The Mind Gone Mad

Well after the Yankees’ horrible loss to the Red Sox last night, I am officially calling it a season. Granted, I have been calling it a season for about a month.

And I don’t want to hear “Hey, you’re not a real fan!” What?! Are you kidding me? I’m not allowed to give my opinion of the team based on the knowledge I have of the team as well as the sport itself? Just because I don’t honestly believe they can pull it off means I am not a fan? Yes it does! It also means I’m realistic.

Now of course, mathematically they are still in it, but c’mon. Let’s not go there. Let’s look at some real facts as to why this season has been a complete and utter disaster for the team.

Injuries
Every team goes through injuries to all sorts of their players. The Yankees went through it last year too. But this year it was really bad. Let’s look at the list shall we.

1. Chien-Ming Wang: Ace of the pitching staff goes down on June 15. That’s less than half way through the damn season. How does he get hurt? Running the bases during an interleague game. This is why I hate interleague. American League pitchers don’t hit every time they start. They don’t condition their bodies for it. Then they play a few games under those rules and everyone expects them to be fine. It’s stupid. I can understand it in the Word Series because at most that is 4 games and its the end of the season. So either sop inteleague play or bring the DH to the national League (personally I’d love to see interleague stop).
   
2. Joba Chamberlain: The new ace of the pitching staff who proved it when he went toe to toe with Josh Beckett and won a 1-0 game in Fenway. Just as the rotation was starting to level off and not miss Wang so much, the dude gets hurts. Sending the team in a downward spiral it really hasn’t come out of since. To me that was the final nail in the coffin and more or less when I knew it was over.
   
3. Jorge Posada: There went about 70-90 RBIs over the season, most of them in clutch spots. Something I haven’t heard anyone point out. They are having really hard times driving in those big runs. Well who did it better on the team than Jorge? No one! Yeah, the guy didn’t call the best game and his arm has gone down in years, but dammit, the man could hit!
   
4. Hideki Matsui: The second big clutch hitter goes down and misses 55 games. That’s insane. The guy used to be this model of consistency, now he’s injury prone like any other slob. Maybe it’s his consecutive games played streak catching up to him, maybe it’s something in the water. All I know is they missed his bat for a long time and now that he’s back its probably too little too late.

All of those were the big injuries that have really hurt this team. Now let’s look at the lesser injuries (whether the player wasn’t that big a deal or wasn’t hurt that long) but still did something to slow this team down.

1. Alex Rodriguez: Missed a month of the season because he was hurt. That was between his time on the DL as well as the time he wasn’t on the DL but wasn’t playing because of the injury. Remember that? He was sitting out for like a week before they realized he wasn’t getting any better like that. Yeah that didn’t help much did it. In my opinion, it’s like 2006 all over again for him. He was out briefly that season with a virus, rushed back, lost his timing, and then starting pressing at the plate. Have you watched the guy this year? He’s had some nice moments and all, but he hasn’t really gotten locked in. And now he’s just up there guessing.
2. Johnny Damon: He went down and he was the team fucking leading hitter! You can’t just lose that kind of bat and yet they did. It wasn’t for that long a time, but it still happened. Never a good thing.
3. Brian Bruney: He was becoming a reliable a relief pitcher as any in the bullpen for them at the start of the year. He came into this season wanting to prove he was great. Not good, but great. And he was doing that. Then he goes down and misses about half the fucking year. He’s back now, but like Matsui, too little too late.
4. Dan Giese: It’s not that big a deal that to team lost Dan Giese. It’s just what losing him meant. Dan Giese was the backup of a backup. That means a pitcher got hurt, then the guy called up to replace him got hurt, then Geise gets called up and he fucking gets hurt! Where does that leave the team? CARL PAVANO!

And those are just the ones I felt were significant in some form. There were plenty of others hurt. And once again, I get it. All teams go through injuries and I’m not blaming the season on injuries. There are plenty of other factors (one’s where I blame the players, the coaches, and the front office). All of which will come next time in Part 2!

I’m alive!

I’ve been home from the hospital two weeks and I’ve only been on my computer the past few days. It turns out I have mononucleosis otherwise known as mono. Basically it’s a viral infection you can do very little to fight back against and just have to let it beat the hell out of you. Which it has for me.

I was in the hospital three days (and keep in mind that this is the same hospital I work in) and they sucked at their jobs. The nurses were incompetent, the doctor didn’t give a shit about me (no really, she couldn’t have cared less that I was there), and I knew my way around the building better than the transporters who were bringing from my room to the places I had to get tests at like the MRI machine. I myself work transport at this hospital but in a different building, but still know my way around their building better.

Then when I got out all they claimed as my illness was an acute headache. That’s it?! Just a headache? Granted, that was a symptom of mine, but that wasn’t the problem. A headache wouldn’t also cause an imbalance in my liver (which they knew I had) nor would it give me a fever (they also knew I had) and it definitely wouldn’t cause muscle aches.

Then let’s top it all off with the fact that I didn’t have a private room. I had to share my room with some stupid old man in his 60’s who would not shut the fuck up about his food. If it was 10 minutes late, he would start complaining to everyone that it wasn’t there. Kept saying how horrible the place way. The man was there for a fucking angioplasty, he was there just to wait for it, had to take a pill every few hours, and that was it. Not a lot for him to get bent out of shape over, yet he found a way!

“10 minutes! My food is late by 10 minutes! Oh! Oh! Just wait ’til they send me that survey! Just wait!”

The survey being what the hospital sends to all it’s discharged patients asking detailed questions about your stay in the hospital. I recently got mine and I tore them a new one. Detailing how the doctor came to see me only once in my three days there, how she failed to inform me of two new tests she ordered for me (you are supposed to keep the patient informed at all times of anything new…she did not), how they failed to start my IV not once, but twice, one of them leading to bleeding and the other leading to the MRI contrast being pumped into my arm and not my vein. It burned….a lot. Unpleasant.

So when this old fuck, who had some equally old friends visit him and all they talked about for 3 hours was what they consider to be elitist and what others only think are elitist….yeah that was a fun conversation to sit through. So when he gets his survey he is either gonna fill in how everything but the food was great or he’s gonna lie and state how it was all bad especially the food service just to get his point across. I guess he considers himself an elitist.

I hope his angioplasty went wrong. I hope he died.

Fucking morons….