Mike Vaccaro

Yankees' gutsy win can be one that truly matters in the end

As ever, Yankees' myriad challenges won't draw pity outside Bronx

Kevin Durant is as close to perfect as there is in sports right now

Mets must make their NL East stand now

Yankees finally beginning to reward Aaron Boone's faith

If you’d like the R-rated, NSFW (and drop-dead hilarious) description that Ichiro Suzuki gave for just how hot it is in Kansas City, Mo., in the summer, that’s easily available on YouTube.

There was also a long-ago August night when the great Buck O’Neil was sitting in his regular seat behind home plate at Kauffman Stadium.

For one of the few times ever, when he was at a baseball stadium, Buck wasn’t smiling.

“Too hot to smile,” he said, and then of course he smiled.

There were few things to smile about Tuesday night in Kansas City, unless you were either:

1. A “Star Wars” fan, as this was Star Wars Night at the K, with plenty of R2D2s and C3POs visible throughout.
2. A Salvy Perez fan. The Royals’ catcher, celebrating 10 years to the day of his major league debut, blasted a pair of buzzkill home runs that ruined Nestor Cortes’ night.
3. A Royals fan who has seen more than your share of slapstick out of the local nine since they won the world championship six years ago, and so who must have taken great delight in watching the Yankees kick the ball around and throw it to indiscriminate places all night during an 8-4 Kansas City win.

“I don’t know why it happens,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said, looking like he’d gotten a bad batch of burnt ends from Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque earlier in the day. “Back-to-back long nights? For whatever reason we didn’t play our best tonight.”

Look, it happens, even for a team that has played as well for an extended stretch as the Yankees have since the Fourth of July. There are easy excuses — a second straight game in 90-degree K.C. humidity (add a dozen degrees if you want to know what it really feels like), coming off a nearly five-hour, 11-inning marathon win Monday.

And as the Scooter used to put it: “Sometimes you’re just due.”

It’s nights like these when we are reminded of just how fragile the daily and nightly tightrope the Yankees walk really is. Winning eight out of nine series — with a chance to make it 9-for-10 Wednesday afternoon — has made it certain that there are genuine stakes now every time they take the field, no matter who they take the field against.

And when you are a team with gaping holes in your batting order — and not knowing yet, day to day, who the next day’s starting pitcher is going to be — it’s actually remarkable that there aren’t more of these games now, especially because the news generally comes in loud bursts from the out-of-town scoreboard.

There is the good news/bad news series taking place in Fenway Park this week, the Rays coming from behind Tuesday (bad news in the division) to knock off the Red Sox (good news for the wild card). There are the A’s, who seem to win every day now, finishing off a comeback of their own in extra innings in Cleveland.

The Blue Jays are making these days even longer now, playing out west.

So a clunker like this, while understandable on certain levels, also brings its share of caution. Joey Gallo continues to scuffle as a Yankee (7-for-45, 22 strikeouts). The daily grind of replacing Gary Sanchez seems to be gaining on Kyle Higashioka, who hit a homer that briefly gave the Yankees a lead, but also added two uncharacteristic throwing errors to the Yankees’ pile.

Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton each have two home runs since the All-Star break. Logic and past performance insist that will self-correct. But when?

“It’s pretty infuriating,” Higashioka said, speaking of his own adventurous evening, but seeming to summarize the feelings of most of the solemn faces that walked off the Kauffman Stadium field Tuesday night. “It’s not acceptable.”

When the margin of error is so thin, when there are but 49 games left on the schedule, it can surely seem that way, whether it’s the heat or just the long year. Of course, this is exactly what you want, for all of these games to matter this much. It’s why losing them can feel so infuriating.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

As ever, Yankees' myriad challenges won't draw pity outside Bronx

Kevin Durant is as close to perfect as there is in sports right now

Mets must make their NL East stand now

Yankees finally beginning to reward Aaron Boone's faith

Kemba Walker’s homecoming has Knicks fairy tale potential

Sometimes you look for signs. You look for omens. You look for harbingers. And sometimes they mean nothing. Maybe in a few months’ time this 8-6, 11-inning, close-to-five-hours victory the Yankees pulled out over the Royals on Monday night in Kansas City will fade to a blur, and be remembered as just another in the 162-game parade.

Or maybe it’ll mean a little something more than that.

At 1:04 a.m. Eastern Time, Wandy Peralta coaxed Carlos Santana to bounce one to third base. Rougned Odor flipped it over to Luke Voit at first. And the Yankees had a most satisfying victory on a most unusual night.

Say what you will about the ghost-runner extra-inning rule — which, with any luck at all, is entering its final two months of existence. But this sure was a fun, crazy, hard-to-believe, impossible-to-forget tug of war, assisted by, but not exclusively beholden to, those four free runners the Yankees and Royals received in the 10th and 11th (all of whom scored, by the way).

The Yankees won the game despite being the first team since the 1995 Astros to collect four blown saves in the same game. The Yankees won the game despite being the first team in the modern era — that would be the 121 years since 1900, for those keeping score at home — to blow leads in the seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th innings.

This was actually a wonderful pitchers’ duel for most of the night, Jameson Taillon and Carlos Hernandez matching zeroes for six innings. It was a tight, quick game — until it wasn’t. It was a routine game — until it wasn’t.

The Yankees looked bound to lose the game.

Except they didn’t. Remember this one. Circle it. Highlight it in yellow. You may want to remember it.

“So many people did stuff tonight,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “On a scorching-hot night they kept coming.”

It was a night preceded by an afternoon in which the Yankees lost another player — Gleyber Torres landing on the injured list with a sprained thumb — and learned that another, Gio Urshela, wouldn’t be returning from a balky hamstring as quickly as they’d hoped, kept behind in New York for more rehab.

They keep losing players and winning games.

It may not be the ideal formula. But it works.

And so it goes. And on it goes.

“We’ve got a lot of really good players focused on winning, understanding the critical place we are in our season,” Boone had said before the game, giving further voice to the next-man-up mantra that must be a part of every Yankees manager’s playbook. “There’s no other expectations here except to keep winning games. We have a lot of players capable of playing at a very high level.”

Even with a list of absent players that’s almost staggering to behold — Gerrit Cole, Domingo German, Gary Sanchez, Urshela, Torres, Anthony Rizzo, Jordan Montgomery — the Yankees won again. Winning, as a habit, it’s a helpful thing especially at this time of the year. No matter who’s wearing the uniform.

“It was one of the weirder wilder games I’ve ever seen,” said Taillon, who was terrific across six innings, allowing but one unearned run. “Every time we needed a big hit we got one. Every time they needed a big hit they got one.”

Right up to Santana, bottom 11, the tying runs on base, the Royals fans among the 18,477 at Kauffman Stadium on their feet, the not-insignificant number of Yankees fans watching through hands stretched over their eyes.

“We’ve lost some tough games this year,” Boone said, “but the fact that we’ve played in so many I think helped us tonight. There’s a comfort level in playing in them.”

And an even higher one winning them.

“A grind,” said Luke Voit, back from purgatory, who had two huge hits including what looked like the game-winning homer in the ninth.

Even with all the new faces, learning on the fly, these Yankees are not only learning how to play like Yankees, but win like Yankees, too. Good stuff.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Yankees finally beginning to reward Aaron Boone's faith

Kemba Walker’s homecoming has Knicks fairy tale potential

This can't be all Leon Rose has planned for the Knicks — right?

Anthony Rizzo has earned Yankees lovefest that awaits him

Knicks legend Earl Monroe looks to change lives with new charter school

Edwin Diaz threw a couple of slices of high cheese past an overmatched Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder named Daulton Varsho and that was that: there were 7,880 folks inside Citi Field that afternoon — May 9 — right up against the reduced-entry capacity, and they stood and cheered and saluted the Mets as they walked off the field 4-2 winners.

Out in left field, there was already another happy recap posted on the out-of-town scores: the Braves had roughed up Aaron Nola and the Phillies, 6-1, in Atlanta. So as the Mets walked off the field that afternoon, and as their fans scooted back to their cars and to the 7 train, they did so knowing something splendid about themselves.

They were a first-place baseball team.

All alone. First place, NL East. The record was only 16-13. They had already fired a hitting coach, and still weren’t exactly knocking the cover off the ball. Jacob deGrom had left the game early, so there was that concern. But hey: a win’s a win. First place is first place.

That was 90 days ago.

The lead has ballooned as high as five games on a couple of occasions, most recently June 26. It has been shaved a bit, frittered as small as a half-game on May 16, when the Rays completed a three-game sweep in Tampa and the Mets, afterward, had two-thirds of their lineup on the injured list.

The team directly in back of the Mets has switched a couple of times, Phillies to Braves to Nats, back to the Braves, back to the Phillies.

But Friday, for the 90th consecutive day, the Mets will wake up, alone, in first place.

Will it be the last?

There are two gale-force winds in the East now: the Mets, who can’t get out of their own way, and the Phillies, who simply can’t seem to lose anymore. When they meet Friday night they’ll be separated by a skinny half-game. The Mets added onto their pile of misery losing again to the woeful Marlins in Miami, 4-2; the Phillies scored four times with two outs in the ninth to take a 7-6 win from the Nats.

Thursday’s loss may have been the most dispiriting of all the 51 that came before it. The Marlins are a last-place team mostly interested in peeks at the future now. Didn’t matter to them, or the Mets. The outcome was probably determined the way too many Mets games have been this year, early, in the first inning.

The first three men reached base: infield single for Jonathan Villar, walk to Pete Alonso, single for Dominic Smith. The Marlins were begging to be taken out early. Rookie pitcher Braxton Garrett, on his 24th birthday, had nothing. Good teams bury bad teams here, take all mystery out of the game, sprint for the airport with a four-game split.

The Mets didn’t score.

And you knew. Right there, you knew.

“We still expect it to come together,” said Michael Conforto, whose fly ball ended the first after Garrett struck out both J.D. Davis and Javier Baez. “We still expect to score a lot of runs and we’ll keep showing up with that attitude.”

But there was a genuine lack of conviction in his voice, same as there has been a genuine absence of confidence for the Mets lately. Their lead was still as high as four games after Sunday, but it’s a cushion built mostly on the kindness of the Phillies, Braves and Nats, none of whom have been able to sustain anything all year.

But the Braves have caught a little fire in St. Louis. The Phillies have welcomed the Nats’ mass talent exodus and feasted on their bullpen multiple times in the past week alone. For a while it seemed like pixie dust, paper clips and Elmer’s glue might be enough for the Mets. For 90 days, it has been.

Starting tonight?

“We’ve been doing it all year,” Conforto insisted. “So many ups and downs in this season. We flush it when we lose. This wasn’t the way we wanted this series to go, we’ll be set for a little bit, get in the plane and be Philly bound. It’ll be out of our minds when we get there.”

When they get there, they will play their first hypercritical series of the year. Ninety days the Mets have figured things out, with makeshift lineups and random heroes.

Can they make it to 91?

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Kemba Walker’s homecoming has Knicks fairy tale potential

This can't be all Leon Rose has planned for the Knicks — right?

Anthony Rizzo has earned Yankees lovefest that awaits him

Knicks legend Earl Monroe looks to change lives with new charter school

Next phase of Leon Rose's Knicks reign begins with fascinating NBA Draft chance

This is what Aaron Boone was talking about during those long nights of the soul, nights in the spring and early summer when the Yankees were playing pedestrian, borderline indifferent baseball. Maybe he couldn’t envision quite how this was all going to come together.

Maybe, some nights, the Yankees manager would look at the field and wonder if his words really squared with his eyes. But he kept saying it anyway. He kept believing. Better days were ahead, he said. Better baseball was ahead. You’ll see.

Now, we see.

There is still work to be done, to be sure, with 55 games left in the season. There is still one team to jump in order to get both feet in wild-card position, still a sizable gap between themselves and Rays in the AL East. But that stuff is just numbers. That good baseball that’s been ahead of the Yankees all year? It’s here. It’s present. It’s accounted for.

“We keep grinding away,” Boone said after the Yankees’ 10-3 blasting of Baltimore at the Stadium Wednesday night. “The bottom line is, we keep our nose down and keep after it.”

It was the seventh series win in their past eight. It moved the Yankees nine games over .500 (58-49) for the first time since May 23, and nine over is the high-water mark of the year.

Better: they are simply way more on point now than at any time in the season. Even when they spotted Matt Harvey and the Orioles a 3-0 head start Wednesday night there was never a real question as to whether they’d be able claw back.

For one thing: the O’s are terrible. And that’s being kind. They are managed poorly. They play poorly. They kick the ball around. They are 38-69 and you wonder sometimes how in the world they’ve won that many.

But it was more than just having a patsy to pile-drive. So much of what the Yankees look like now is because of the arrival of Anthony Rizzo to the lineup, because every day he seems to make a winning play. In that way he’s become as must-watch a player as we have in New York.

In the first inning he put together a 13-pitch at-bat that had to be seen to be believed. He sent a few rockets out toward the right-field porch that bent just foul. He took a few borderline strikes that Harvey wanted badly, benefit-of-the-doubt strikes Rizzo has earned across his career thanks to a sharp batting eye.

He drew a walk.

Three innings later, having seen every weapon in Harvey’s arsenal, he smoked a no-doubter home run to right-center that not only got the Yankees on the board at 3-1, it seemed to loosen the rest of the batting order. Harvey was gone by inning’s end. From there it was a matter of time.

“That at-bat was definitely a grind,” Rizzo said. “A lot of times when you have an at-bat like that, when you hit a few foul home runs, the pitcher wins it in the end. Just wanted to keep battling.”

Said Boone: “Just a great at-bat Hope can manifest itself and lead to really long inning or a big inning. He saw a ton of pitches, all he had. And later on he had a home run.”

The Yankees are picking a good time to elevate their game. The Mariners arrive now for four games, and while Seattle seems to have settled into a seismic fade they are still a formidable team. The White Sox loom next week, the Red Sox the week after. It’s a good time to rediscover how to make winning an organizational habit.

“Our best days,” Boone said, “are still ahead of us.”

He’s been saying that even when best days were hard to define and even harder to conjure. They are upon the Yankees now. Now all they need is to keep it up. Winning is the best kind of muscle memory.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

This can't be all Leon Rose has planned for the Knicks — right?

Anthony Rizzo has earned Yankees lovefest that awaits him

Knicks legend Earl Monroe looks to change lives with new charter school

Next phase of Leon Rose's Knicks reign begins with fascinating NBA Draft chance

Yankees' season has been about living on the edge

If this works out, it will be one of the sweetest tales ever to be hatched within the boundaries of the City Game. If this works out, we will look back on this as one of the splendid days in Knicks history, Kemba Walker coming home, coming back to New York, back to the Garden.

We are forever a city of point guards, after all, even those of us whose basketball journeys ended with the JV, or at the Y. We are the city of Bob Cousy and Dicky McGuire, of Tiny Archibald and Lenny Wilkens and Larry Brown, of Kenny Anderson and Kenny Smith, of Pearl Washington and Mark Jackson and Boo Harvey, Rod Strickland and Steph Marbury, Frankie Alagia and David Cain.

Some of them have done wonderful work at the Garden. McGuire’s number 15 hangs in its rafters. Jackson won rookie of the year, making the wonderful New York hoops trip from Bishop Loughlin to St. John’s to the Knicks. Dean (the Dream) Meminger went from Rice to Marquette, where he won the 1970 NIT at the Garden, then landed with the ’73 champion Knicks.

Walker takes that path now. He was a star at Rice, too, and as a junior memorably met up with a senior from Chicago Simeon High in January 2007, fellow named Derrick Rose, in a high school game at the Garden that people who were there still talk about. Across five unforgettable nights four years later, he led UConn to five straight wins and the Big East Tournament title, then won six more in the NCAA, one of the great college basketball stories ever told. He became an All-Star in Charlotte, and in Boston.

And he comes home now. He is 31, with close to 25,000 NBA minutes on his treads, coming off an injury-plagued season with the Celtics. But he comes at a reasonable salary number after getting a buyout from Oklahoma City, and he will team with Rose to provide a 1-2 punch at point guard — a yawning chasm for the Knicks in recent years — that will be as long on intrigue and class as it might be long in the tooth.

There are pitfalls and there are pratfalls aplenty standing in the way of this, of course. Can the Knicks get, say, 140 games total out of Walker/Rose, of the max 164? Will Tom Thibodeau be tempted, as we all know he can be, to play them together during the regular season when the moment begs for it, even if their wheels require something else?

We can worry about that later.

For now, we can enjoy the moment, a grand moment of homecoming, a great moment when two of the game’s dynamic point guards will team up for a city of would-be point guards, all of us capable of driving-and-kicking in our dreams, all of us yearning to push the ball up the floor, Bernard on our left and DeBusschere on our right.

Back on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007, the Garden was unwittingly treated to a preview of this pairing in the old “Super Six” tripleheader. Rose’s Simeon was the 14th-ranked high school team in the country and Memphis-bound Rose lived up to his billing as a surefire 2008 first-rounder by pouring in 22 points, eight of them in an electrifying fourth quarter.

But Walker, a junior, held his own for Rice, the longtime Manhattan power that closed in 2011. He scored 16 points, guarded Rose the whole day, and raised an awful lot of eyebrows.

“I was very excited,” Walker said after Rice’s 53-51 upset was complete that day. “I heard he is the top player in the country and I wanted my chance to prove myself against him. I think I did.”

“We didn’t win,” Rose said, “and I blame me for that.”

Fourteen years later the players have one NCAA title and one-runner-up between them, they have seven All-Star appearances, two All-NBA nods and one MVP trophy between them. And come the fall, they will have the ball in their hands an awful lot as the Knicks try to keep their heads above water in an Eastern Conference that has gotten a lot tougher, and deeper, since the season ended.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong. There is no question about that.

But if most can go right? If Walker and Rose can combine for 55 minutes a game, combine for 150 games, combine to give the Knicks the kind of dynamic two-headed playmaker they haven’t had — dare we say — since Clyde Frazier and Pearl Monroe? Yeah. A city of would-be and wannabe point guards is going to be awfully happy.

And the Knicks are going to be awfully fun.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Anthony Rizzo has earned Yankees lovefest that awaits him

Knicks legend Earl Monroe looks to change lives with new charter school

Next phase of Leon Rose's Knicks reign begins with fascinating NBA Draft chance

Yankees' season has been about living on the edge

Athletes like Simone Biles helping break stigma around mental health

There has to be something else. Right?

The Knicks were a perfectly delightful team to watch for all 72 games of this past season. They played hard. They had wonderful chemistry. They were dynamically coached. They clearly enjoyed playing together. For a while there, the Garden sounded the way the Garden is supposed to sound, the way it used to sound, until the Hawks kicked the plug out of the wall.

Good stuff, all of it. Tom Thibodeau was Coach of the Year. Julius Randle was an All-Star, and second-team All-NBA, and won Most Improved Player. RJ Barrett may have actually improved even more. There was momentum here. There was energy. There was …

I mean, seriously.

There has to be something else. Right?

The Knicks, in essence, kicked off free agency by declaring they were running it back. They re-signed three of their own free agents: Derrick Rose, Alec Burks, and Nerlens Noel, to deals totaling $105 million spread across the next three years. They allowed Reggie Bullock to migrate to Dallas and replaced him with what, right now, stands as their signature offseason acquisition: Evan Fournier, three years (plus a club option), as much as $78 million.

Are they better this moment than they were 24 hours ago?

On paper, sure. Fournier is an upgrade over Bullock. He has had an up-and-down pro career, though those able to fight insomnia have seen the very best of him in the Olympic tournament where he represents France.

But “better,” in this case, is truly in the eye of the beholder. The Knicks have gained no ground on the teams that finished north of them in the East (76ers, Bucks, Nets). The teams south? The Bulls added Lonzo Ball. The Heat added Kyle Lowry. The Raptors added Gary Trent Jr. The Celtics and Pacers are almost sure to be better even if they add no one of significance. The Hawks are still the Hawks.

And one by one a checklist of high-profile point guards, a crying need for the Knicks, fell off the board. Ball to the Bulls. Chris Paul back to Phoenix. Mike Conley back to Utah. Norman Powell back to the Blazers. Now the Knicks are left to ponder the possibility of a trade if they’re going to upgrade there, with Cleveland’s Collin Sexton and Charlotte’s Terry Rozier possibilities.

There has to be something else. Has to be.

Leon Rose will eventually have to go on the record and explain this offseason strategy, which included some intricate dungeons-and-dragons maneuvering on draft night (which did yield promising point guard Miles McBride) and what, so far, seems like an ultra-safe trek through free agency. Rose hasn’t done that in over a year. It’s time to hear him clear his throat and explain where the Knicks are, and where they may be going.

Because it has to include more. All we glean now are hints. Noel’s re-signing suggests Mitchell Robinson’s health remains an issue (as did a photo that emerged Monday that apparently showed him wearing a walking boot). Rose is a Thibodeau favorite — but if we learned anything from last year, it is that the best version of Rose happens off the bench now, in singular shifts, as opposed to the multiple up-downs of a starter.

Burks is a very good player and he played well for the Knicks last year. But is the $10 million now committed to him the next three years going to strap them to the point at which they won’t have the flexibility to make a better move? Was he that essential?

These are things we need to hear from Leon Rose, among many others. Right now it is hard to conjure this as a top-six team in the East, and harder to imagine a way in which they can finagle a deal to change that — even if they are “better” today than they were yesterday.

Look, in some ways, this is just lousy timing and rotten luck. The Knicks were clearly a franchise with momentum, with a magnet coach, they were armed with both draft assets and cap space … in a free agent summer lacking either a high-end free agent, or restless stars looking to assemble in a new city.

Fair enough. So maybe there really is something else. Because right now the working adjective to describe the Knicks since the end of the regular season — the playoffs, the draft, free agency — isn’t one that’ll satisfy anyone:

Meh.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Knicks legend Earl Monroe looks to change lives with new charter school

Next phase of Leon Rose's Knicks reign begins with fascinating NBA Draft chance

Yankees' season has been about living on the edge

Athletes like Simone Biles helping break stigma around mental health

Yankees getting dangerously close to point of no return

Sometimes, the indoctrination can feel like an initiation. Ask Tino Martinez what it was like to show up in place of Don Mattingly. Ask Jason Giambi what it was like to show up in place of Tino Martinez. Ask Alex Rodriguez what it was like to show up for work on just about any random day before Nov. 4, 2009.

And it isn’t just the Yankees, of course. New York is demanding. New York wants what it wants, and sometimes takes a while to figure out what that is. Mets fans were mostly brutal to Mike Piazza during his first two months on the job. Knicks fans took a while to warm up to Carmelo Anthony, and a fair amount never did.

Anthony Rizzo will have no such initiation rites applied for him when he dons his No. 48 jersey early Monday — the pinstriped version, the baseball version of being handed a sacred vestment — and walks onto the field at Yankee Stadium for the first time. He will not be forced to do the baseball equivalent of a keg stand, or a four-beer funnel. He will not be led blindfolded through the quad, or be asked to guzzle a bottle of soy sauce.

No hazing for Rizzo.

This will be love at first sight, because across three weekend days and nights 1,300 miles south of the Major Deegan, Rizzo learned the first lesson in becoming a major New York heart-throb. He got off to a torrid start. And then only got hotter.

“I look forward to putting on the pinstripes and getting on the field,” he said after leaving his fingerprints all over the Yankees’ 3-1 schooling of the Marlins Sunday at loanDepot Park, finishing off a sweep in which Rizzo’s debut was more dazzling than the first six songs of Van Halen’s debut album.

“I’m excited to get to New York and play in front of the fans.”

Rizzo’s career as a Yankee starts the way “Casablanca” ends, Bogey telling the Captain, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It started Friday and Saturday, when his first two games as a Yankee began thusly: walk, groundout, home run, single, hit-by-pitch, walk, single, home run, walk. That’s an .889 on-base percentage and a 2.889 OPS in any league.

On Sunday, as an encore, he had the game’s most essential hit, a one-out scorcher the other way in the eighth to tie a game in which the Yankees had been mostly manhandled. Miami, which must not have access to fancy data reports and stuff, had brought in lefty Richard Bleier to face Rizzo, even though Rizzo was hitting .348 against lefties this year.

Then in the bottom of the inning, Rizzo showed off his gold glove, starting and ending a slick 3-6-3 double play against the speedy Jazz Chisholm that effectively snuffed out the Marlins’ final flickering hops.

All in all?

A nice place to start. And now he gets to go home after a weekend like that, a weekend Yankees fans had given up finding in any of the regulars who’d limped and labored through the season’s first hundred or so games. Maybe Yankees fans would’ve been happy to see Rizzo even if he’d gone 1-for-13 with three errors this weekend.

Now he’ll be greeted like the Beatles at JFK in ’64.

“I think it’s his makeup,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said of what’s allowed Rizzo to fit in so well and so quickly with his new mates (beyond the flames presently shooting out of his bat, that is). “If you surveyed around the league they talk him up as a special teammate and a great leader easygoing, easy to connect with. He’s cut out for this.”

Said Brett Gardner: “We know what he’s capable of doing, the energy he brings, and that he’s been playing for a really good team for a really long time. He knows what it takes to get where we want to go, keeps coming up with big hit after big hit for us.”

They loved him at Wrigley Field — so much so that a large contingent of fans waited long after his final game as a Cub was over to bid him a loud, emotional farewell outside the park. They will love him at Yankee Stadium. He would never put it this way, but another key import from another time did (and it’s worth noting that Rizzo is 48 and not 44 because 44 will forever be that former star’s number), and so we can transfer it to Rizzo:

He isn’t coming to New York to be a star. He’s bringing his star with him.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Yankees' season has been about living on the edge

Athletes like Simone Biles helping break stigma around mental health

Yankees getting dangerously close to point of no return

Shame on Team USA basketball, NBC for this all-time debacle

Mets, Yankees bullpens equally bad lately

The honeymoon isn’t over, necessarily. Better to put it this way: It’s changed locations. The Knicks of Leon Rose aren’t lazily lounging on the beaches of Turks and Caicos any longer, merely settling into the blissful grind of newlywed life. Quiet dinners. Maybe a show on the weekend. Maybe a quick getaway down the shore.

Rose has one draft, one free-agent season, one regular season and one playoff run, however truncated, under his belt, and it is hard to argue: So far, so good. Last year’s draft yielded Immanuel Quickley (a surprise Garden favorite) and Obi Toppin (who, at the least, is sure to put in the sweat equity to maximize his talent and justify his selection).

The free-agent period passed without a major addition which, for this team, at that time, was right. The regular season? That was the jackpot, a 41-31 bonanza that not even the most optimistic fan could possibly have seen coming. The playoffs? The Hawks buried them, but given what the Hawks did from there — beating Philly and throwing a legit scare into eventual-champ Milwaukee — even that is hard to feel too much lingering angst about.

The frozen daiquiris were all mixed properly. The sun shone brightly. The water was calm and inviting. Not a bad honeymoon at all.

And now, the marriage.

You can already see what’s percolating among the rest of the Eastern Conference teams. Look above: The Bucks will still be formidable, the Nets will still be Vegas’ darlings to win it all, even the Sixers, you assume, will figure out a way to recover from a dysfunctional, dyspeptic playoff calamity.

Look below: The Hawks, healthy, were already better than the Knicks even if they finished with the same record, and they will go into next year flying with confidence. It is almost impossible to believe that the Celtics and Heat will endure a repeat of this season, when they punched well below their weight class. The Pacers ought to be better. The Raptors will likely lose Kyle Lowry, but will add the No. 4 pick; they should be on the rise.

Bottom line?

There is an awfully good chance the Knicks don’t enjoy near as much success next year as they did this year even if they improve themselves substantially, even if they find a point guard, even if someone (either from within or without) becomes a legit wingman for Julius Randle, even if Mitchell Robinson comes back from an injury-plagued year and takes another few steps forward.

That is what makes this phase of the honeymoon so vital, the one that starts Thursday, at the draft, where the Knicks will have both the 19th and 21st picks in the first round, as well as the second pick in the second round (No. 32 overall).

Rose never said — and never would have said — as much when he took over, but he had to believe, heart of hearts, that even if the Knicks had improved last year they weren’t going to improve themselves clear out of the lottery. But they did. Such is the cost for the job Tom Thibodeau did in reviving the fans’ love affair with this team.

It makes Thursday that much more curious. Can the Knicks package their picks and move up — and if so, how high, and if so who is going to be there for them to make it worthwhile?

One thing we know with certainty: The Knicks crave, above all else, stability at the point. Elfrid Payton is no longer a viable option, especially after Thibodeau (fairly) buried him in the playoffs. Derrick Rose was brilliant last year, enjoys playing for Thibodeau — and at this stage in his career is far better suited to coming off the bench.

The free-agent options for the Knicks there could be fascinating or they could be fool’s gold. Do they try to capture lightning Thursday night with, say, West Virginia’s Miles McBride? A generation ago, in back-to-back drafts, the Knicks struck gold with Mark Jackson at No. 18 in 1987 (who became rookie of the year) and Rod Strickland at No. 19 a year later (whose best years came in San Antonio, Portland and Washington).

Can they pick a winning ticket like that again? Starting Thursday, so many things about the Knicks’ future will begin to come into sharper focus. The fun part of the honeymoon is over. The business part of the marriage commences.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Athletes like Simone Biles helping break stigma around mental health

Yankees getting dangerously close to point of no return

Shame on Team USA basketball, NBC for this all-time debacle

Mets, Yankees bullpens equally bad lately

Jets' Robert Saleh, Zach Wilson need the all-important click

The final pitch from Aroldis Chapman curled around the bat of Nelson Cruz, and at last the deed was done. At last the game was won. The Yankees don’t turn every one of their games into “War and Peace”; it just seems that way.

It just feels like every game lately chews up cuticles and tests digestive systems, just feels like every day is life and death. It was life this time. The Yankees won 4-3 over the Rays, then dashed back to their hotel before anyone could declare otherwise.

“No margin for error,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.

Lately, there hasn’t been. Lately every game has become the Cyclone at Coney Island, an absurd tour through baseball’s heart of darkness. It’s becoming clear this is what the season is going to be like from here on out, a parade of pulse-quickeners and heart-thumpers and stomach-churners.

This time, the Yankee did just enough on a night when just enough had to be plenty. Jordan Montgomery was brilliant, though the bridge from him to Chapman was shaky and creaky. And Chapman, who blew away the first two hitters of the ninth, only seems most comfortable these days when introducing a whiff of frenzy.

And so of course he would allow rookie Wander Franco to work him for a walk, allow the tying run to reach first with two outs, allow Cruz to stalk ominously toward the batter’s box. Back on June 10, in Minneapolis, Cruz had made his contribution to the Yankees’ tower of angst, clubbing a walk-off for the Twins off Chapman.

Now here he came.

And suddenly it was 3-and-0.

The TV cameras caught Boone then. He looked the way you did. He looked nervous. He looked worried. He looked in need of a friend. Or, at the least, some good news.

The good news arrived thusly:

Called strike one. Called strike two. And then Chapman coaxing his final pitch of the night around Cruz’s bat. Every day another epic. Every night another grind. This time, this one, with a happy ending for the Yankees.

“Any time Cruz us coming up there it gets tense,” Boone said, “but I really liked the way Chappy was throwing the ball. And ultimately he made the pitches he needed to.”

Later, Boone would actually allow himself a laugh as he assessed the importance of winning inside Troicana Field, a longtime house of horrors.

“We really needed it,” he said. “We need ’em. Every day is super important.”

Every game helps. And every helping hand helps. Montgomery was brilliant across five brilliant innings — five hits, five strikeouts. The Yankees actually scored a few runs on his behalf, which always feels like a back-page story.

And then Ryan LaMarre — all of six major league home runs to his name — hit number seven, and it turned out to the margin of victory, a blast in the eighth. The Yankees are in no position to be picky about who will step up on behalf of the greater cause night to night. The job is open to anyone. LaMarre just took it this time.

“Just unbelievable,” LaMarre said. “Every game we’re competing the best we can. We know every game is important and we’re trying to go out and put yesterday behind us, keep fighting.”

If those words sound familiar they should. They are straight from the Book of Boone, and sometimes they can sound disingenuous if not downright delusional. Still: when you hear the players channel them, maybe it does indicate the manager’s relentless optimism is rubbing off. Maybe the message is getting through.

And maybe the Rays will change the narrative right back again Wednesday.

When there’s so little margin for error, every night can be a daunting gauntlet. You take the favorable endings and you tuck them away and you run for the bus. And try again tomorrow.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Shame on Team USA basketball, NBC for this all-time debacle

Mets, Yankees bullpens equally bad lately

Jets' Robert Saleh, Zach Wilson need the all-important click

NFL right to use forfeit threat if unvaccinated players cause COVID outbreak

New York has been waiting for its Giannis Antetokounmpo

There’s the standard-issue gut punch. Aaron Boone talks about those a lot, because the Yankees collected so many of them this year, have allowed Boone to pursue a master’s degree in the subject. Those are the kinds of losses that keep you up deep into the night.

Then there’s the kind of surprise punch to the solar plexus, not unlike the one that felled Harry Houdini. You get those every now and again in a baseball season. The Yankees lost one of these in Houston two weeks ago. They lost another Thursday night in Boston. These require some combination of Alka-Seltzer, Maalox and Pepto-Bismol to fully recover from.

Then you get something like what happened to the Yankees on Sunday afternoon at Fenway Park, something akin to the scene midway through “The Godfather, Part 2” where Vito Corleone returns to Sicily to pay a visit to Don Cheech, who had his parents and his brother murdered. Cheech is an old man but that doesn’t stop Vito from plunging a knife straight through his belly, twisting it, then heading north toward the sternum.

The Yankees were Don Cheech’ed Sunday afternoon.

They led 4-0 after 7 ½ innings. Better: They were building on the momentum of Saturday’s feel-good comeback over the Red Sox, a game that actually sent out the message that they weren’t finished yet in the AL East, that there was life yet in the old Bombers. Best: Domingo German had a no-hitter going, he was mowing down the Sox, and Fenway sounded lifeless and limp.

“A really good spot,” is how Boone described it.

And that’s what made what followed so impossible to believe. German lost his no-hitter when Alex Verdugo doubled leading off the bottom of the eighth. German knew he was batter-to-batter, hadn’t thrown this many pitches since May, handed the ball to Boone after 93 mostly brilliant ones, 10 strikeouts next to his name.

And look: In a year when things are clicking, when everything goes right, then Jonathan Loaisiga, making his second appearance since leaving the COVID list, would do what he’s done most of the year, which means plowing through the bottom of the Sox’ lineup, 7 and 8 and 9, and snuffing the mystery out of things.

“I couldn’t do it,” Loaisiga lamented.

He couldn’t do it. He served up double, single, single, double to 7, 8, 9 and 1 before Boone summoned Zack Britton, and by then it was 4-3. He played the middle infielders back — “Maybe the one thing I second-guess myself about now” he said later — and of course a soft grounder that would’ve kept the runner pinned at third instead became the tying run.

Xander Bogaerts’ go-ahead sac fly was almost anti-climactic, that’s how inevitable it was.

And before you knew it, the Yankees had lost 5-4, they were on the balcony of their decaying Sicilian estate with only the knife handle visible in their torso, and the Red Sox were rushing for the getaway car, rushing toward the gate. No season expires in July, not even one that has been this star-crossed from the start.

But we’re close with the Yankees. Awfully damned close.

“Like they have all year, these guys have to handle and deal with adversity,” Boone would say softly. “We already dealt with it in this series and I know we’ll do it again.”

At this point we should say: Yes, we’ve also grown weary of these milquetoast Boone aphorisms, too. Just once, you suspect, Yankees fans would like to see Boone channel, say, one of their own like Nick Turturro, the fine actor whose post-loss Twitter meltdowns have become must-watch (if usually NSFW) treats of daily coping this season (if you don’t already, it’s worth checking out — @NickTurturro1).

Boone losing his mind alone won’t save the season. But occasionally it would be nice as an almost proof-of-life offering — evidence that these games torture the manager as much as they do Yankees fans. We know they do, of course. We know that somewhere inside his inner Billy Martin/Earl Weaver/Leo Durocher is lurking.

Somehow, he keeps it in.

Somehow, he believes in his team, even past the point where others do, even as the evidence has begun to mount that this year might not be their year. There are still 64 games to play. The Red Sox are still flawed. So are the Rays, who the Yankees get three cracks at this week. That’s the good news.

The bad?

The Yankees are awfully flawed, too, and awfully close to done. They might not yet have a fork sticking out of their back. But right now they do have a knife sticking out the front.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Mets, Yankees bullpens equally bad lately

Jets' Robert Saleh, Zach Wilson need the all-important click

NFL right to use forfeit threat if unvaccinated players cause COVID outbreak

New York has been waiting for its Giannis Antetokounmpo

Giannis Antetokounmpo will never be forgotten after this

Before we get to the 8,000-pound pink hippopotamus in one corner of the room, let’s address the 7,000-pound purple rhinoceros in the other corner.

Really, NBC? Peacock?

Here is the subject of seven different emails I woke up to Sunday from basketball-fan friends, all exactly the same except for the variety of words within the parentheses: “WHAT THE [HECK] IS PEACOCK?”

Of course, maybe NBC knew something none of the rest of us knew when it decided to farm out the U.S. Basketball Team’s Olympic debut against France Sunday morning, assigning it to a channel usually reserved for the binge-watching antics of Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott. Because it might’ve done Greg Popovich and his crew a big favor.

In its own way, France 83, USA 76 was the modern equivalent to the Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas fight of Feb. 11, 1990, which also took place in Tokyo and which also took place with almost nobody watching back home. Maybe USA Basketball isn’t Invincible Iron Mike anymore but it’s still stunning when they lose, but no more stunning than NBC keeping it off free TV. This isn’t team handball, after all (all due respect to team handball).

As for the pink hippopotamus? Look, this isn’t Frederic Weis’ France team anymore. France beat the U.S. at the 2019 World Cup in China. It features three terrific NBA players in Utah’s Rudy Gobert, the Celtics’ Evan Fournier and the Clippers’ Nicolas Batum (and also the Knicks’ Frank Ntilikina, who was an injury scratch). We knew the U.S. was vulnerable, especially after pre-Olympics friendly losses to Nigeria and Australia.

Follow all the 2020 Olympics action

• Daily updated medal counts, full schedule and results, athlete bios and more
• Full Post coverage of the Games

But this was a little something different. The U.S. had previously lost five games in an Olympics history that stretches back to 1972. Each one was a little different. The first Russian loss, in Munich 1972, was a heist, but it was preceded by an extraordinary last-ditch comeback (capped by two pressure-packed Doug Collins free throws) that put them in position to have their hearts crushed.

The ’88 loss to Russia in Seoul was a routine basketball loss: Russia was simply better that night. The three losses in 2004, in Athens, included a stunning blowout (by Puerto Rico), a payback game four years in the making (Lithuania) and a semifinal loss to Argentina in which the winners simply outplayed the losers.

This was something else.

This was a 74-67 U.S. lead with 3 minutes and 41 seconds to go. This was a 16-2 French run to end the game.

This was USA Basketball choking, in a way that’s never happened before, not at the Olympics. It is almost stunning to believe that a team with Kevin Durant, Dame Lillard and company couldn’t close out a seven-point game, under four to go. But it happened.

(Or at least it allegedly happened; we are still trying to contact one the 16 American households that has Peacock.)

“I think that’s a little bit of hubris if you think the Americans are supposed to just roll out the balls and win,” Popovich said. “We’ve got to work for it just like everybody else. And for those 40 minutes, they played better than we did.”

Very soon, Popovich is going to have to come to terms with the fact that he isn’t coaching Hickory High. When you accept the job coaching USA Basketball, you inherit the history: three straight gold medals, 15 overall (out of the 18 the U.S. has competed in), 25 straight wins (until Sunday), 138-5 all-time record.

Now 138-6.

“France is a good team and they play very well together,” said Jrue Holiday, the one U.S. player who really did cover himself in glory, scoring 12 key fourth-quarter points after arriving in Japan fresh from the Bucks’ championship celebration only hours before tip-off. “There were times we were up ten or so and we have to keep going. I feel like we’ll get better every game.”

He’s probably right. This is also right: that is no longer merely a hope. It is now, officially, a necessity.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

New York has been waiting for its Giannis Antetokounmpo

Giannis Antetokounmpo will never be forgotten after this

These Bucks and Suns don't have to run through Celtics this time

Giannis Antetokounmpo isn't the type of star you can root against

This is a start for the Yankees

We don’t say this very often.

Good for the NFL.

Good for pro football for being the first North American sports league to put into writing what ought to be obvious and logical by now, a decision that, in essence, comes down to two talking points:

1. You are free to make your own choice about getting vaccinated.

2. You are no longer free from the consequences of making that choice.

The NFL actually went there, dropping an “F-bomb” far more significant than the one that, in whole or in part, made up two-sevenths of George Carlin’s old “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” bit, a word that terrifies sports leagues because its implementation is always the culmination of something bad, the ultimate worst-case scenario.

Forfeit.

There were two items from the NFL’s memo released Thursday that seem almost certain to be game-changers, one way or another, for this upcoming season, which will cover 18 weeks and 17 games per club and feature 272 regular-season games — all of which the NFL expects to play. Or else …

Or else a team compromised by infections of unvaccinated players risks losing that game — and all the revenue and playoff implications intertwined with it — by being forced to forfeit.

And by the way? No players on either team involved in a forfeit will get paid for that week.

So good luck to the Cole Beasleys of the world. The Bills receiver, a few months ago, earned an extra 15 minutes of fame with some loud don’t-tread-on-me declarations that not only wouldn’t he take the vaccine for COVID-19, but also he’d be willing to walk away from football if forced to do so.

Good luck to DeAndre Hopkins, wide receiver for the Cardinals, who in a since-deleted tweet Thursday said: “Never thought I would say this, but being put in a position to hurt my team because I don’t want to partake in the vaccine is making me question my future in the @Nfl.”

We can save the arguments about whether citizens are entitled to the right to refuse a vaccine for our friends on the Op-Ed page. So let’s just remind Beasley, Hopkins and a bunch of other NFL players who popped off Thursday about a couple of indisputable facts as they pertain to football:

1. Every one of them played high school football. And the only way any American teenager is allowed to play high school football is to show proof of a baseline series of routine vaccinations — mumps, measles, small pox, etc. That’s non-negotiable. No proof of shots, no Friday night lights (or Saturday afternoon sun) for you.

2. The NFL also mandates that players — for their own benefit, and also for the sake of the game — wear helmets, and face masks, and shoulder pads, and other assorted protections against the traumas common to a violent game. There has never once been a challenge to these rules because the men who play the game may be stubborn, but generally aren’t stupid.

Somehow the NFL made it through its entire schedule last year without losing even one game, and that felt like a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God miracle, frankly — especially when you look at how ravaged college football was. But there was no vaccination then. All the NFL could do was roll the dice, collect the swabs and hope. It worked.

But there is no longer a need for this Hail Mary play. Vaccines are available. They are easy to get. They are free. And if they have been shown to not be 100 percent resistant to the virus, it is becoming abundantly clear that, at worst, they minimize COVID-19’s impact.

Baseball is struggling right now with the fact seven teams — including the Mets — haven’t reached the 85 percent threshold to reduce restrictions on the road. The Phillies and Yankees just completed a series in which one team (the Yankees) is in fact above that 85 number, but has been plagued by breakthroughs, while the other is reportedly well below. Philly has lost players. There is a real fear that the next time it could be worse.

And then what?

In the NFL, we now know what. We also know that while all 32 teams have vaccination rates above 50 percent, 18 of them are below 85 percent. That is a concern, especially with these new rules on the books. The NFL was right to attach forfeits to these regulations — “forfeit” is the dirtiest word in competitive sports.

It was righter to potentially dip into the players’ wallets. Money talks. We know what walks. The NFL just made it more likely that it will, instead, run, hopefully to the nearest available clinic.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Yankees fan's abhorrent behavior is nothing new

Mets, Yankees in playoff hunt at same time doesn't happen too often

A beautiful Yankees-Red Sox battle wrecked by COVID

'Spectacular' Giannis Antetokounmpo block was one for the ages

There's plenty of time left for Yankees to channel winning spirit

Look, it’s a start. There will be no bold declarations after these first three games, post-break. There ought to be no conclusions drawn. The Yankees took two out of three from the front-running Red Sox this weekend, and you have to think that was the bare-minimum requirement.

They stomped the Sox, 9-1, Sunday night, even though many of the Yankees regulars were elsewhere. In some ways it was a most nostalgic callback to a more innocent time, a few years ago, when cynicism didn’t choke the Yankees every day, when they would plant no-names in the lineup every day and keep winning.

Then, the names were Ford and Tauchman and Urshela and Voit, and Yankees fans were charmed by the way they would seize the baton whenever the front-line regulars flocked to the IL.

Yankees fans are harder to charm these days. They are impatient with this season, displeased with much of what they’ve seen across the first 92 games, unhappy with the long spasms of lifeless ball the Yankees have turned in. So maybe this is something to hold on to.

Maybe the thrashing of an ancient rival with a lineup dominated with surnames that most certainly require a first-name qualifier — Gittens and Amburgey, LaMarre and Allen — can provide something of a heading-for-the-homestretch spark. Or at least enough of a push across the next week and a half — during which time the Yankees are going to endure missing stars every night — to flip a switch and try to make August and September matter.

If anything, the Yankees should realize after three days of coming eyeball-to-eyeball with the Red Sox that these are not the 2018 Sox, the ones who lapped the American League to the tune of 108 regular-season wins and 119 overall on the way to a fourth World Series championship since 2004. Boston is good, very good. But Boston also has a lot of games left with the Yankees and Rays. Boston can be had. Maybe they can even be caught.

And the Blue Jays will continue to be heard from, too. The Yankees are still in fourth place in their own division but they will have a say in all of that. The message they needed to send — to the brass, yes, but also to themselves — was that they can keep their head above water now with six regulars sidelined to COVID-19 issues, notably Aaron Judge.

Consider their heads safely above sea level.

And now it must be sustained.

“It’s been a hard week,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “Bottom line, it’s been a very hard week and I think we really played with a level of focus and energy. We lose the first game and it’s easy to be deflated. And nobody was.”

The Sox did themselves no favors this weekend. They had a 1-0 lead in the rain Saturday night, and at that moment they could probably detect that the glint in the Yankees’ eyes was flickering. But the Yankees came back Saturday night, winning a rain-truncated six-inning game behind Gerrit Cole. And then they took it to the Sox early Sunday, poured it on, delighted a jazzed-up house of 40,309.

“You saw everyone contributing,” Boone said.

That included Jameson Taillon at the start, who was terrific across 5 ¹/₃ scoreless innings. It included Aroldis Chapman at the end, and his redemption tour made an important stop with a 1-2-3 ninth inning that started out a little adventurous but soon calmed.

And in between it included a second home run in as many days from way-overdue Gleyber Torres and some legit contributions from the brigade of Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, notably Allen (Greg) who is now hitting .500 for the Yanks and LaMarre (Ryan) who finished the scoring with a two-run blast in the eighth.

Again: No declarations. No conclusions. No pronouncements. But none were necessary this weekend. The requirement was providing proof of life, and the Yankees did that. They took two of three from the Sox. They shaved their deficit to seven games. Lots of ballgames left. Lots of season left. Heads above water, for now. It’s a start.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

The 6-5, 12-inning win at Miami on May 21 (Day 13 in first place) featured key 12th-inning RBI hits by — Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? — Khalil Lee and Johneshwy Fargas.

There have been some mornings when the top of the NL East standings feel like a typo and, yet, here the Mets are, starting the second half at 47-40, and that’s good for a 3 ½-game lead, and here’s what’s remarkable:

It feels impossible that lead isn’t smaller.

And it also feels like the lead should be bigger.

How can that be? Well, just take a walk through the 69 days the Mets have spent in first place. The whole journey tells you a story of how they got here …

Day 1, May 9: Mets 4, Diamondbacks 2. Lead: 1

The Mets entered the day tied with the Phillies, but they had Jacob deGrom on the mound and felt bulletproof … until the ace begged out of the game after five innings and 68 pitches, after allowing a run and a hit and striking out six. This would become a familiar emotion for Mets fans: thrilling to deGrom as he mowed down hitters, then anxiously turning their attention to the bullpen at inning’s end. This time it was right-side tightness and it landed him on the IL. He also battled shoulder, elbow and back issues. The Mets took over first place by themselves yet few were ready to celebrate.

Day 10, May 18: Mets 4, Braves 3. Lead: 1.0

Tommy Hunter (soon bound for the 60-day IL) started. Robert Gsellman (soon bound for the 60-day IL) relieved him. Jonathan Villar, thought to be a spare piece in April, homered for an early lead. Tomas Nido, making a play to unseat James McCann as No. 1 catcher, hit the winning homer in the ninth. The Mets kept a narrow lead over the Phillies.

Day 20, May 28: Mets-Braves PPD. Lead: 2.5

An accounting such as this would not be at all possible without a little rain, of course. In the old days we could give an alliterative spin to the Mets’ dueling narratives of 2021: DL and DH. At one time the Mets had 18 players on what is now called the IL. The Mets have already played 10 doubleheaders (sweeping two, splitting eight), have at least three already scheduled the rest of the way … and, well, you know what the weather in a New York summer (and fall) can look like. There’ll probably be a few more.

Day 30, June 7: Off-day. Lead: 3.5

The Mets enjoyed a day off in Baltimore after splitting four games with the high-flying Padres, a step up in class for the Mets, who until then had beaten up on weak teams and scuffled against good ones. But they’d take two out of three from the Padres the following weekend, too. Suddenly the standings didn’t feel quite like a typo …

Day 40, June 17: Cubs 2, Mets 0. Lead: 4.5

… and yet, the Mets were — are — still capable of an empty-offense game like this one, when they scratched out two hits against Chicago’s soft-tossing Kyle Hendricks. The lack of offense has been a standard part of this season, regardless of whether the batting order is filled with regulars or Bench-Mob temps. And never do the standings seem more like a typo than days when the bats take a siesta.

Day 51, June 28: Nats 8, Mets 4. Lead: 3.0

The crazy thing is, you keep waiting for someone — Braves, Phillies, Nats, one of them — to make their run at the Mets. They still might. But so far, all three have found that the closer they get to the Mets, the more likely their wings are to melt. The Nats clobbered five home runs. Two of them were by smoking-hot Kyle Schwarber, who looked primed to take out the Mets all by himself … and then four days later strained his hamstring. The Nats lost nine of 11 heading into the break …

Day 61, July 8: Off day. Lead: 4.0

… including a brutal 9-8 loss to San Diego in which Max Scherzer couldn’t hold an 8-0 lead. This was just one of many days when the Mets — rained out against the Pirates — did just fine by not playing at all, letting the other teams in the East light themselves on fire. It’s happened more than once.

Day 69, July 16: Mets at Pirates. Lead: 3.5

For the first time all year, the Mets ought to be at full strength offensively, with J.D. Davis joining the party, and if he can have a similar impact to Brandon Nimmo … well, it might make the quest to fill out the rotation a little more appetizing. Sixty-nine straight days in first place. Eighty days left in the season. As Neil Young once posed, lyrically: How many more?

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

'Spectacular' Giannis Antetokounmpo block was one for the ages

There's plenty of time left for Yankees to channel winning spirit

Every once in a while USA hoops needs 'good humbling'

Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo imposed his will on these NBA Finals

Bitter Yankees-Astros rivalry is exactly what MLB needs a lot more of

This was the rare day of this soggy, sopping summer when from the start you clicked on the weather app on your phone and all you saw was one thing: the sun. Alone. Glorious. Unambiguous. Unblocked by clouds, unimpeded by rain droplets, or lightning. The rest of the weekend, of course, looks sketchy and spotty. Par for the course this summer.

Just not this day. Just sun in the sky, and in the forecast, on this day. All day. In The Bronx, the forecast for 7:05 p.m. was sunshine and 86 degrees. A light breeze, perhaps, but no storm clouds looming. No thunderstorms brewing.

At 7:05, Domingo German was going to throw a baseball in the direction of Kiké Hernandez, there would be a full house buzzing at Yankee Stadium, the scent of beer and hot dogs in the air, and even Yankees fans seized by uncharacteristic pessimism the past few weeks could feel, in that moment, that everything might really turn out all right.

For once across this sodden, soaking summer, we would have a perfect night for a baseball game, and the only one in town, the only one on the whole baseball schedule, was a good one, maybe the best one.

Red Sox versus Yankees.

Perfect. Just perfect.

Except it turned out not so perfect after all. Except at 7:05 p.m., there were no Yankees on the field, no Red Sox on the field, no umpires. There were no fans in the stands. The doors never opened. The sun went to waste. One more time, even amid the bright sunshine, a shadow descended.

Game called.

On account of COVID.

“We are still vulnerable,” Brian Cashman said.

And we are still at a time when the headlines can overwhelm us. Earlier in the day came a statement from USA Basketball that Bradley Beal, undergoing contact tracing, will not be allowed to play in the Olympics in Tokyo. NFL Network announcer Rich Eisen, double-vaccinated, announced he’d tested positive. Los Angeles County, biggest county in the country, said it will reinstitute mandatory masks inside public spaces this weekend.

Yankees-Red Sox, PPD, COVID.

Yes. We are still vulnerable, not only to the virus itself but to the soul-sucking gut punch each of these news items delivers. Our world is better for the vaccines, and at the least they seem to have dulled the deadliness of the disease. But it still roams among us. It can still dim the sun on the very brightest day of summer.

The Yankees have three confirmed cases — pitchers Nester Cortes Jr., Wandy Peralta and Jonathan Loaisiga. They have three everyday players who are in COVID protocol, awaiting lab results: Aaron Judge, Gio Urshela, Kyle Higashioka. None of that is good news.

But it is Judge’s name that raises the largest concern, because Judge spent the early portion of the week at the MLB All-Star Game, an event that, if you didn’t know any better, could have taken place in 2019. Full house at Coors Field. Glad-handing teammates, all of them interacting freely with each other. Not a care in the mile-high air.

Not all of them vaccinated.

And so baseball enters into its most nervous period of the year, its most curious phase since last summer when teams such as the Cardinals and Marlins spent extended periods of time inactive because of virus breakouts.

The Red Sox announced that all five of their All-Stars were undergoing immediate testing — and conceded that at least one of them has not been vaccinated. Surely similar protocols will take over the 28 teams whose seasons are set to resume Friday night. And one more time the sport holds its breath.

“Disappointing and frustrating,” is how Yankees manager Aaron Boone put it. “Nobody wants to be talking about this. We want to go back to normal. But some things are out of our control. We have to do the best we can with the circumstances and the hands we are dealt.”

We’ve been dealing with the same lousy cards for 16 months now. Things are better, much better. But they are not normal. Every so often we get a few blissful weeks where we are allowed to forget that. We resume our lives. We plug back in. We get ready to spend a beautiful night at the ballpark, Yankees versus Sox, two ancient rivals and a perfect night for baseball. Until it turns out not so perfect after all.

Damn it.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

There's plenty of time left for Yankees to channel winning spirit

Every once in a while USA hoops needs 'good humbling'

Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo imposed his will on these NBA Finals

Bitter Yankees-Astros rivalry is exactly what MLB needs a lot more of

The Mets' news that dominated headlines 60 years ago this week

This was a night when the stars mostly had to be wingmen instead, Maverick ceding to Iceman for the good of the club.

Giannis Antetokounmpo was still brilliant — 26 points, 14 rebounds, eight assists, three steals, two blocks — but the Bucks had a shot to tie the NBA Finals because Khris Middleton played the game of his life — 40 points, many big shots down the stretch.

Chris Paul wasn’t brilliant. He struggled. He scuffled. He only scored 10 points. His seven assists were almost entirely obscured by five turnovers. He looked every second of 36 years old. But Devin Booker — 42 points, 17-for-28 from the floor — had the Suns in splendid position to bring a 3-1 lead in this series back to Phoenix.

Still … these are the Finals.

And stars … well, stars do crave moments like this.

And so it was: The Bucks, who looked dead three different times in the fourth quarter, somehow led 101-99, after Middleton drained a 19-footer with 88 seconds left. The Suns, going for the kill, hadn’t let the Bucks out of their sights all night.

So Booker, with the ball, started to drive the lane after taking a hand-off from Deandre Ayton, who flashed to the basket. Ayton was open. Booker saw he was open. Every eye inside Fiserv Forum saw he was open. Booker flicked the ball to the rim, expecting an Ayton slam, expecting a tie game, expecting a quiet, funereal arena.

What he wasn’t expecting: Antetokounmpo, in an eyeblink, catching up to Ayton — who already was soaring toward the basket — quick-leaping, getting in Ayton’s way and …

“HE BLOCKED THE SHOT!” came the three-way harmony of Mike Breen, Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy on the TV, their voices soon drowned out by maybe the loudest sound a basketball arena has made in two years.

He blocked the shot?

He blocked the shot?

“He made a spectacular block,” Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer said, shaking his head, stunned by what he had seen even if he sees Antetokounmpo do things like that every day of the year: exhibition games, practices, Game 4 of the NBA Finals. “He has the ability to cover an awful lot of ground.”

He shook his head.

“That,” he said, “is an NBA Final special moment.”

It was impossible, in the moment, not to immediately recall 2016, and LeBron James catching up to Andre Igoudala at the end of Game 7 of the Finals, the play that allowed Kyrie Irving’s jumper not long after to be the title-winner for the Cavaliers. They were different blocks — James’ more of a sheer athletic showcase, Antetokounmpo’s a master stroke of instinct and quickness.

But they left fans panting, and arenas ranting. They were — Budenholzer’s words — NBA Finals special moments.

“Just a hustle play,” Antetokounmpo said a bit later, after this 109-103 Bucks victory was secure, after they’d tied the series at 2-2, after they’d guaranteed their fans at least one more communal party, when Game 6 returns to Wisconsin on Tuesday. “At that point in the game you do whatever it takes to put yourself in position to win the game.

“I saw the play coming, I felt him rolling in behind me, I jumped vertically toward the rim and hopefully I can be there in time. I got there in time.”

He got there in time. Every time you rewind it. He gets there every time.

Budenholzer, his voice absent irony, said: “Big-time play. We’re gonna need more of them.”

Well, as long as he has No. 34 on his side, he has come to the right place. Antetokounmpo didn’t have the game softly in his palm, as he did Game 3 when he was simply unstoppable. He was merely excellent. And for the longest time it seemed that Booker’s epic outburst would be enough to pin Giannis and his mates to the abyss.

But Middleton was wonderful late. Jrue Holiday was a dynamo on defense. Backup guard Pat Connaughton, who each game looks as if he has arrived straight from an industrial-league opener, made every important play down the stretch, had 11 gritty points and nine sweaty boards. The Bucks had fought back from nine down to two ahead. They needed one more play to feel secure.

Then a ball was lofted toward a basket, and one of the best basketball players on Earth did what comes naturally. He went after it. He got in between Ayton and the basket. And he delivered a play they’ll be talking about in Milwaukee when Antetokounmpo and Middletown take honored alumni seats courtside in 50 years, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson did Wednesday.

An NBA Finals special moment. One for the ages.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Every once in a while USA hoops needs 'good humbling'

Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo imposed his will on these NBA Finals

Bitter Yankees-Astros rivalry is exactly what MLB needs a lot more of

The Mets' news that dominated headlines 60 years ago this week

These fanless Olympics will be one of most depressing ever

Before we take a cautious look forward with the Yankees, let’s take a quick look backwards. Set your watch for July 15, 1978, 43 years ago, another summer when the Yankees were pursuing the Red Sox. Things looked so glum then that Reggie Jackson, noted horse player, had already mused, “Not even Affirmed can catch Boston,” referring to the freshly throned Triple Crown thoroughbred.

Anyway, there has lately been a lot of hand-wringing by Yankees fans and the ever-helpful refrain of “If Only The Boss Were Still Alive …” to accompany the angst, and it seems helpful to recount that on July 15, 43 years ago, with the Yankees sitting 11 ½ games behind the Sox, in third place, this was what George Steinbrenner, very much alive, did on that one day alone:

• He demoted Reggie Jackson, the team’s leading RBI man, from everyday right-fielder to part-time DH against right-handers. This was done for no apparent reason.

• He made Thurman Munson’s periodic appearances in right field permanent (or at least temporarily permanent). Munson, the perennial All-Star catcher, would’ve looked more comfortable playing goalie for the Rangers.

• He declared Mike Heath (lifetime OPS-plus: 88) and Gary Thomasson (lifetime batting average: .249) would be regulars. Lou Piniella and Roy White all but vanished from the lineup (again, temporarily permanently).

• He asked Billy Martin if he’d like to retire. Martin declined.

“I ain’t no bleepin’ quitter,” Martin declared.

That was one day. Around the Yankees, in the summer of 1978, that was considered “Thursday.” That was what life was like when The Boss was alive. And that doesn’t account for what happened in the next few weeks …

(Reggie bunts, against orders, versus the Royals at the Stadium, is told to stop it, bunts again despite getting a green light to swing, is suspended for a week. … Billy has a few too many at an O’Hare Airport saloon, adds “One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted” into “Bartlett’s Famous Quotations,” resigns. … The Yankees fall to fourth place, 14 games behind the Sox on July 17 (their record: 47-42). … Billy is brought back on Old-Timers’ Day, two weeks after quitting, and is declared manager for 1980. …)

Oh, yeah. If only The Boss were still alive.

Of course, we all know what happened next: The Yankees staged one of the great comebacks in baseball history, one of the signature chapters in the 86-year trance they held over the Red Sox. You know what’s kind of overlooked, though, in the telling and retelling of that summer? There were no magic tricks involved. There was no pixie dust. There was certainly no magic wand waved by the principal owner.

The Yankees did the most simple thing you can do in baseball.

They started to win. A lot. Almost every day, in fact. They started to play better baseball. They got better pitching in the second half than they’d gotten in the first. They started hitting in the clutch better. The Red Sox cooled down, sure, but they still won 99 games. They didn’t exactly go in the full tuck position.

The Yankees just heated up, starting at 47-42. They went 52-21 from there, then won a playoff game.

It is worth noting that the Yankees, as of this moment, are 46-43, only a game worse than the ’78 team at the same time. They trail the Sox, who visit Yankee Stadium for four days beginning Thursday night, by eight games (so, if you are an optimist, they are already six games to the good from 43 years ago).

Now, yes: Those Yankees had a winning pedigree and were, in fact, defending champions. But it is also worth remembering that the last two times this core of Yankees played a full 162, they went 203-121. There is winning in their DNA, too, even if it has been hard to detect sometimes this year.

Want more? Yankees fans nearly revolted in ’78 when Martin — fiery, angry, headstrong Billy — was replaced by cool, calm, collected Bob Lemon. Yankees fans in 2021 sometimes sound ready to hold a séance to restore Billy to the manager’s office in order to fix the path crafted by Aaron Boone — cool, calm, collected Aaron Boone.

Maybe this really is a lost cause. Maybe 46-43 isn’t an outlier. Maybe the Sox really are uncatchable, the Yankees irredeemable. But there’s sure an awful lot of season left. There are still a lot of games left against baseball piñatas like the Orioles and Twins and Rangers. And there still are so many games left with the Sox and the Rays.

Better: Hal Steinbrenner is unlikely to walk into the Yankees clubhouse Thursday and rearrange the lineup for kicks and giggles. That’s the kind of thing his old man used to do, back in the ’70s, thinking it was a good idea. Of course, a lot of people in 1978 thought bell-bottoms and leisure suits were a good idea, too.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Chris Paul puts on show in long-awaited NBA Finals moment

Bucks, Suns were opposite sides of coin in historic draft

Albert Pujols, Chris Paul latest to prove old guys rule

Why this Subway Series is so important for Yankees, Mets

Simulating an all-time modern Subway Series between Yankees, Mets

This ought to be a layup for Rob Manfred, and the embattled commissioner of baseball sure could use a couple of point-blank easy decisions. Manfred has developed a reputation – and it is earned, make no mistake – for caring far more about baseball fans he wants to cultivate as opposed to the ones he already has.

There is a belief – fairly or unfairly but, again, well-earned – that he doesn’t much like the sport over which he has held guardianship since 2015.

He needs a layup. Here is his layup.

Sometime Wednesday – too late to save Mets fans who had a separate-admission, seven-inning doubleheader foisted on them, but in plenty of time to spare untold thousands of others going forward – he must announce an immediate executive order as of the start of business Thursday:

These out-in-the-open bits of larceny must end. At once.

From now on – immediately – if inclement weather forces cancellation of a game there are two, and only two, options:

1) A single-admission doubleheader with two seven-inning games.

2) A separate-admission doubleheader with two nine-inning games.

That’s it. That’s all it will take. In the eyes of a lot of baseball fans that won’t be nearly enough of a roll-back to undo the damage that Manfred has already inflicted on the game, but at least it will keep his owners from – and there’s no delicate way to put this – STEALING FROM THEIR CUSTOMERS.

We can debate the merits or the malevolence of the two Manfred creations that haunt traditional baseball fans every day. The ghost runner at second base to begin the 10^thinning remains an intolerable departure for a lot of baseball fans; even purists might’ve been persuaded to accept this if, say, the free runner didn’t enter the game until, say, the 12^thinning. But compromise isn’t high on Manfred’s list of skillsets.

And so we also had the introduction of seven-inning double-headers last year. And in the context of 2020, you could make the argument they made sense: limit the possibilities of Covid exposure, allow teams with multiple make-up dates to do so in a manner that wouldn’t completely wipe them out. Plus, games have been decided in five, six, seven, and eight innings going back to the beginning of time thanks to poor weather.

Also, a year ago, there were no fans in the stands. They didn’t have to be part of the solution because they simply weren’t part of the plan, period.

But they are now. And, look: you can have a reasonable debate about seven-inning doubleheaders. Both sides have valid arguments. But only as single-admission affairs.

Separate admission?

That isn’t just wrong. That’s stealing. Folks who bought tickets to the Mets-Yankees game Sunday night did so believing they would get a nine-inning game. Same deal with the fans who bought Brewers-Mets tickets for Wednesday night. If you shell out for a Broadway play and the house lights came on midway through the second act, you wouldn’t stand for that, would you?

If you bought a price fix dinner and suddenly were told you had to leave the restaurant before dessert, that would cause an incident, wouldn’t it?

It’s the same thing here. Baseball fans pay through the nose as it is to watch these games in person – tickets, parking, hot dogs, merch, on and on. Now you’re randomly knocking two innings off the program they have already paid for in advance? And if anyone has offered up a 22 percent refund on these games, I sure haven’t heard about that yet. Have you?

One person has the power to stop this – Manfred. It won’t recast his image, or his legacy, but it would show he has at least a passing interest in doing right by his fans. And we already know he wouldn’t be restrained by hoary old handcuffs that might’ve hindered past commissioners who actually seemed to care about the integrity of the games and the continuity of seasons.

Lucky for Manfred, he’s already shown contempt for both. Not only has he ushered in ghost runners and seven-inning doubleheaders, he merrily and unilaterally rushed in on-field strip-searches of pitchers midway through a season. He has shown a willingness to act boldly, if not always wisely. He has the chance to do both here.

He has the chance to end the farce of separate-admission seven-inning doubleheaders right now, immediately, today. Take the layup, Commissioner. Take the damned layup.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Why this Subway Series is so important for Yankees, Mets

Simulating an all-time modern Subway Series between Yankees, Mets

This Islanders defeat will sting for a while

Islanders hoping this do-or-die chance ends as happily as their first

Islanders and Lou Lamoriello relishing Game 7 shot

There was a marvelous moment tucked away Friday night at Nationals Park in Washington. The Dodgers were trailing the Nats, 3-1, in the top of the seventh inning, but the defending champs had a man on third, one out, and 23-year-old Gavin Lux due up. But Lux was called back to the dugout.

Albert Pujols pinch-hit for him. Pujols was nearly 18 years old on the day Lux was born. He is 41 now. He is the oldest player in MLB. He walked to the plate with his old-man’s gait. He worked the count to 2-2. And then he swung, and hit a dribbler to third. The ball ate up Starlin Castro at third. Pujols had an infield hit and drove in a run.

If it felt like it took forever for the play to develop … well it did. There was an iso camera on Pujols as he “ran” to first. It was laborious. It was glorious. It famously took Mickey Mantle all of 3.1 seconds to make it from home to first in his prime. It took 41-year-old Albert Pujols 4.85 seconds to cover the same ground.

The Dodgers, inspired, scored eight more times that inning, won the game 10-5.

And it was just the latest example of how the sports year 2021 has become an Ode to the Olde. Every few weeks, it seems, someone is defying Father Time and showing the kids that there’s still life yet in the old bear/tiger/lion.

Tom Brady started all of this, of course. Brady is one of the few pro athletes left that Albert Pujols could use a courtesy title with; Mr. Brady is a month shy of 44, and he was 43 in February when he won his seventh Super Bowl. It doesn’t matter that he looks 33, or that he doesn’t always play like he’s 23. With a title at stake, he outplayed his heir apparent as GOAT — Patrick Mahomes, 18 years his junior — and got the girl in the end, too (though he already had her).

Phil Mickelson is 51. Way back when he was 50, in May, he won the PGA Championship, becoming the oldest man to ever win a major. Now, there are only a few 50-year-olds who look like Lefty — truth is, if 30-year-old Lefty and 40-year-old Lefty looked more like 50-year-old Lefty, his trophy case might be even more crowded than it is — but no matter.

He beat Brooks Koepka by two shots. Mickelson won his first PGA Tour event, the Telecom Open in Tucson, Ariz., as an amateur on Jan. 13, 1991. Koepka turned 256 days old that afternoon.

Old guys rule.

Roger Federer, at 39, is still grinding away at Centre Court, Wimbledon, and while he might not be the marvel he was at 29, or at 19, as he seeks Grand Slam No. 21, it sure is more fun watching him now. It is why we can dream that Serena Williams can make one more run at a 24th Slam at the Open this September, weeks before she turns 40.

Because Old Gals rule, too: just ask Syosset’s own Sue Bird, a WNBA All-Star at 40, who will try to win a fifth Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in a few weeks.

Chris Paul is the latest to grab the torch. He’s only 36, but in NBA years there’s no telling how old that is, especially for a point guard, especially for as many miles as he’s put on his tires. But when he qualified for his first NBA Finals last week there wasn’t a soul anywhere who seemed to object — well, other than maybe Patrick Beverley.

It doesn’t matter that the Suns have skipped here on pixie dust, drawing a banged-up Lakers team, a banged-up Nuggets team and a banged-up Clippers team on their way to the Finals … where they’ll face either the banged-up Hawks or the banged-up Bucks. Paul will be the favorite.

And it’s funny — LeBron James is actually four months older than Paul and won a year ago. But LeBron belongs in his own physical category. Even when he’s old, it’ll be hard to imagine him as old.

It’s why the Islanders losing was so sad, because 38-year-old Andy Greene was still hammering folks, and with his playoff beard you might swear the first guy he ever drove into the boards was Boom Boom Geoffrion. Because even in hockey les vieux règnent.

Old guys rule.

Vac’s Whacks

I can’t be the only one who finds it delicious that one of the all-time basketball coach-killers, Jason Kidd, is now going to try to work with Luka Doncic in Dallas, who has already gotten a head start on his own collection of pelts. This will be fun to watch.

If we didn’t already know baseball was a cruel game, watching what it’s done to Clint Frazier the past few years has been an unwanted and unrelenting reminder.

I really wanted to like “Lansky,” the new movie. Oh, well. What I’ll say is this: Harvey Keitel is great, and is now probably the best Lansky, leapfrogging Richard Dreyfuss and Ben Kingsley (will need a ruling on if Lee Strasberg is eligible for this category).

July 4 will always have one powerful memory for me: a long day and longer night in 1985 at Breezy Point, then a trip home to Long Island accompanied, amazingly, by the 15th through 19th innings of Mets 6, Braves 3 on the radio. Ron Darling pitched the 19th for the win and told Jay Horwitz recently: “When we got back to the hotel, there was tomorrow’s paper at my door. That’s never a good sign.”

@bg23on28: Dad took me to the Coliseum the week after the opening for Nets-Colonels. Lower level had not been finished. Saw Moses Malone’s first pro game with the Utah Stars. Last time there was to see Bruce. The place had a good run.

@MikeVacc: I’ve now been there for the last Nets game (ABA & NBA preseason), last Islanders games (2015 and 2021) and last Billy Joel concert (2015). I am officially ready to say goodbye for good.

Michael Bruno: If I am Hal Steinbrenner, it’s time to start over. No need to panic. But I would let Brian Cashman go now and start the GM search. The GM should determine the coach and roster for next season. While Cashman has done a good job over the years, the team is slow, very inconsistent and just boring.

Vac: Proof that it’s OK to believe it’s time for a new GM without going out of your way to disparage what has been a very successful tenure. Civility lives!

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Simulating an all-time modern Subway Series between Yankees, Mets

This Islanders defeat will sting for a while

Islanders hoping this do-or-die chance ends as happily as their first

Islanders and Lou Lamoriello relishing Game 7 shot

Islanders and their fans still can dream after this classic

We are closing in on a full quarter-century of the Subway Series, starting Friday night at Yankee Stadium, and the temptation — if not the truth — is that we have officially come close to the jump-the-shark portion of our program.

The novelty vanished long ago, probably in 1998, by which time the teams had met three times apiece, in both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, the places that used to host Mayor’s Trophy Games and harbor dreams of Mets-Yankees games that counted for real.

The world-is-ending feel to the games probably evaporated in the fourth year of the Subway Series, 2000, when both teams qualified for an old-fashioned, old-timey, old-school Subway Series, one that takes place in October under the marquee of “World Series.” That one lived up to all expectations and all manner of hype.

We have had plenty of unforgettable moments in the regular-season Subway Series — Dave Mlicki’s shutout; Doc Gooden coming back to Shea to beat the Mets in Game 1 of an historic day-night doubleheader in the summer of 2000; Roger Clemens beaning Mike Piazza in the nightcap; Shawn Estes’ odd revenge drama two years later; Luis Castillo’s dropped pop-up (and Mark Teixeira’s heads-up dash from first to home). There are others.

But there rarely has been a lot of urgency to these games, certainly not from both dugouts. There rarely has been a whiff of desperation emanating from both clubhouses.

Most years, one team — usually the Yankees — has been doing just fine.

Some years, too many of them, one team — often the Mets — has already begun to feel the weight of gravity pulling them southward in the division standings.

Some years, too few of them, both teams are going great guns and this is merely an opportunity to play a few interesting games before the real matchups of interest resume with Boston or Tampa Bay on one side of town, with Atlanta and Washington on the other.

Not this time. Not this year. This season, both teams will almost certainly look back at whatever happens this weekend as the key stretch in which their year was either salvaged or shredded, sent off to sleep with the fishes or to fly with the eagles. The Mets and Yankees both sit in tenuous places.

The Yankees didn’t even get a chance to erase the memory of the inexplicable 11-8 gag job on Wednesday night and Thursday morning against the Angels, since rain (or at least the threat of rain) postponed the last game of their four-game series Thursday afternoon. They managed to drop another half-game in the standings anyway when the Red Sox obliterated the Royals.

The Mets? Somehow the Mets have been by themselves in first place since May 3, despite the fact that on many of those 60 days, they have posted a lineup card more appropriate for Syracuse — or St. Lucie in March. And while the Dodgers lent a hand by cooling off the Nationals on Thursday night before rain washed away the final four innings in Washington, the Mets followed Wednesday’s 20-2 thrashing by the Braves by losing a gut-wrencher in the ninth in Atlanta on Thursday.

So the Yankees need to right themselves, or face a rare sell-off later in the month.

And the Mets need to right themselves, or face another year in which instead of building on early speed and their division rivals’ refusal to bury them, they’ll encounter another three-month slog which they may or may not be physically able to endure.

The teams will meet again this year, in September, but by then their fates will almost certainly have greater clarity. And by then, the games will have a far different significance, since the middle one will take place on Saturday, Sept. 11, 20 years to the day since the Towers fell (which is when at least one half of this series should be played every year, of course).

So this weekend is about dual, dueling crossroads.

And that’s happened infrequently since 1997. There was the first year, actually, when the Yankees were 37-29 and the Mets were 36-20 and both were already fighting for wild-card positioning (the Yankees made it, the Mets didn’t). There was 2005, when both teams were 22-20, the Yankees digging out of an early 11-19 hole and the Mets rebounding from an 0-5 start (the Yankees did, the Mets didn’t).

There was 2009, when the Mets were trying to hang on after losing two of three to the Phillies and the Yankees were scuffling having been swept at Boston … and then Frankie Rodriguez popped Alex Rodriguez up and … well, you know what happened from there.

Subway Series like these have been few and they’ve been far between. But this time they bring more than nostalgic stories of the 1940s and 1950s and “bragging rights” — which, along with $2.75, will get you a ride on the subway. And it’s about time.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Mike Vaccaro