By Geoff Walter / SNY.tv

 

 

When it rains it pours. As the skies were opening up over Boston and the Red Sox bats were exploding en route to a 11-6 win Saturday, the Yankees got even more bad news about Roger Clemens. He won't be making his start today in Chicago and is instead aiming for Saturday at Pittsburgh.

 

Every team suffers injuries -- baseball has the longest season -- but it is unfathomable to everyone both in and out of the pressbox how many the Yankees have sustained and how the Red Sox rotation is so automatic. I am quickly becoming used to the idea that the mound at Yankee Stadium is jinxed for the home team. Chien-Ming Wang was hurt at the beginning of the year, and Phil Hughes, Darrell Rasner, Humberto Sanchez and Jose Veras are all now taking a seat next to perennial benchwarmer Carl Pavano. Doug Mienkiewicz will be out six to eight weeks with a fractured right wrist and the Rocket's launch has been delayed.

It seems that the team is taking every opportunity to contradict itself this year. GM Brian Cashman said that his focus was to get the team younger and cut payroll before he signed 44-year old Roger Clemens to a pro-rated one-year, $28 million contract, a move of admitted desperation because Clemens is typically only good for six innings. There's a lesson here kids -- be a pitcher and you can command a big contract! Kei Igawa is probably the best paid Minor League pitcher; he was sent down to work out basically everything at Triple-A Scranton after signing for $46 million this offseason. Meanwhile RHP Matt DeSalvo, whose 5.40 ERA is better than Igawa's seven-plus, is listed as the likely starter for today's game against the White Sox.

At some point when the Yankees trot out Bucky Dent to the pitching mound at Yankee Stadium, it will be a moment ingrained forever on the minds of fans as something they never expected their team to be: absolutely desperate. They will say they are "inviting" him up to the Bronx to toss out a first pitch, that they are "honoring" or "commemorating" the 1978 team whose ability to comeback everyone who wears an interlocking NY now wraps themselves in more desperately than Linus Van Pelt's blanket.

The charade will be just that, because instead of focusing on fundamentals the Yankees will be invoking the ethereal, holding a ritual in an attempt to invoke the baseball gods to once again smile upon them in a place now desperately devoid of magic since Aaron Boone staged his heroics in 2003. The Bombers have to cling to their past, surround themselves with their crowns, achievements, and heroics of years long gone in order to remind themselves of what they were because they are not those things right now. They wish that Ron Guidry could be the Louisiana Lightning of old, the 28-year old starter who would go 25-3, but who is now just their 56-year old pitching coach. They forget that they are not a dynasty anymore, that they are not a team that can consistently come back from deficits but one that also blows leads (they have only played two extra inning games thus far this season -- April 13 and 14 vs. Oakland), and that they do not have the bridge to closer Mariano Rivera due to a sorely lacking bullpen.

Face it -- the most recent dynasty is dead. It breathed its last with the Diamondbacks in 2001, passed away in 2002 with the Angels, was autopsied in 2003 with the Marlins, cremated in 2004 by Boston and had its ashes scattered to the winds by the Angels in 2005 and the Tigers in '06. This is no longer a place for championships. It is a place now destined for the wrecking ball while the House that George and Money Built continues rising next door, an affront to all the wins and crowns achieved by the Yankees of legend. No wonder the gods seem angry.

Wanna argue with the Ref? Don't like the call? Go ahead and make your own!