The Worst Performance Ever

So thin at pitching that they welcomed back a retired 40-year-old and signed a 37-year-old free agent pursued by few else, so riddled with injuries that they grasped mid-season at a punchless 39-year-old with a .642 OPS and relied on a menagerie of long-in-the-tooth backups to staff the outfield and DH spots, so aged and lumbering without their leadoff sparkplug all season that they swiped just 93 bases, the New York Yankees crumbled in 2012...

...to the best record in the American League over 162 games despite playing in baseball's toughest division, then stole two close victories over the best one-run team in MLB history to earn an opportunity to play for the league championship.

Their lineup was so patchwork, decrepit and anemic that it lead the AL in on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and home runs and scored the second most runs in the game.  Absent the greatest closer known to humankind, and denied their ace for nearly a month, they produced the fifth best ERA in the league, nine percent above average.

And two games later they were being booed by their own spoiled fans. 

For eight games of the playoffs (they tallied seven times in their Game One win over the Orioles), Swiss cheese bats transformed the Yankee season from an accomplishment to an obscenity. A string of obscenities, if Twitter is any indication. The sports media is now brokering a deal to send ARod to Libya for a de-commisioned Scud missle and forty-three dollars of salary relief. This despite the fact that he produced 21 runs more offense than a replacement player while struggling with injuries and missing 40 games.

Yankee fandom is also actively seeking a managerial replacement today -- I hear Bobby Valentine's available; so's Bill Cowher -- because Joe Girardi merely steered his tattered club to regular season supremacy. That he eventually stopped rolling sevens in the crapshoot known as the playoffs apparently makes him guillotine fodder in NY.

Pity Max Scherzer. According to the predominant narrative, the Tiger K-machine who won 16 games and held opponents to 3.74 earned runs per nine authored his five-and-two-thirds innings of two-hit, 10-strikeout ball under the pseudonym Yankees Suck, and as such, he gets no credit. Ditto Justin Verlander and Anibal Sanchez.

Here's another narrative, the one Jim Leyland subscribes to: the Tigers made good pitches to the Yankees just when they were struggling at the plate. That combination led to more zeroes than a Japanese air museum, and a Detroit sweep. Whether ARod, Cano, Granderson, et. al will return next year, despite their advancing years, with a slightly altered supporting cast to make another run at glory, or whether the brass will take a step back to secure the post-Jeter/Rivera/Teixeira future is known only to Brian Cashman, and maybe not even to him. We could soon see the Yankees and Red Sox in simultaneous rebuild mode.

Or the Yankees will again be the best team in the AL. But who cares about that when four games can unravel it all?