No.

In other news…

But seriously, who are we kidding? We have a sufficiently large body of work now that has to convince anyone paying attention in the Yankees’ front office. SU says no lead under 5 runs is safe going into the 9th inning with the bullpen in general and especially with the closer. Holmes leads MLB with 10 blown saves – a staggering number for a team right up there with the best record in baseball. You can pretty much say now that if the Yankees fall short of winning the AL East, it is on Holmes. He is a good guy and takes responsibility but apparently not cut out for this role.

The trade deadline is behind us. Mark Leiter Jr. is clearly not the answer although he is good for extra innings if you need to end the game quickly. SU says that they need to take one of the starters and put him in the bullpen. Gill is the more obvious choice given concerns over his innings pitched this year coming off surgery but he is likely their 2nd best starter in the playoffs behind Cole. Nestor Cortes would be interesting as his velocity will go up pitching out of the bullpen. Even Clarke Schmidt would be an option.

The battle for the AL East title will go down to the wire with Baltimore and it makes a huge difference. SU can easily see teams not pitching to Judge at all in the post-season, and the lineup really tails off after him. The return of Jazz Chisholm is a difference maker but we will have to see if he can avoid surgery.

For the Yankees, this is a winnable pennant year. No other team is that scary but they need to lengthen the effectiveness of the lineup and fix the bullpen before October. Unclear that either will happen.

For the 17 people that watch the Tennis Channel (globally), this was a crazy match point the other night between FAA from Canada and Jack Draper, the #1 UK player these days. Draper had the match point and was serving and volleying. Take a look: you have to watch about 45 seconds into the video to see the side angle.

It screams for umpires to have access to video replay on these types of plays – not in the rules today. But…. SU says that an experienced player actually knows what happened. If you watch Draper, he almost reaches out with his hand to catch the ball after hitting it as he knows it his racket and then hit the ground before bouncing off the net cord for a winner. The ball would have had underspin and not bounced so far forward off the net if he hit it cleanly. But it had overspin because it hit the ground off his racket.

He needed to ‘fess up there but decided to take the win. That will cost him in the locker-room longer term. Missed a chance to display good sportsmanship.

So, what are we supposed to do now? After 2 weeks of playing around with the Peacock channel and being able to pick and choose what you want to watch, are we back to watching the Yankees on Amazon or Apple TV? No longer able to flip around for a few hours? That cannot be fair!

The folks at NBC have to be thrilled with their huge Olympics investment for the 2024 Summer games. Maybe it was the time zone difference (vs. China or Japan) but the games this year just seemed easier to follow. SU favorites: table tennis (they are so good); track and field was crazy with the number of world records set and the close finishes; beach volleyball (they never get tired); tennis (SU enjoyed the Djokovic success there); and soccer. LA28 cannot get here soon enough but we have to wait 4 long years. It will be interesting to see how they schedule the night time events as fans in the East will not want to watch games starting at 11 pm.

While the US Men’s and Women’s basketball teams won the gold, they really did not shine in those final games. I mean France was featuring Evan Fournier who could not even get into a Knick game for almost an entire season! Steph Curry is all-World of course but that game should have been a blowout. For SU, what was striking on the US team was their inability to defend and rebound. You could not argue with the roster – all were deserving – but this team was bailed out by the old guys: LeBron; Curry; and Durant. And one more thing: stop complaining on every foul or non-foul call. Play the game and move on.

SU did not see that much of the women’s gold medal game but that team could not rebound and had so many turnovers. Again, a star studded roster and SU was not a supporter of adding Caitlin Clark to this year’s team. But adding her and Paige Bueckers among others in 2028 will be a super team with much better outside shooting. Play more up tempo and have some shooters out there.

The Yankees are tied for first place and that is a good thing for mid-August. No complaints there. And there are no super teams in the AL – this is a winnable pennant year for the Yankees. But the bullpen is absolutely terrifying – no-one is a sure thing. Clay Holmes for a 4-out, 50-pitch save yesterday? The key may be to get Clarke Schmidt healthy and then put one of the starters into the bullpen for the rest of the year and the post-season. SU feels the offense will be good enough – especially if they bring up Jasson Dominguez now. They should be able to score enough runs although the team is still up and down. No-one is that much better but they will need to win playoff games by 5 runs to feel comfortable for the fans.