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.