The New York Yankees are off to a slow start in the 2018 season and there’s another under-the-radar excuse to add to the pile …
Between the insane weather, Giancarlo Stanton’s struggles, the plethora of injuries and the mediocre record, New York Yankees fans haven’t had the chance to express outrage for possibly the worst aspect of the 2018 season. Something so atrocious that even thinking about it has my blood boiling.
There’s a ton of games this year that are inexplicably starting at 6:35 rather than 7:05 p.m. ET.
There is absolutely zero excuse for this. 6:35? What was wrong with the 7:05 starts? All we’ve done here is taken half an hour of time away from fans trying to make it to the game. If anything, we should be starting games at 7:35 to give fans from the entire tri-state area the chance to represent in the Bronx on weekdays.
This schedule simply doesn’t work in New York. Maybe it works in boring, slow-paced cities like Boston or Baltimore where 5:00 p.m. means you can leave the office and head to the ballpark, but that’s not New York. This is a city of hustlers and the “American workday” does not exist here.
Yankees fans need every second of that extra half an hour to make it to the Bronx on time.
Now that I think about it, the schedule change may actually be part of a Major League Baseball conspiracy designed to decrease fan support in Yankee Stadium.
They rightfully suspected that this team would be too good for the rest of the league to handle so they tried to quiet the stadium. They saw in last year’s playoffs how much of an advantage a loud Yankee Stadium can create and decided the Yankees were too good to have home-field advantage. It’s not a bad plan.
Stanton’s home-road splits just throw even more fuel on that fire. He’s been absolutely abysmal in the Bronx but he’s hitting over .300 on the road? Has to make you wonder…
The Yankees start to the 2018 season screams sabotage by Major League Baseball.
All the dots are starting to connect. Rob Manfred probably looked at how uncompetitive the NBA is when the Golden State Warriors are at full strength and decided he needed to use every disadvantage he could find to slow the Yankees down. It’s the smart play if the goal is to let non-Yankee fans believe, if only for a few weeks, that their team might actually have a chance of winning the last game.
He’s probably even somehow responsible for the insane weather that’s prevented the Yankees from playing in any games warmer than -17 degrees. At this point in the season I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of Manfred using cutting-edge technology to prevent the Yankees from getting in a rhythm.
Well played, Rob Manfred. You found a way to slow the Yankees down by creating a schedule that prevented fans from getting to the game on time. I bet you even planted some of the first fans to boo Stanton just to get in his head. Really just a great effort.
Between keeping fans from getting to the stadium in time, controlling the weather so that the team has to play every game in abysmal conditions, and using heartless actors to get in the reigning National League MVP’s head, Major League Baseball has managed to hold the Yankees to hovering around a .500 record.
Looks like they’re going to need a new strategy to slow down the New York Yankees pretty soon though.
