I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the thing that irritates me most about the Yankees these days is the breathtaking lack of accountability. Hal Steinbrenner is content to keep incompetent knuckleheads like Brian Cashman, Randy Levine and Lonn Trost in high positions, and never fires anybody. Mediocrity and failure is never punished.
So now the $230 million New York Yankees are officially out of the postseason race, but I will be surprised if anybody loses their job over it. Heck, forget about playing baseball for a second — this team cannot even correctly manage a promotional giveaway, something Single A minor league teams can do with ease. And yet they all think they’re so wonderful and competent and smart. Good grief, as Charlie Brown (last night’s bobblehead) would say.
The Mariano Rivera bobblehead giveaway was nothing short of a disaster. And what does Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ PR maven, say in response? He appears to be infected with that “Ain’t I great” attitude so endemic in Yankeeland. He tells this to the New York Post:
“It’s a testament to so many people in the organization that we accomplished what we did,” said Yankees’ media relations director Jason Zillo, “given the hand that we were dealt.”
What hand were you dealt, Jason? Your team left no wiggle room for anything to go wrong with the delivery. That is a “you” problem, not a “we” problem. To top it all off, you all couldn’t even figure out how to properly distribute the bobbleheads when they did arrive. Instead of handing them out after the game, you had one bottlenecked spot, where people waited as long as seven innings to get their bobblehead.
To top it all off, the rich people in the Legends seats didn’t even have to wait on line — Yankee staffers personally brought them their bobbleheads, something Zillo professed not to know about.
But this screwup is the Yankee way, the way the organization was surprised that A-Rod needed surgery, and that a 39-year-old shortstop might not be 100% on Opening Day.
Wally Matthews of ESPN New York wrote a great column on the issue — he tried to interview Levine and Trost, but wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t want to talk.
Anyhow, the Yanks are a mess, but as long as the money keeps on rolling in, don’t expect Hal to make any changes. In fact, I’ll bet the big shots in this organization will throw themselves a big ol’ party after the season, is over to celebrate a job well done. Accountability is for suckers.
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