The Yankees bats finally began to break out in June but their win/loss record on the month wasn’t much different from how it had been in May. We’ll see to what degree the pitchers were responsible for that in our next article. In the meantime let’s survey the batters and see who was responsible for a month that saw them surge to a .278 BA on the month against May’s .232 and .424 SLG against the previous month’s .385.
There has been an extensive list of players who have passed through the New York Yankees’ pinstripes between April and the 24th of June. In this article, I am going to survey the players who have spent at least 1 day on the roster for the Bronx Bombers but are no longer on the 25 on that date in June.
Who: Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band
What: The River Tour 2016
Where: Wembley Stadium, London
When: 5th June 2016
My track record with the music of Bruce Springsteen has been a little chequered. I discovered his music early in his career and love the first four albums – “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.”, “The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle”, “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of the Town”. “The River” was an interesting album. Bruce felt it needed to be a double record. Listening to it in Yorkshire in England, I always felt it would have been better as a single album. Loved “Point Blank” but couldn’t get excited about what Mr Springsteen refers to as his “bar-room songs” especially pieces of fluff like “Crush on You”. But there was some real meat in there and I remember listening to that album a lot.
So if the batters were worse than terrible, it must have been the pitching staff who picked up some of the slack and gave the team a chance in the May games – leading to the Yankees achieving that surprising 16-13 record on the month.
12 of those 16 wins came from the starting staff so we’ll be considering them first.
A few months ago I talked in this column about two perils that the Yankees faced in the 2016 season. The first possibility was that the senior players would prove to be well past their sell-by date and would under-perform. The second possibility was that although those senior players would perform, they would be laboured by injury. In reality, I overlooked the third possibility – that they would under-perform AND carry injuries.
What: Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
Who: Royal Shakespeare Company
Where: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon
When: May 26th 2016
Mmm… first of all you’re asked to delay your night at a Shakespeare play then your hotel manager tells you that the play has had somewhat “mixed reviews”. Then you hear the story of how the first night’s audience were given a refund because the play was running well behind in its mad dash to be ready for press night. As you take your seat in the theatre perhaps you’re right in not having too high an expectation of the night’s proceedings.
On the way in you had handed over your £4 for the programme. Back in the day, the programmes were fully of scholarly essays about the play itself. These days, it has become customary for the programme to be full of pieces about the themes that the director and producer have decided to emphasise in this performance. There is an essay about the European Union and the danger of Britain breaking away from it. There is an interview with the director about the gender changes in the Dramatis Personae.
At least you know what’s coming. The married couple next to us who didn’t buy a programme (having paid £110 for a pair of tickets) left at the interval mumbling that “it wasn’t worth watching”.
I first met Paul Cookson in the early 1980s at an Arts Festival called Greenbelt. Back then he was writing poems for adults and selling them in self-published booklets on the “fringe” area of the festival.
A couple of years later he had found his true vocation and graduated to writing poems for children. We started doing schools presentations of his work about 15 years ago and when I opened the theatre “Ravenscourt Arts@ Ravenscourt Baptist Church”, his performances became a regular if occasional part of our repertoire at the theatre as we have invited Paul to work with local schools groups.
This tradition continued in March 2016 as over 800 young people joined Paul over 6 events and laughed, worked with words, invented rhymes, and wrote their own poetry.
Whilst the batters showed few highlights in April, you could almost divide the pitchers into two groups…those who were starters (bad) and those who were relievers (good). As we shall see, there were some exceptions but not many!
In an earlier article. I pessimistically asserted that I saw similarities between the Yankees squad of 2016 and that of 1989. The 1989 team finished 5th in the American League East. That was pre-expansion when there were 7 teams in the division. Consequently, that would mean that it was likely that the Yankees would finish 4th or 5th in the 5-team division and be well out of contention.
However, there were a few positive signs in Spring Training which gave me pause for thought. And then the real season began…
(with just a little insight into the first few days of the season!)
Well, if you compare my previous two articles on the Yankees in Spring Training,(https://twilightdawning.com/2016/03/18/the-new-york-yankees-in-spring-training-2016-update-1/ & https://twilightdawning.com/2016/03/25/the-new-york-yankees-in-spring-training-2016-update-2/ ), with what has actually happened you’ll find that I was pretty close to correctly predicting the opening day roster.
But I was lucky!
twilightdawning 