New York Yankees Throw in the Towel Mid-Season

That's fine with me. I hate the Yankees.

But see the Wall Street Journal, "A New Yankees Tradition: Being Totally OK With Losing":

Eric Morris picked up his allegiance to the New York Yankees in the 1990s when the team began throttling the rest of baseball, winning four World Series titles in five seasons. He remembers the roar of the crowd, the champagne showers, the ticker-tape parades.

This season, Mr. Morris says he has fallen in love with the Yankees all over again, but for an entirely different reason—because they decided to trade away all of their best players and give up.

“I’ve been rooting for this for a few years now,” he said.

The imperial Yankees, the team that has come to define the aggressive, relentless pursuit of excellence in American sports, have finally looked down the barrel of a mediocre season and chosen to surrender.

On Sunday, the team announced it was trading pitcher Andrew Miller to the Cleveland Indians for a quartet of anonymous young prospects. The following day, it sent Carlos Beltran to the Texas Rangers. Those moves followed a July 25 trade that sent star pitcher Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs.

The Yankees aren’t the first proud, old American business, or even the first baseball team, to bow to the chorus of actuarial nagging. Baseball’s modern conventional wisdom teaches that the best way to build a winner is to take advantage of the lean years by trading your best players to contending teams in exchange for promising young talent.

But for years, the Yankees resisted that idea. The team’s brass found the idea of capitulation abhorrent. They preferred to stand pat, or to open their checkbooks to sign expensive stars who might help them stay competitive. Though they have only won the World Series once since 2001, they haven’t posted a losing record since 1992...

Meh.

I think it was the 1990s when I really began to loathe the Yankees, heh.

I'd rather watch the Mets.

And thank goodness the Angels didn't throw in the towel. There was talk of trading Mike Trout for a platoon of prospects, but that didn't happen. Phew.

Still more.