For One Night Only, A Rookie And His Sweet Folks Make It Possible To Enjoy The Yankees

It used to be that all the normal, real people of this great nation could set aside political and religious differences, and even a well-calibrated distaste for Bostonians, and come together in our pure and righteous hatred of the New York Yankees. Now it’s all confused: The Yankees—once such an inevitability that Bob Costas invoked the word “socialism” to describe how collective action could force them from the mountaintop—are no longer the sport’s big bullies. Hell, they’re no longer even the grotesque profligate silver-spooners of their own damn town. If what grossed you out about the Yankees in the last millennium was their habit of buying your team’s best players every year, probably now you have trained your white-hot contempt on the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now there exists a widening schism between those who hate the Yankees only when they are rich and successful, and those of us who hate them for purer, longer-enduring reasons, namely that they are the favorite team of Barry Petchesky.

It is because I am a true Yankee hater—a shit-hearted ghoul who takes open delight in their failures due to grievances that would register as obscure and possibly demented to a properly adjusted baseball fan of the 21st century—that I have been prepared for frankly an embarrassing length of time to loathe George Lombard Jr. To me there is almost nothing more dreadful than a hotshot young Yankees shortstop. It should go without saying that I have delighted very much in the humiliating struggles of Anthony Volpe, who was booted down to Triple-A this week in order to clear a spot for Lombard’s ascent. It strikes me as a personal attack against my own peace of mind that the Yankees, in Lombard, have another next Derek Jeter queued up, to take the sting off of the abject failure of the last one. I have been snarling at Lombard’s presence on prospect lists for years, in the way that a vampire snarls at garlands of garlic.

Because he is a Yankee shortstop, Lombard will not need to produce like a superstar to be considered one. Lombard has in common with the poor discarded husk he is replacing that he is a highly regarded defensive shortstop and a very good athlete, and that his hitting is expected to come around, enough to make him a perfectly solid everyday player but perhaps never enough to justify the 15 All-Star team appearances he is certain to “earn.” Lombard comes from a baseball family: His dad cobbled together eight years of big-league service as a very occasional, very part-time journeyman outfielder, then went into coaching and is now the bench coach for the Detroit Tigers. His younger brother Jacob, also a shortstop, was drafted 14th overall in July by the Miami Marlins.