The Yankees are becoming Next Year’s team far too often

You probably aren’t much in the mood for a history lesson right now. Not on the morning after we said goodbye to baseball. Not with the bitterness of the Yankees’ 5-2 loss to the Blue Jays on Wednesday night still fresh in your memory. Not with this decisive 3-1 schooling in the ALDS still ringing in your ears. That’s fair enough.

So I’ll only briefly introduce you to a man named Ren Mulford Jr., one of the very first baseball writers, who mostly earned his living for “The Sporting Life.” It was Mulford who, in 1913, wrote the following sentence, as a fare-thee-well to that season’s New York baseball Giants:

“Here’s where the ‘Wait Till Next Year!’ chorus has a chance.”

This feels relevant right now, because the Yankees have inherited the mantle of that old Brooklyn war cry, which first spilled out of the typewriter of Mulford 122 years ago, adopted for the next four decades by the Dodgers before they fled the Borough of Churches.