This is the Michael K. Show podcast. Listen live weekday afternoon starting at three on 98.7 ESPN in New York, the ESPN app, the two-minute app, or on your smart speaker.

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Don LaGrecca has vacation time this week. He'll be back next Monday and he's going to be very disappointed to know that we get a chance to talk to Jeff Passon on a day that he's off, just not off Don is.

And we welcome in ESPN's baseball genius right now in the show. What's up Jeff?

Michael K. Keep it Rosenberg. How are you gentlemen? Hey, hey, hey. We we have to ask first how how's your back Jack?

You know, I'm doing okay. I'm I'm noble and I move a little more slowly than I did once a ton of time, but the day after day that is getting better.

So my plan is to be out and about in October during the playoffs and it's very unfortunate that I will not be making a stop in New York and very rare, frankly, to have an October where I'm not really spending a few days in New York.

Alright, so let's move to that. I open the show by saying everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. That's still no excuse for them the way they're playing right now. They're not this bad.

Has this taken you by surprise? Did you ever envision this happening to this Yankee team?

Can I like I feel like I'm a voice not of reason here, but of actual objectivity.

Okay. You are you are every game, Michael. You are in the booth every night. You talk about this team every day. Peter, you live in New York. You know just how die hard Yankee fans really are.

I live in the Midwest. I grew up in Cleveland. And so let me just start here. You do it Yankees to end might be the most fortunate in all of professional sports.

You have like three times as many championships as every organization outside the Cardinals. Year in, year out, you have one of two or high like two or three highest payrolls in the game.

Yankee haven't been under 500 in three decades, 30 years. So yeah, like welcome to how the rest of us live.

They're baseball fans out there who would give like a penny. It's maybe a thumb to have 30 years of waiting baseball.

And so I'm not sitting here like playing my tiny violin saying all you poor things having a year under 500. I understand why there's frustration and why there's anger. And because this is what's up radio, finding someone who wants to have like an intelligent multi-pronged objective critical discussion about how they got here is rare, but I feel like you guys can actually do that.

That's what I'm hoping to do here. I don't want to be the person. I don't want to be the person because I feel like conversations devolve when you start preparing the guillotine without any care for what happens when the blade drops.

Let's get rid of cashmum. Let's get rid of boo. Let's get rid of everyone. Okay, what's next? That's where if we're going to have these conversations, if we're going to talk about what went wrong and where it went wrong.

We can't just look at 2023 because this goes back a while longer, but if we're going to talk about years before, we have to talk about also the years going forward.

And what needs to change in the who, if not the people who are in charge right now, needs to shepherd it. And that to me is where the discussion gets muddled and confusing.

Well, if you listen to our show, and I know you're very busy, but you do every now and then, I mean, Brian Cashman, too, a lot of the fan base is the antichrist.

Because of this season, they claim they could see this coming, all the bad moves. So my question to you before we go into what would happen if?

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