Hour 1: Yankees Starting CF & Tony Massarotti Joins

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This is The Michael Kay Show Podcast.

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**Michael Kay** (0:41)
And a good afternoon, everybody. This is indeed The Michael Kay Show. We thank you for joining us on this Tuesday. It's already September, September 1st, 2026 Me and you for two. Those are the rules of engagement for the fastest moving two hours in sports talk radio and it's fast moving because you're the co-host. You know that and you know the membership number 1-800-919-3776 1-800-919-3776.
Go figure sports. Really think about it. The Yankees had an exhilarating weekend in the Bronx.
They take three out of four from the Red Sox. The final game, which was the Pivotal game, which was a massive implication game. They don't just win, but they kind of kick the Red Sox out of town. 16 to 1
An ugly eighth inning and the Red Sox embarrassed in the Jazz Chisholm situation and all of that and the catch in center of everything went the Yankees way.
Then they get on a plane and they fly to Southern California. And you can't talk about fatigue. It was an afternoon game. They got into their hotel. I'd say about 1030 in the evening, West Coast time. Now obviously that's 130 on their body clock. But if they want to bet at 1030, they could reset their body clock. Going east to west is not that difficult. Going west to east, that's difficult.
So they play the first game of the three-game set against the Angels. And might I add that the Angels, this is not anecdotal. This is empirical evidence. They were tied with the Colorado Rockies for the worst record in all of Major League Baseball. At the trade deadline, they traded a third of their roster. They are a terrible team.
So you would think, this is for the Yankees' chance to go on a roll right here. This is when they could pick up some ground on Tampa. And before the first pitch was even thrown out here in Adaheim, it came up on the board that the Mets had beaten the Tampa Bay Rays.
So there's your chance to shave the lead in the loss column down to three. And what do you do? You go out and you lay an egg. You lose 10 to 1 Just an awful performance. Now you're going to lose games. You're going to lose games to bad teams. That's what baseball is. Baseball is not the kind of sport where the most talent always wins out. It's just not that sport. Because you can lose to the worst team in the world. And the Yankees did.
But I don't like the way they played.
Their emotions seemed lackluster. Their bats seemed disinterested.
They made many physical errors. They made some mental ones as well. It's unacceptable, man. You're in the stretch run. After last night's game, there were 24 games remaining. So while Tampa Bay was losing, and you were losing, you let the Red Sox win a game against the Mariners, an extra inning, so they could wash the taste of that awful loss out of their mouth.
Why let them come up for air? So what was a four-game lead, really five because of the tiebreaker, now is a three-game lead over the Red Sox, really four because of the tiebreaker. So if you think that the Red Sox can't come back and make up the ground that they lost in the Bronx, you're sadly mistaken. They have 24 games remaining. This is a team that won 32 and 5 in 37 games. So let's say they go 19 and 5 over the final 24 Then the Yankees have to do some heavy lifting to keep their lead. You can't play the way they played yesterday. And I'm not a guy who overreacts on a game to game basis. That's not the way baseball is played. But when you get into September, yesterday was the last day of October, every game is magnified. Now, I know the games in April are games that you could say, well, they're just as important as the games in September. And in the grand scheme of things, they are. But now, when you're looking at a sport in April, you're looking at a macro. When you're looking at a sport in September, you're looking at a micro.