Yankees: Jeff Passan ‘Bombshell’ rumors have social media thinking NYY

There’s a major Jeff Passan nuke coming next week, and the world full of haters assumes it’s about the Yankees.

Every time “major” news is poised to break, the majority of the baseball world tries (usually in vain) to connect the speculation to the Yankees and some broken code.

And by “majority of the baseball world,” we mean Astros fans as well as the sub-humans in Boston who seem to have memory-holed their own recent cheating.

Suffice to say, after Jeff Passan’s appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Wednesday, the speculators are swirling in full force once again.

Passan demanded back on the show next week — aka Super Bowl Week, a typical hotbed of NFL news — to talk about a huge story he had in the pipeline. When humorously pressed by McAfee to defend his bravado, he emphatically said, “Trust me.”

Needless to say, all anti-Yankees fans immediately went into Accusation Mode, and Yankees fans put up their guard, if only slightly.

Passan, whose most recent scoop involved now-ex-Mets GM Jared Porter and an unbroken string of explicit and insane text messages, certainly has plenty of big picture stuff on his plate this offseason. Major League Baseball and the MLBPA have another labor dispute on their hands entering a second straight atypical season, and tensions are simmering below the surface, breaking through to the public sphere when the “Cactus League” released a letter at MLB’s urging asking to delay Spring Training.

There also isn’t a CBA in place beyond 2021, and a lockout is looming next offseason.

Despite the very real mountain of evidence pointing to many other places, though, fans still insist Passan must be talking about theunsealing of the Yankees letter, a silly element of the 2017 Astros/Red Sox scandal that has somehow placed the Yanks on equal footing in the minds of their detractors.

Last we heard, Randy Levine, the Yankees’ team president, was set to argue against the unsealing of the letter in court himself, asserting that its contents becoming public would cause irreparable harm to the team.

Haters of the Yankees have focused on the use of that phrase, but, well…it’s true, no matter what resides under lock and key. The Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox, two teams that faced penalties, still have not had their letters unsealed. We may never know the full extent of what those teams did.

The Yankees? Major League Baseball agreed there was no violation beyond improper dugout phone use, which was very much dealt with pre-2017. Why are they the only team that people want to see exposed in court? Because…well, because they’re the Bronx Bombers.

Or perhaps we’re getting a full investigation into Gerrit Cole’s “sticky situation” with adhesive grip, which would involve many of the league’s foremost aces? That could be annoying, though we don’t see how Major League Baseball would get much out of suspending Cole, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and an endless parade of the game’s biggest names.

And if no 2017 Astros got suspended, how could you justify that type of strike?

The full context of Passan’s appearance makes it seem far more likely that this is a labor-related bombshell of some kind, a nuke that could put the start of the 2021 season in doubt.

After all, he spent the majority of the interview foreshadowing real beef between the two sides, which we’ve all long known has existed, and never really diminished even when the ’20 campaign got underway, a season in which players were demonized for “causing” COVID outbreaks in Miami and St. Louis, while the league was never really held accountable.

Of course, while it’s likely to involve 2021 season complications, Houston would very much prefer it involve the Yankees, embroiling them in scandal.

So, what’ll it be?

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