Camilo Doval, Yankees somehow lose to Tigers in worse meltdown than Fenway defeat

Is New York Yankees reliever Camilo Doval unlucky, or incompetent? We may never know, but if anyone would like to watch him unravel five or six more times in a row to get some additional hard data, be my guest.

Yes, the Yankees are injured. Yes, the Yankees are weakened by food poisoning. But on Wednesday afternoon against the Tigers, in stretching their still-ongoing losing streak to seven games, they somehow unlocked a new level of their catastrophic mess.

The lineup is far weaker than it should be, but with a runner on third and one out in the bottom of the 10th and a win at your fingertips for the first time in forever (well, the first time since Boston on Sunday, I guess), that doesn't matter. The game is tied. How it got there - a ninth-inning miracle and a cameo from Team MVP Run-Scoring Wild Pitch - is no longer important. As Aaron Boone likes to say, it really was right in front of them. It takes a special hitter to power a home run to the opposite field, or grit his teeth and drill a gapper when the whole world is watching, but really any baseball player at any level should be able to hit a simple sacrifice fly or a well-placed ground ball, which could be the difference between season-altering deflation and elation.

Oswaldo Cabrera couldn't. He swung over strike three in the dirt. Ali Sánchez then failed to deliver with two outs and a runner on third, because failure is what the Yankees do these days, and just like that, they'd squandered the scoreless miracle Fernando Cruz had provided them in the top of the inning.

I'll keep this brief. Camilo Doval recorded two outs on three pitches. Camilo Doval and the Yankees chose to intentionally walk Riley Greene and face rookie Hao-Yu Lee with two on and two out, the difference between another scoreless chance and the ultimate deflation. Camilo Doval got ahead of Lee 0-2 in the count.

From that point forward, he threw a 103 MPH cutter a foot off the plate, recorded a foul on a solid slider, then threw 101, 101, and another slider into different dimensions. Lee didn't "work a walk" so much as he "existed near the plate while Doval punted the game into Hackensack, New Jersey".

He then walked in a run by giving Spencer Torkelson another largely non-competitive free pass, at which point this happened:

Which Yankees disaster was worse: Sunday vs. Red Sox or Wednesday vs. Tigers?

What do you think is worse, reader? Clawing back from the depths of a Sonny Gray no-hitter against Aroldis Chapman only for the Red Sox offense to swipe Cruz's soul quickly in the bottom of the 10th? Or tying the game in the ninth against the similarly stuck-in-the-mud Tigers, giving away the cleanest, clearest walk-off opportunity you'll ever have, then watching "one strike away from another zero against a rookie" spiral into whatever I embedded above?

My vote is, shockingly, this game. This game is worse. And it's because the Yankees' straits have gotten more dire since Sunday. And it's because they were at home. And it's because it wasn't the Injured List that bit them, but rather their long-festering inability to play Major League Baseball when the spotlight is upon them.

Call Doval unlucky if you'd like. Call the Yankees "slumping" or "swooning" if you want. Talk more about how feeding fans baseball excrement is a "sickness" and how we've got to love it. All I know is that disaster compounds disaster, and while it's almost impossible for a team like this to miss the playoffs entirely in a watered-down American League, it starts to become plausible if you play like this every single day, something they seem dedicated to trying on for size for a long, long while.

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