Culture
Maybe the Yankees should have traded for Jack Flaherty. These starters are struggling
NEW YORK — Nearly 3,000 miles away, Jack Flaherty will make his second start for the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night. After reviewing his medical records, the New York Yankees backed out of a preliminary trade agreement for Flaherty with the Detroit Tigers.
When asked after the trade deadline, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman did not specifically comment on Flaherty’s medicals, stating only that he could not match the ask of what the Tigers wanted.
“At the end of the day, I would’ve brought Jack Flaherty in if I could’ve matched up,” Cashman said. “I had difficulty matching up, and that was the reason I don’t have him.”
An argument could be made that trading for Flaherty, who has the seventh-best ERA in MLB, would have been worth the risk for the Yankees. It’s impossible to make direct comparisons between what the Dodgers traded and what the Yankees might have offered after they backed off their agreement, but let’s do so for analysis purposes.
The Dodgers traded catcher/first baseman Thayron Liranzo, an offensive-minded prospect in A ball, and Trey Sweeney, a former Yankees infield prospect. Roderick Arias and Jorbit Vivas seem like the safest equivalents. Arias has struggled this season with the Low-A Tampa Tarpons, carrying a 32.4 percent strikeout rate, but he could develop into a strong major leaguer in a few years if he reaches his potential. Vivas might be on the Yankees’ Opening Day roster in 2025 as the starting second baseman.
The American League is wide open this year. Getting a top-of-the-rotation starter in Flaherty could have cemented the Yankees as the overwhelming favorite heading into October. Instead, the Yankees’ starting rotation is filled with question marks. Since June 1, only the Miami Marlins and Colorado Rockies have a worse starting pitching ERA. After Nestor Cortes’ Thursday night dud in which he gave up six runs to the Los Angeles Angels, the Yankees’ starters have combined for a 5.48 ERA since June 1.
How you doin’? 😉#RepTheHalo pic.twitter.com/u5eovtRZlf
— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) August 8, 2024
Yankees manager Aaron Boone says he’s unconcerned with how poorly his rotation has pitched in the last two months.
“Our guys are more than capable,” Boone said. “More help is on the way with guys coming back from injury. We have everything we need.”
Even with the Yankees removing themselves from the Flaherty sweepstakes, not adding another starter feels like a miss. Cortes has allowed 24 runs over his last five starts, the most for any pitcher since July 11. Marcus Stroman’s 6.32 is the fourth-worst ERA since June 1. Carlos Rodón’s 5.83 ERA is the 11th worst since the start of June. That doesn’t even get into Luis Gil’s career-high workload coming off Tommy John surgery and Gerrit Cole, the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner, not looking sharp just yet.
But outside of Flaherty, there weren’t many appealing starting pitchers traded. The Houston Astros overpaid for Yusei Kikuchi, the second-best starter who got moved. James Paxton, Frankie Montas, Martín Pérez, Michael Lorenzen, Erick Fedde and Zach Eflin were other notable starters traded, but each profiles as a depth option rather than an impactful acquisition.
Once the Yankees didn’t get Flaherty, it made sense for them to not pursue any of the second-tier options because Clarke Schmidt, who was pitching like one of MLB’s best starters before his lat injury, could be back in the rotation by the end of the month. Schmidt threw his first live batting practice Tuesday and is expected to throw another Saturday. If that goes well, the Yankees could send him on a rehab assignment beginning next week. If everyone stays healthy from now until Schmidt’s return, the Yankees may have to make a decision on whom he should replace in the rotation. Cortes and Stroman are the two likeliest candidates to get bounced.
“I don’t feel like Nestor is that far off,” Boone said. “It just comes down to finishing off execution. Stro, we have to get rolling a little bit.
“We have the guys to go out there. It’s just getting a few guys going and getting to that next level of execution.”
4 of the 20 worst starting pitcher ERAs in MLB since June 1 (min. 40 IP) are by Yankee pitchers: Stroman, Rodon, Cortes, Cole.
No other team has more than 2 pitchers in that group. https://t.co/j3Aoq9MCSU
— Katie Sharp (@SharpStats17) August 9, 2024
Stroman had his start date pushed back from Thursday to Sunday as he works on his mechanics, which he felt were out of sync in his last outing. Stroman said Thursday afternoon that he believes he’s “figured some things out,” but he wouldn’t specify what he may have tweaked. Stroman has a career-worst walk percentage, strikeout percentage and ground-ball percentage. Since Stuff+ and Location+ debuted in 2021, Stroman is running career lows in both categories, too.
With how they’ve performed lately, it’s possible both Stroman and Cortes could find themselves out of the Yankees’ playoff rotation. Their best four starters right now are Cole, Rodón, Gil and Schmidt, if he bounces back fine from his lat injury. The Yankees could use Cortes out of the bullpen as another left-hander because the only other lefty option is ground-ball specialist Tim Hill. But thinking about the playoff starting rotation configuration seems like a moot point if Cole can’t return to being a legitimate ace.
“Anytime we give the ball to Gerrit, we expect good things,” Boone said. “He’s spoiled us with that.”
The Yankees need Cole to return to the form he showed in 2023, or at least come close to it. If he can’t be that pitcher this season, the starting rotation won’t be strong enough to carry them through October. That’s why taking a risk on Flaherty, who will be a free agent at the end of the season, would have felt worthwhile in a year with high stakes, especially with Juan Soto in pinstripes for only one guaranteed season.
(Photo of Nestor Cortes handing the ball to manager Aaron Boone after getting pulled Thursday: Wendell Cruz / USA Today)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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