There are bad ideas, and then there's how the New York Yankees tried to motivate their players entering Game 4 of the American League Championship Series.
With the Yankees trailing the Houston Astros 3-0 in the best-of-seven series and facing elimination, manager Aaron Boone revealed that the team’s mental skills coach, Chad Bohling, sent around highlight clips of the 2004 Red Sox, who famously erased a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees in the ALCS to advance to the World Series.
That's a good tactic in a vacuum -- "Rallying from a 3-0 deficit in the ALCS is possible, and here's video evidence" -- but it's pretty head-scratching when your own franchise was on the losing end of that historic comeback.
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Yankees TV play-by-play voice and ESPN New York sports radio host Michael Kay was among many who found Bohling's motivational tool blasphemous and added that several members of the 2004 Yankees agreed with him.
"How in baseball god’s name can you be so tone deaf as an organization as if to do that! Talk about bad optics, are you out of your mind?" Kay said Monday on "The Michael Kay Show." "I talked to three players from the '04 team; they were outraged by the fact that their failure was being used as motivation for the 2022 team. How could you do that?"
Kay then made an analogy for the ages, comparing the Yankees' situation the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford 's Theater in 1865.
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"It would be like somebody from Lincoln’s family and you’re trying to teach them about shootings in theaters, so you use their dad as an example of how to avoid it," Kay said. "I mean, are you out of your mind?"
Kay's analogy might be a bit aggressive, but it's certainly puzzling that New York tried to motivate its players by showing them footage of the greatest collapse in franchise history.
Needless to say, the tactic didn't work, as the Yankees fell 6-5 in Game 4 to suffer their fifth consecutive ALCS loss dating to 2009.