Chris Carter’s last at-bat, as told by Yankees fans

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in fact it tells a thousand stories. I’ll get to what I mean in a second. Pictures of baseball in particular can strip away the blur of the moment, the heat of your instantaneous passion, and reduce a single baseball moment to a single frame. But what if we captured many moments within one, or: many people watching Chris Carter try to hit?

Carter just lost his job yesterday, and it’s not a surprise why. After being signed as Greg Bird insurance, and then being needed when Bird got hurt, Carter was unable to capture the power he effused last season, hitting a measly eight home runs in 57 games.

There have been calls to scrap Carter for Tyler Austin, and they have finally come true. The straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back was Carter’s final at-bat in the tenth inning against the Rangers’ Matt Bush, as he struck out on four pitches. What I was struck by was that not only was he toast, but everyone in the stands behind him knew he was toast. If you look at the individual faces reacting to each pitch, it’s like each person was living through his whole Yankees career at once. Let’s relive the moment:

Pre-At-bat

It’s not telling yet, but there is a sense of foreboding. Oh yeah, thanks a lot to the kids dabbing. 2015 called and they want their joke back.

0-1

This is right after Carter swung and missed at the first pitch, and you see the initial, guttural movement: the man on the left looks up the heavens requesting God to provide relief, the man in neon consults his migraine, and the man with the armband is about to spend the next two minutes using his hands to explain how Carter swings and misses constantly:

Seriously, he keeps going.

I’d also like to shout-out to the Yankees fan Logos that kept his cool throughout the at-bat, man on the right in the white t-shirt:

Unfazed, as our inner logic centers tell us not to worry, because a DFA is surely coming.

Carter then takes a ball and fouls a pitch off, to bring the count to 1-2, setting up his last pitch as a Yankee:

0-3

Man on the left and neon man are once again our pathos muses, man on the right maintains his cool, and armband-man is tired about talking about this and has given up. And part of us is also finding all of this so hilarious:

You can see in all of these fans a lot of emotions: boredom, anger, frustration, humor, total and utter resignation. It’s also the tenth inning on a Friday, and I’m sure they’re tired. When I said the faces herein sum up Carter’s Yankees tenure, I wasn’t joking:

#WeAreAllNeonMan

Carter is gone, and I doubt he returns. There are a lot of things that can be said about this signing overall. It was a smart idea that didn’t work out, and the experiment lasted much longer than we would have liked. You don’t need to know what he looked like playing or even how bad he was statistically; just look at a fan’s reaction when you ask about him.