If you were a Yankee fan watching the season-ending press conferences from Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone, you felt as if this was your baseball Groundhog Day. There were no surprises, nor did any Yankee fan expect there to be. They have heard variations of these remarks for eight years now.
“A good team fell short of our ultimate goal,” Brian Cashman said.
“We’re just as hungry [as the fans], just as disappointed,” Cashman said.
“You gotta be on your ‘A’ game [in the postseason] or you’re gonna take a punch and get knocked out,” he said.
They got knocked out. Again. Another home-run-happy Yankee team took another swing and miss at October. And you have to say there were a lot of misses, since the Yankees — only the Angels and Rockies struck out more this season than they did — struck out 25 times in Games 1 and 2 against the Blue Jays, when that series was really lost. Aaron Judge tried to save his team with his last home run of the season, that shot out of “The Natural” and off the foul pole in Game 3. It turned out to be too little and too late for another Yankee
team that leaves October early.
It was an NBA champion named Draymond Green who once said this about his sport, “There are 82-game players. And there are 16-game players.” The Yankee were once again loaded with a bunch of really good 162-game players, led by a great one named Judge. But they won only three more games after the first 162, out of the 13 they would have needed to win it all. So another season ends with somebody being better than they are. Under Brian and Boone it has been the Astros three times, the Red Sox twice, the Rays once, the Dodgers once. Now it’s the Blue Jays, who lit them up for 23 runs in Games 1 and 2 and never looked back after coming back across the border.
Yankee fans know all about how many consecutive winning seasons their team has had, 33 and counting. The Yankees have absolutely made history in the process and been a model of consistency across the first 162. It is just not the kind of history their fans once expected from their team. And by the way? This isn’t about Yankee fans thinking that every single season really is supposed to be World Series-or-bust. Or that any season that falls short of the Series is some sort of embarrassment.
But Yankee fans are allowed to think that their team, with all of its resources and with the championship pedigree it once again carried into this century, ought to win more than one World Series over 25 years, which is where they are today. Since the Subway Series of 2000, the Yankees do just have that one title, in ’09. Over the same period, the Red Sox have won four titles, the Giants have won three, the Dodgers look like they’re about to win their third, the Astros and the Cardinals have won two.
Boone, of course, will be back next season, working on a contract extension that scheduled to take him through 2027. Cashman, if he doesn’t get an extension of his own, will be entering the last year of his own contract next season. They both talked bravely about doing better next time because, really, what else was either one of them going to say?
Cashman spoke of Hal Steinbrenner and the Steinbrenner family on Thursday, at one point saying, “They believed many times we had a chance to do something.”
Did Cashman make the team better at the trade deadline? He did. But in the end, even the reimagined team wasn’t good enough. Did the Yankees win 94 games without their ace, Gerrit Cole, lost in the spring to Tommy John surgery? They sure did. And then nearly got clipped by in the Wild Card round by a Red Sox team that had lost its young star, Roman Anthony, weeks earlier.
Even then, that best-of-three series win over Boston was noteworthy in this one very big way: It was the first series victory in the Brian-Boone era at Yankee Stadium that didn’t come against a team from the American League Central.
Now Yankee fans wonder what will change between now and next October, by which time the Yankees will almost certainly be giving themselves another chance to win World Series No. 28. They wonder if Anthony Volpe, in whom Cashman and Boone and everybody else on 161st St. continue to be so invested, will ever be the player they’re still convinced he’s going to be, especially since Volpe will start next season late because of shoulder surgery this week.
Cole will be coming off his surgery when next season begins. Carlos Rodon will be coming off his own surgery to remove bone spurs from his pitching elbow. No one knows whether Cody Bellinger is going or staying. No one has any idea who the starting centerfielder will be on Opening Day, or the starting shortstop, or even the starting third baseman. Or if the Yankees really want to ride into the future with Jazz Chisholm, Jr. at second base. At least Ben Rice, such a wonderful surprise this season, seems to be a worthy and everyday product of the Yankee farm system we constantly hear so much about.
There is a lot of money coming off the books this winter, so Cashman will once again be able to throw money at some of those problems, and be given another chance to put his team back on top.
“When opportunities present themselves [in the postseason] you have to capitalize on them,” Cashman said.
In the offseason, too. We just saw his vision for the ’25 Yankees, no one else’s. Cashman says every team is different. It is. It’s the ending that doesn’t change for the Yankees. Groundhog Day again yesterday. Long winter just beginning.
