The Yankees are 60-59, and dropping fast. The team has been in free fall for at least three months. Unless something changes, they will finish below .500 for the first time in decades.
It’s a remarkable streak. The Yankees continued to win a lot more games than they lost through three generations of players, after their huge financial advantages leveled out and in the middle of huge changes in how baseball in played. When the streak eventually ends, it’s going to be a little weird.
But I also think ending the second longest winning streak in baseball history will be a good thing for the New York Yankees.
As Yankee fans, we’re constantly treated to reminders of the franchises’ history. 27 World Series wins. The most wins of any franchise ever. Babe Ruth. Mickey Mantle. Mariano Rivera. The Yankees have been one of the premier sports franchises in the world for a very long time. We get to watch highlight reels like this:
Back in the day, there was good reason why the Yankees were so great. Before modern draft rules were implemented in 1965, rich and prestigious teams were able to acquire players that other teams couldn’t. The Yankees had won about half of the World Series championships since they traded for Babe Ruth and built their stadium in the 1920s. Other rich teams like the Cardinals, Giants and Dodgers won most of the championships that the Yankees didn’t. Young talent would now be distributed fairly across teams, not bought up by the biggest markets.
In hindsight, the Yankees dominance ended in 1965. They became a normal baseball team, not doing much until they put together an elite core to form the 1976-1981 team. George Steinbrenner’s money played a role in assembling that team, but really they were acting like a normal baseball organization that would sometimes get enough good young players together at the right time to go on a long run. They weren’t all that different from the Reds, Royals, Dodgers, Athletics and other top teams of the era.
I wasn’t around, but my guess is that the Yankee mystique and aura had a resurgence around this time. The Bronx Bombers were back, baby. Remember Mantle and DiMaggio and Gehrig and Ruth? Now add Jackson and Guidry and White to the mix. It’s time to be special again.
And then they weren’t special, for 15 years. Steinbrenner was able to keep the team in contention for most of the 80s by signing big free agents. They brought up a few great players like Don Mattingly, but the team couldn’t hit critical mass. They were pretty bad around the turn of the decade. Normal baseball team stuff: teams go through cycles.
Then the 90s happened. The Yankees put together an incredible young core of Jeter, Posada, Pettitte, Williams and Rivera. Steinbrenner used his money to supplement that core with great free agents when the Yankees still had a huge financial advantage over the rest of the league. The Core 5 were all remarkably long-lasting great players, and the Yankees road them for two decades. They won five more World Series. During the incredible 2001 World Series, we started talking about mystique and aura again. Joe Girardi started using the count of World Series wins as his uniform number.
They haven’t been to a World Series since 2009. In the fourteen seasons since, only two or three Yankee teams could reasonably claim to be one of the best teams in baseball that fell victim to bad luck in the post season. They played in a lot of Wild Card games. They barely kept their .500 streak going despite scoring more fewer runs than they allowed. They were back to doing normal baseball club stuff, with enough money and competency to put together solid teams each year.
But ever since the Core 4 team, we hear players, coaches and front office staff constantly repeat the same mantra, “Every year is a failure if we don’t win a World Series.” They then. make roster decisions because the expectation is to win a World Series now, while waiting is a failure.
We all know that the Yankees didn’t sell at the 2023 trade deadline. That was a mistake, but they didn’t have huge assets to give away. Harrison Bader and the rest would have brought back a few decent prospects, but no one who you’ve heard of.
I think the more damaging trade deadline was 2013. The Yankees were in 4th place at the trade deadline, eight games out of the division and three of the wild card. The team had allowed more runs than it scored. Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira missed the whole season, and stopgaps Lyle Overbay, Vernon Wells, Eduardo Nunez, Ichiro and Travis Hafner weren’t working out.
It was a bad team, but they had the best two trade pieces at the deadline: Robinson Cano and Hiroki Kuroda. Both were free agents. But the Yankees were somehow 3 games out of the wild card, so they decided not to sell. The team finished the 2023 season with 85 wins, 6.5 games back of the Wild Card. Cano left for Seattle. Kuroda resigned for one more year before retiring from the majors.
The 2014-2016 Yankees were more of the same, but didn’t even have players good enough to sell at the deadline other than Aroldis Chapman. Cashman kept trying to patch holes with guys like Chase Headley, Brian McGann, Carlos Beltran and Brian Roberts. It was enough to keep winning more than they were losing, but not to build the next World Series winner.
Imagine if the Yankees had tried to reboot the team in 2013? They get a few top prospects for Cano and Kuroda. Instead of the Chase Headley era, the Yankees might have lost a few more games with Rob Refsnyder, Ben Gamel and Jake Cave. They probably would pick a little higher in the draft, then spend a bunch of money and build for the future. Then, when Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez show up in 2017, they would join a team with lots of capacity to spend and maybe a few more young players to supplement the new Baby Bombers core.
But they didn’t rebuild in 2023. The New York Yankees don’t rebuild. They’re the Yankees! If there’s a 5% chance their roster can win the World Series, by God they are going to try.
But the Yankees aren’t special. They can’t just ignore the laws of physics that every other baseball club has to abide by. They have a little bit more money than a lot of clubs, but a quick glance at the standings suggests that financial resources have pretty big diminishing returns in today’s game. Normal baseball clubs have stop, take a breath, and get ready for the future. Even the Mets, with greater financial resources than the Yankees, saw the writing on the wall and decided to implement a 2-3 year plan.
In political science, we have a concept called an error accumulation model. The basic idea is that the longer you ignore a problem, the worse it gets. If you addressed the problem early, it only takes a small adjustment to fix it. However, if you wait and let the problem fester, the change required to fix it gets bigger. Eventually, if you do nothing, the dam breaks and you are forced to do something really big or suffer a major harm. The Yankees are in danger of letting the dam break, ushering in the same malaise that took Aaron Judge to break out of last decade.
I think contributing to the no rebuild direction is what I call the curse of the YES Network. Debuting in 2002 YES was built on the success of the late 90s. Maintaining the winning tradition became tantamount because the pinstripes are legacy and tradition etc thus resetting the team for future success went out the window. I also think it has contributed to the “weight” of the pinstripes. You’re not just playing baseball. You’re playing with the weight of monument park on your shoulders.