How the Yankees Slid Into the Abyss
How the Yankees Slid Into the Abyss
It’s even worse than you think in the Bronx, where big names and big contracts have failed to live up to big expectations — and the franchise only has its players, manager and GM to blame.
The New York Yankees’ season continued to unravel Wednesday night, with their 2-0 loss and series sweep at the hands of the Atlanta Braves putting them on unfamiliar footing as they linger in last place of the AL East standings.
The Bronx Bombers are now 60-61, marking the first time all year they’ve sat below .500 in the standings. It’s the deepest into a season that New York has been underwater since it sported an identical 60-61 record on Sept. 5, 1995 — when current manager Aaron Boone was still playing Double-A ball and Derek Jeter had just been called up from the minors for the last time.
It’s pretty rare to see the Yankees struggling this much, this late in a season; the list above only contains 23 entries for the franchise’s entire history. Of course, the most optimistic pinstripe-rooters might note that, in 1995, the team made the playoffs thanks to a late surge (they went 19-4 from Sept. 6 onward) and a historically epic collapse by the Angels. But such a gift is probably not coming for the 2023 Yankees, who are down to 2% playoff odds and seem far more likely to fire their manager than mount any kind of heroic turnaround.
The only legitimate question for the Yankees now might be: How can the franchise adjust its sails to become a contender again? And what do we make of this era in the Bronx, which started with immense potential but seems fated to end in colossal disappointment?
It was difficult to imagine this state as recently as last June, when the Yankees were off to one of the best starts in MLB history and drew parallels to the most dominant teams from their storied franchise history. But, incredibly, New York is 113-114 since June 19, 2022, a stretch that includes both their second-half swoon last season and a 2023 campaign that has seldom built any momentum aside from a 19-10 stretch in May.
Even the hope that reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge can save this team has been dampened by New York’s 6-12 record since he returned from a toe injury in late July. Though the premise that the Yankees can’t score without Judge in the lineup remains true, this team’s problems extend far beyond mere hitting woes. When it comes to Wins Above Replacement, New York ranks among the bottom third of the league in a variety of categories this season:
Aside from Judge, who continues to rake when healthy, and Gerrit Cole, who is still generally pitching well enough (66 ERA-, 77 FIP-) to justify his hefty price tag, only one other Yankee (rookie shortstop Anthony Volpe) is on pace for 3 WAR this season, and only two others (Gleyber Torres and Harrison Bader) are on pace for even 2 WAR. According to Baseball-Reference’s data, the Yankees are paying a collective $134.4 million this season (or roughly the entire payroll of the Minnesota Twins) to seven players — Giancarlo Stanton, Carlos Rodón, Josh Donaldson, Anthony Rizzo, DJ LeMahieu, Luis Severino and Aaron Hicks (who was released in May) — who have produced -1.4 total WAR for New York between them.
Largely because of those slumping players, the Yankees have devoted a whopping 79% of their 2023 payroll to players who have failed to meet their previously established level of WAR (based on a weighted average of the past three seasons). It’s hard for a team to win if it is wasting so much money on underperforming players.
So much attention has been paid — and deservedly so — to the crosstown failure of the New York Mets, whose record-setting payroll on Opening Day yielded a similarly soul-crushing letdown when the team’s big-ticket stars failed to deliver. But at least Mets owner Steve Cohen and general manager Billy Eppler recognized the futility of trying to win this season and conducted an extensive trade-deadline fire sale to restock their farm system. The Yankees, meanwhile, largely stood pat at the deadline — neither adding enough to credibly improve their playoff odds nor selling off any parts that might have yielded help for the future.
Adding insult to injury, the Mets’ deadline sell-off has resulted in the Yankees surpassing them for the No. 1 payroll in baseball (!), per Baseball-Reference data.
It’s hard to see how the Yankees can retool much from here for next season or beyond without blowing up the current roster. Of those seven players making Twins-payroll money while generating negative WAR, New York is committed to four in 2024 and three beyond that. Astonishingly, Stanton’s contract doesn’t potentially come off the books until 2028 at the earliest, a deal that will probably only ever end up producing one season of 3 or more WAR (2018) for the Yankees.
Manager Aaron Boone is likely history, after six seasons that yielded five playoff appearances but zero World Series berths — with this Yankees season moving ahead of 1982-1995 for the second-longest World Series drought in franchise history (14 seasons), and the longest since the team’s first two decades of existence.
Aside from THAT home run he once hit, Boone’s legacy with the Yankees might be his penchant for getting tossed from games, as he ranks fifth all-time in ejection frequency (once every 25.9 contests) among managers with at least 30 ejections in their careers. But no amount of histrionics could coax a playoff-worthy effort out of this New York roster.
Which leads the finger-pointing around to Brian Cashman, the general manager who constructed this roster. Cashman has been the Yankees’ GM since Feb. 1998, and in that span the team has won an MLB-high 2,382 games, with four championships. He has undeniably been one of MLB’s steadiest leaders across multiple eras of the game, particularly when he had to navigate the volatile conditions of running the front office under late owner George Steinbrenner. But while Cashman’s previous success has shielded him from job-endangering criticism for years, the chants of “Fire Cashman” have gotten louder and louder at Yankee Stadium recently.
Cashman’s missteps include many of the bad contracts detailed above, which laid the foundation for a roster that is old, expensive, inflexible and has gotten the ninth-fewest WAR from homegrown players of any team this season. Aside from Judge (and Severino), the core that powered the Yankees’ surprising breakout of 2017 is now scattered across baseball. Cashman didn’t do enough to surround New York’s greatest star since Jeter with players who would help him capitalize on a historic season like the one he had last year.
Some of this was also the fault of ownership, in the form of managing chairman Hal Steinbrenner. As Mike Axisa of CBS Sports pointed out this week, many of Cashman’s moves — from signings to contract structures — were designed to keep the Yankees under MLB’s competitive balance tax, or to at least reset the team’s tax rate by strategically managing seasonal payrolls. The added complexity of that factor handcuffed the team’s decision-making and kept it from fully taking advantage of the window to win with a player of Judge’s abilities.
With this team currently finding its way below .500 despite all of the big names and even bigger contracts, it feels like the Yankees are on the verge of a major reset that will transition into a new era for the franchise. Whether that means new players, a new coach, or even a new GM promises to be the story that will dominate New York media headlines for months to come.
Filed under: Baseball