Expectations for Success: How the Yankees Continue to Lower their Standards of Excellence
During the middle of this summer, I had to take a break from covering the Yankees. Truth is it was hard to derive joy or excitement out of riding the ceaseless merry-go-round of hot and cold with this frustrating misnomer of a team. Every time you thought you had them pegged, they went the other way in baffling fashion. Sometimes the 2021 Yankees were good and a lot of times they were bad in a season that was almost exclusively ugly from start to finish. You were sick of them, I was sick of them, it’s the one thing that brought us all together here, but as an unrelenting fan they broke my heart and wore me down. In the end I just had to throw up my hands and let DiMaggio take the wheel, so to speak.
After two weeks of radio silence, the Yankees have announced they will retain and resign manager Aaron Boone to a three year contract, with an option for a fourth. This (most unsurprising) announcement comes less than a week after the Yankees tipped their hand in relieving third base coach Phil Nevin and hitting coaches Marcus Thames and P.J. Pilittere of their duties, clearly hoping to signal that despite a move towards status quo, there will still be chances. Whether or not these changes amount to anything more than cosmetic tweaks remains to be seen, but the lede here is Boone will return, and with him many of the questions that have dogged the Yankees since the start of the truncated 2020 season.
Make no mistake, I don’t view this as a cut-and-dry issue regarding Aaron Boone. Though I’ve shared my skepticism on his ability to lead this team in the past, and largely maintain many of those same reservations, it seems as though the Yankees are perfectly content not only with Boone’s execution of his position, but their overall organizational strategy when it comes to selecting a manager in the first place. We can debate endlessly whether or not the Yankees would be better off pivoting to a more seasoned, old-school leaning manager like a Bruce Bochy, Bob Melvin, Buck Showalter, take your pick. Perhaps the ideal scenario is to pair someone similar, perhaps with a slightly lower profile, to caddy Boone on the bench. Regardless, I don’t think the ideal scenario for the Yankees would be to replace Boone with a manager exactly like him, and I think you’d be a fool to think the Yankees would do anything else.
In a published press release, Hal Steinbrenner is quoted as saying,
“As a team and as an organization, we must grow, evolve and improve. We need to get better. Period. I know Aaron fully embraces our expectations of success, and I look forward to drawing on his intelligence, instincts and leadership in pursuit of our next World Series Championship.”
The problem is not whether Boone does or does not embrace the Yankees expectations of success, but the sobering fact that Steinbrenner has lowered his expectations of success. It’s very wholesome that the Yankees have decided they don’t need a $200 million payroll to win a World Series, truth is they may in fact need a $300 million payroll in today’s climate. From a fan’s perspective, it’s embarrassing that the Yankees payroll has essentially stayed flat since 2004, serving as a punching bag towards great teams while the Red Sox to collect four rings and the Dodgers to lap them in salary. The “pride of the Yankees,” has been hurting for a long time, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
Hal is right about one thing, the Yankees failure over the past two seasons is a collective failure, one players, coaches and management should be owning to the most extreme degree. It’s simply uninspiring to hear the highest voices in what was once the most demanding franchise celebrate four consecutive years of postseason appearances, especially when you have to squint to see the legitimacy in the team’s last two trips to October. It doesn’t feel good that the Yankees are giving such a ringing endorsement to a manager that has oversaw the rapid and startling decline of players who were once thought to be franchise cornerstones. It doesn’t feel good knowing that we’ll continue to see Boone punt on winnable games with the likes of Brooks Kriske. Mostly, it doesn’t feel good that we’re left wondering whether or not the Yankees realize they are a team that’s in something of an existential crisis.
The way this team will improve is through acquiring better players and using their positives (money) to hide their negatives (a strange and somewhat embarrassing poverty fetish). The Yankees don’t win like the Royals, the Yankees don’t win like the Rays. Let the world hate you because they ain’t you. There’s really nothing that endearing about the billionaire who drives a 2004 Hyundai Elantra.