When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It
Photo Credit: Andrew Mills / NJ Advance Media via NJ.com
60 games into the 2021 season, the New York Yankees are very obviously for real, and for once, that feels like a very, very bad thing for their increasingly impatient fanbase. Sitting at 31-29 and stuck in fourth place in the American League East amidst an ugly 3-10 stretch, it’s evident that the Yankees are who we thought they were when this team with World Series-aspirations shat itself out of the gate with a 5-10 start to the year. Though they steadied the ship thanks to a run of incredible starting pitching from a staff that has now (somewhat) regressed to the mean of Very Good, old habits die hard for this offense. The team still lacks any and all capability for situational hitting, throwing fundamentals like approach out the window at the first sign of trouble. They are a miserable combination of sloppy and conservative on the bases, taking the few chances while bungling most of the gambles they make. The question of “are the Yankees a bad team?” is now more than fair to ask, and the question of who’s to blame for all this is even more difficult to answer.
As the team struggled to string together hits, let alone runs, this week, Yankees hitting coach Marcus Thames assured the media that his team does in fact have an approach beyond the “Home Run or Bust,” label his lineup has been branded with the past several seasons. If the coaching staff is indeed putting players in positions to succeed and the talent can’t seize the opportunity, who’s fault is that? The old adage of “you can’t fire the players,” is absolutely true, perhaps frustratingly so for a team that simply feels like it was built the wrong way.
Whatever the problem truly is, the time is long due for the Yankees to start asking themselves the most difficult questions. Though I’ve remained one of the few Yankees fans firmly implanted in the corner of manager Aaron Boone, you have to at least opine about the idea of changing the voice in the room, even if it’s a change for the sake of change. After all, Boone was largely brought in under such circumstances after Joe Girardi led the Yankees with almost surgical precision, despite being given rosters far darker than the one Boone is currently leading. That’s not at all to say this current team is up to par with previous clubs of Boone’s own regime, but at the very least he hasn’t been tasked with bleeding 85 wins out of Vernon Wells, Travis Hafner and Lyle Overbay like his predecessor was in 2013. It’s more than fair to question whether or not he even could, nor would it be his fault if he couldn’t, quite frankly.
Aaron Boone’s temperament and [like it or not] iron-clad support of his players makes him a more than promising candidate as a manger in Major League Baseball. Regrettably, it’s appearing more and more possible that he was the right man at the wrong time for a club that hadn’t proven nearly enough to earn such a player-friendly manager. The Yankees are, unfortunately, in a pretty bad spot to properly diagnose whether or not this is even the case. As I’ve said time and time again, and most likely will continue to until some aspects of this nightmare are solved, the team has been allowed to completely stagnate since Boone’s arrival in late 2017. Management would point to the acquisitions of Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole and argue they’ve done nothing but sink money into improving this tenuous team. Yet, when you look deeper, those two moves, along with their steadfast commitment to bringing back DJ LeMahieu this past winter, have come at the cost of the depth and balance that originally brought the Yankees franchise back from the dead.
Absolutely no one is going to debate the merits of signing Gerrit Cole. Despite a recent funk, Cole has been every-bit as advertised since joining the Yankees, and all signs point to him going on to a legendary career in pinstripes. Yet, his acquisition has done more to keep the team’s head above water than push it over the top. When Giancarlo Stanton was acquired in late 2017, make no mistake about it, that move felt just as pertinent. This was a player coming off of an MVP season and was set to be installed in a lineup that had just been rendered lifeless by the right-handed power pitching of the Houston Astros (cheating aside). The Yankees were re-writing their plans to chase the talent of Bryce Harper in 2019, and fans mostly applauded their urgency. Stanton did his part to pay it forward in 2018, largely carrying the club when Aaron Judge suffered a fractured wrist on a hit by pitch causing him to miss much of a very prosperous summer for the Bombers.
Over time, it’s proven that patience would have possibly been a virtue for the Yankees when they instead decided to open a championship window they didn’t expect to come to so quickly. The combination of Stanton’s subsequent injury spiral and the Yankees unwillingness to play him in the OF has locked him into DH, and the rest of the team has suffered for it. The Yankees seemed to swear off DH-only types when they jettisoned A-Rod to the broadcast booth, only to fall back on old habits some 18 months later. Instead of going year to year with a professional nightmare of a hitter like Nelson Cruz, or better yet, playing to their environmental strengths and acquiring some left-handed balance, the Yankees sunk 10 years and an over-ambitious financial commitment into Stanton, and they’ve had buyers remorse ever since.
This past offseason, the Yankees came to a similar fork in the road with DJ LeMahieu. It’s absolutely true that LeMahieu has driven the Yankees offense ever since he walked through the door at the start of 2019. Even now, the Yankees struggles as a team are largely reflective of LeMahieu’s baffling spiral into mediocrity. While it’s still possible, if not probable, that DJ will right the ship and continue to do what made him an MVP candidate for the Yankees, it’s fair to debate the endless lengths the Yankees went to bring him back. It’s obvious that the issues we began to see take shape in 2020 are more reality than anomaly, yet this was not the approach of the front office whatsoever. Instead of weighing (under a self-imposed budget crunch) the benefits of one player [LeMahieu] over two or three veteran hitters plus a reliable and beloved starting pitcher [Masahiro Tanaka], the Yankees went full-bore into bringing LeMahieu back at any cost. While they seemed to get a price that satisfied the grip of their financial chastity belt, the move signaled to most keyed-in fans that the collective of Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner were becoming a bit tone-deaf to the Yankees mounting problems.
The Yankees now approach an urgent fork in the road, humbled and embarrassed by two of their biggest rivals. It’s clear the Yankees have fallen behind the likes of Tampa Bay, Boston and Houston, both in talent and in ingenuity. They seem to lack the youthful spark of Toronto and the White Sox, and worst of all, there’s few signs pointing to the decision-makers trying to fix this. Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman have, whether they intended to or not, left this team to drown under back-handed reassurance that what they have in-house “should be good enough,” to compete for, if not win, the team’s 28th world championship. Was there even a plan in place for the very real possibility that the team wasn’t good enough to win without major reinforcements? Did the front office really misjudge the team’s struggles last season to the point where this was just expected to go away?
Unfortunately, fans continue to receive radio silence in response to these questions. This vow of silence has asked the biggest and most concerning question of all, can we trust this front office to do something about it? Unlike in years past, specifically 2016, this team still has quite a bit of talent worthy of belief. Despite a lineup falling to pieces around him, Aaron Judge is putting forth one of his best seasons at the Major League level, and talented enigmas such as Gleyber Torres and Gary Sanchez are starting to trend towards viability, if not stardom just yet. The pitching staff is still keeping the Yankees in most games, and the bullpen has been among the league’s best all season long. With a serious and forceful investment, this roster can still out-muscle any team put in front of them on their best day.
The Yankees want to wait until the offseason to make this investment. The organization desperately wants to reset their threshold under the luxury tax so they can feel free to spend without great penalty, and that’s understandable. The issue is, the mantra is no longer acceptable to any fan, even the most pragmatic. The penalty of going over the luxury tax is steep, but it would be laughable to call it prohibitive for the most financially-viable organization in American sports. The Yankees have really sold us a bill of goods if we believe that they cannot overcome a $1 million hit in international spending money or the loss of a 2nd round draft pick. This approach could be more easily forgiven if the fruits of this frugality were providing a stable, consistent contender. Like it or not, the big business approach will always work better for teams like the Yankees, and everybody realizes this except for those that actually decide the direction of the team.
All hope isn’t lost for this team, but it very easily could be in the coming weeks. In Yankees history, teams in the late 70s came back from similar struggles to win championships, and in recent history the 2015 Mets went from mediocrity to winning a pennant, seemingly in one very well-placed trade for Yoenis Cespedes. The 2019 Nationals were famously languishing below .500 around this point in the season before sparking themselves to the franchise’s first World Series win. Nothing about the Yankees succeeding from this point forward is unprecedented, but it will take a team effort from the owner down to the last man on the bench. The lineup has to pick itself up and show it’s worthy of Cashman investing in it right here, right now. Boone and his coaching staff have to begin coaching for their professional lives, whether the front office is putting that type of pressure on them or not. Most importantly, the front office has to come to terms with the fact that they cannot, and will not, nickel and dime their way to one, two, three or four World Series. Brian Cashman has talked a big game about building a team capable of sustained success, the time is long past due for him to put his money where his mouth is.