I have spent the week violently ill. It hasn’t been the flu. It hasn’t been a virus. It’s nothing antibiotics can treat. It’s been a physical, emotional and mental breakdown as a reaction to the news the Yankees have had trade discussions with the Rangers about Corey Seager.

Four years ago, coming off a season in which the Yankees were the odds-on favorite to win the American League and instead finished third in the division and fifth in the AL with their postseason lasting nine innings and their manager shockingly stating after that embarrassing wild-card loss that the “league has closed the gap on the Yankees” — despite having never won to that point as Yankees manager and still having not won four seasons later — I desperately wanted the Yankees to sign Seager.

By September 2021, Gleyber Torres had played his way off of shortstop and the Yankees were forced to start Andrew Velazquez at short in the one-game playoff at Fenway Park. The Yankees were without a shortstop for 2022 and their misevaluation of thinking Torres could be the long-term answer there had now caused roster construction issues as DJ LeMahieu had been given a six-year, $90 million deal to play second base prior to 2021. Now Torres would move to second and LeMahieu — the former Gold Glove second baseman — would become a third baseman/first baseman hybrid.

Over the course of baseball history — outside of four miserable nights in October 2004 — things have mostly broken in a favorable way for the Yankees, and needing a shortstop in the 2021-22 offseason happened to be the best time to ever need to sign a shortstop through free agency. The Yankees could fill the biggest need on their roster without depleting their farm system. All they would need was money — the resource they generate more of in revenue than every other team in the sport.

A 27-year-old Seager was the best available shortstop. The former Rookie of the Year, two-time All-Star, two-time Silver Slugger and 2020 World Series MVP had posted an .870 OPS in 636 regular-season games with the Dodgers. The prime of his career would match up perfectly with the primes of other star Yankees. Seager was undoubtedly the player to sign that offseason, but even if the Yankees didn’t sign him, there were plenty of other good options.

The Yankees didn’t sign Seager. They didn’t sign any of the alternatives either. The Rangers signed Seager to a $10-year, $325 million deal and added shortstop Marcus Semien on a seven-year, $175 million deal to play second base. The Rangers decided spending half-a-billion dollars on two shortstops and asking one of them to play second base would be better than their in-house option. Their in-house option was Isiah Kiner-Falefa and the Rangers traded him to the Twins. The Twins didn’t really want Kiner-Falefa, but they also lacked a shortstop and weren’t certain they would be able to sign any of the free agents because of their massive remaining commitment to Josh Donaldson of two years and $50 million. The Twins would need to find a team dumb enough to want Kiner-Falefa so badly they would take on the $50 million owed to Donaldson as well.

The Yankees traded Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela to the Twins for Kiner-Falefa, Donaldson and his $50 million, and Ben Rortvedt, who would go on to post a negative WAR in 32 games with the Yankees. The Twins, now free of Donaldson’s contract, turned around and gave the money they saved on Donaldson to Carlos Correa. The Yankees were outmuscled by the Rangers financially in the free-agent market and then outsmarted by the Twins in the trade market.

In 2022, Seager was an All-Star and hit 33 home runs and Correa posted an .834 OPS. Kiner-Falefa was 16 percent worse than league average at the plate and a disaster in the field, leading to his eventual benching in the postseason. Donaldson posted career lows in runs, home runs, RBIs, batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and OPS+, culminating in him striking out in 16 of 29 at-bats in the playoffs.

The reason the Yankees chose to not sign Seager or Correa or any of the available free-agent shortstops after 2021 had been a combination of Hal Steinbrenner not wanting to spend more of his inherited money on a business venture he has never wanted to be a part of and because of the organization’s belief in prospects Anthony Volpe and Oswald Peraza. The same baseball operations team and evaluators that believed Torres could play shortstop, that Hicks was worthy of a seven-year extension, didn’t feel the need to even meet with Bryce Harper as a free agent and believed taking on $50 million owed to a 37-year-old Donaldson was wise were being trusted in their assessments of Volpe and Peraza. Once again, they were wrong.

Volpe “won” the starting shortstop job in spring training 2023 because if he showed even a modicum of talent the Yankees were going to give him the job. There was no one else. Peraza’s glove was elite, but his bat was a Quadruple-A bat and there was no way the Yankees could go back to Kiner-Falefa after he was benched for Peraza and Oswaldo Cabrera in October. Volpe won the job for Opening Day, and despite being one of the worst, if not the worst everyday player in the majors since that day, he has never been benched, let alone sent down. Not even when the Yankees traded for Jose Caballero last season and Caballero greatly outplayed Volpe in September did Volpe sit in the postseason. The most recent memory of Volpe on a major-league field was him being pinch-hit for in his final at-bat of the 2025 playoffs, so he could be spared from being booed off his home field yet again after striking out 11 times in 15 at-bats in the ALDS.

In 2023, Volpe provided putrid offense, Kiner-Falefa finished with a 0 WAR and Donaldson was released, only after Aaron Boone spent the offseason calling any Yankees fan who didn’t think Donaldson could still hit “crazy.” The Yankees failed to qualify for the playoffs despite 40 percent of the league getting in and finished with the franchise’s worst record in three decades.

In Texas, Seager led the league in doubles (42), hit 33 home runs for a second straight year, hit .327/.390/.623 with a ridiculous 174 OPS+ and finished second in MVP voting to Shohei Ohtani. Seager then went on to hit .303/.439/.667 in the postseason with an 1.137 OPS in the World Series to win World Series MVP for the second time. He led the Rangers to the first championship in franchise history, helped unseat the Astros as the class of the AL (something the Yankees weren’t able to do) and the lasting image of the 2023 postseason is his monstrous two-run, game-tying home run in the ninth inning of Game 1.

Seager’s 10-year, $325 million contract has already been worth its entire value after four seasons. It was worth it after the first two. His $32.5 million average annual salary is nearly $17 million less than the Yankees paid Marcus Stroman ($18.5 million), DJ LeMahieu ($15 million), Aaron Hicks ($9,785,715) and Anthony Rizzo ($6 million) last season. Stroman gave the Yankees a 6.23 ERA and 72 baserunners in 39 innings, LeMahieu put up a .674 OPS (something Volpe would dream about) and couldn’t get to any ground ball not hit directly at him and Hicks and Rizzo made a combined $15.8 million not to play baseball. (Hicks is receiving another $1 million in 2026 to not play baseball.) His $32.5 million average annual salary is nearly equal to what the Yankees will pay Trent Grisham ($22 million), Paul Goldschmidt ($4 million), Volpe ($3.475 million) and Hicks ($1 million) this year. (I think my favorite thing about the Brian Cashman era has been how many players the Yankees pay to not play baseball at all or pay to play for other teams, and how many players never get another job after leaving the Yankees.)

So yeah, I’m sick over the idea the Yankees are trying to fix a franchise-altering mistake from four years ago that can’t be fixed without a time machine. The Yankees chose to waste prime years of their star, high-priced talent in a win-now window with Kiner-Falefa and then Volpe. Yes, having Seager in 2026 is better than not having Seager in 2026, but the idea of signing him four years ago and giving the Seagers generational wealth for all of time was paying him for his age 28, 29, 30, 31 and 32 seasons and knowing you would have to live with the second half of the contract. A soon-to-be 32-year-old Seager is still better than Volpe or whatever slop the Yankees plan to play at short until George Lombard Jr. is ready (if he’s ever ready and isn’t just another Yankees prospect that flames out), but getting Seager now, four years after the Yankees should have, is sickening.

Anthony Volpe won’t be on the Yankees’ Opening Day roster and will likely be out until May as he rehabs his shoulder following offseason surgery. I have yet to see any Yankees fan anywhere upset that Jose Caballero is going to be the Yankees’ starting shortstop to begin the season, and that’s all you need to know about where the fan base is when it comes to the player the Yankees still believe is going to be a star.

Unfortunately, there’s no chance Volpe will lose his job to Jose Caballero. There’s a better chance Hal Steinbrenner caves to putting an advertisement on the team’s iconic uniform. Oh wait. OK, there’s a better chance Hal Steinbrenner opens the Yankees’ books and lets the public see their profits. Caballero could have a March/April like Aaron Judge had last season (.427/.521/.761) and the moment Volpe comes off the injured list, he’s going right back to being the everyday shortstop. Aaron Boone has been asked if Volpe will go right back to being the everyday shortstop many times since the end of last season and every time he has essentially said he will without saying those exact words.

Boone hasn’t used those exact words because he wants Yankees fans to believe no one’s job is safe and that the idea of playing time based on performance exists within the team. But we all know that is a crock of shit. Just look at last September when the Yankees tried to act as if shortstop was an open competition down the stretch. Caballero played 18 games in September and had an .845 OPS and Volpe played 18 games and had a .534 OPS and Volpe still started every postseason game. He started every game of the ALDS despite going 1-for-15 with 11 strikeouts before mercifully being pinch hit for in the ninth inning of Game 4, so he wouldn’t have to endure being booed off his home field again. Caballero is a placeholder until Volpe is ready and nothing more no matter how well he plays.

“I just can’t wait to go back out there and play and help the team win,” Volpe said this week, though I’m not sure how often he has actually helped the team win over the last three seasons. “If I do that and play the way I know I can play, everything will take care of itself.”

Volpe shouldn’t want to play the way he knows he can play since to this point in his career he’s been 16 percent worse than the major-league average offensively. As for defensively, well who cares (even though he was atrocious defensively last year as well and has seemed to always commit an error in the biggest moments of games throughout his career)? Defensive shortstops grow on trees. If defense at shortstop were all that mattered, Oswald Peraza would be the Yankees’ starting shortstop and not another failed Yankees prospect. 

“I’m not really looking in the past,” Volpe said. “I just get excited about what it could be like when it’s all healed.”

Since Volpe doesn’t want to look in the past, I will do it for him.

Volpe said he felt a “pop” in his shoulder after diving for a ball in the Yankees’ May 3 game against the Rays last season.

“It happened quick and it was scary, but after that, I felt OK and I felt like I had my strength,” Volpe said after that game. “I’ve never really had anything else pop or displace or anything like that, so I have nothing to compare it to.”

Volpe remained in the game and then was sent for X-rays and an MRI, all of which came back as “good news,” Boone said at the time. Volpe was held out of the lineup the next day, but the day after that he went right back to being the Yankees’ everyday shortstop.

Volpe finished the regular season with a .212/.272/.391 slash line and an abysmal .663 OPS. It’s hard to chalk that level of non-major-league-caliber offense up to his shoulder injury, considering the Yankees and he both said he was fine, the Yankees said the imaging looked good and Volpe’s OPS over the previous two years had been .661. In 2025, he produced the most doubles in any of his three seasons, the most RBIs, the fewest strikeouts and the highest slugging percentage. Volpe with an injured shoulder was better than Volpe with a healthy shoulder.

And that’s why I’m not being fooled into thinking this surgery will have resolved some underlying issue that has him much closer to being an all-time Yankees bust rather than the long-term answer at shortstop. He has played in 472 regular-season games and been given 1,886 sad plate appearances with disappointing results, and yet, the Yankees continue to tell you he is going to be a star. I wish they were right. I wish Volpe were to become a star beginning this season. But based on his career performance to date — when healthy or not — there’s absolutely nothing to suggest he’s going to become a star and it takes being a stubborn front office employee of the Yankees or the biggest homer of the team possible to think otherwise.

If the same Volpe from the last three years — the one with the .222/.283/.379 career slash line — is the Volpe we see in 2026, what excuse will the Yankees have then? His shoulder won’t be a valid one since it’s been surgically repaired. Inexperience won’t be a valid one as he will finish the year with around 600 games played and just under 2,500 plate appearances to his name. If Volpe doesn’t produce like a former organizational No. 1 prospect and former No. 3 baseball prospect should in Year 4 it’s hard to believe he ever will. And it’s already hard to believe he ever will.

After wasting years of his prime vouching for his buddies to be his teammates, Aaron Judge seems to have finally realized that losing with your friends isn’t as enjoyable as potentially winning without them. Gone are the days of Judge’s best friends on the field with him as he will have to settle for Rangers and Knicks games to see them instead.

Judge spoke with the media this week at spring training about watching his team idly sit back throughout the offseason and do nothing other than trade for Ryan Weathers and bring back the entire position player roster from last season.

“Early on, it was pretty tough to watch,” Judge said of the Yankees’ lack of an offseason. “I’m like, ‘Man, we’re’ the New York Yankees. Let’s go out there and get the right people, the right pieces to go out there and finish this thing off.”

After sharing his actual feelings on the state of the team that has provided him little help in terms of an elite supporting cast in recent years, the alarm of a decade-plus of Yankees media training went off in his head and Judge swiftly reversed course on his words.

“Once we solidified getting Bellinger back, we’ve got Trent being our center fielder for another year, then we got a guy like Goldy back. … I think we’re in a good spot,” Judge said after calling out his front office and ownership.

When asked about “running it back,” Judge then responded, “I love it.”

“People might have their opinions on it because we didn’t win it all last year and we fell short in the Division Series,” Judge said, “but we get a chance to bring a lot of those guys back … I like our chances.”

So to recap: Judge was upset that the New York Yankees didn’t add the “right people” or the “right pieces” to improve upon their 94-win season. He didn’t like that the team was making smaller moves (like trading for Weathers and signing Amed Rosario) and “it was tough to watch.” But then, after realizing how his comments would be portrayed, Judge said once the Yankees finalized bringing back the same team, he nows think “they’re in a good spot.”

The first half of Judge’s statements are his true feelings and I’m happy he said what he said because if anyone who should be upset within the organization it should be him. He’s the one with the legacy at stake if he finishes his career without a championship. All of the individual awards he has accumulated and the all-time offensive seasons he has put together are nice, but without a single championship (and because his postseason OPS is 206 points lower than his regular-season OPS), he can’t be discussed alongside the Mount Rushmore Yankees.

“We’ll never be satisfied until we go out there and finish it,” Judge said. “No matter the awards — MVPs, All-Stars — that stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is putting New York back on top and putting this organization back where it belongs, which is being the best organization in the game.”

Judge will turn 34 a month into this season and who knows if his age 35 season will be played with the threat of an extended lockout. There’s a very real possibility he could lose next season and more. 2026 is his best chance to win a championship, just as 2025 was, and 2024 before that, and 2023 before that, and so on. Judge has already gone through two cores of teammates and the players and pitchers who were brought in in their mid- and late 20s during his major-league tenure are now in their mid- and late 30s without anything to show for it.

Judge should be pissed that the lineup lacks even an average right-handed bat beside his. He should be pissed at the continued failed development of the organization’s top prospects. He should be livid that a roster that wasn’t good enough last season is the one that’s going to surround him again this season. After hearing him speak this week, it sounds like he is all of those things.

The Yankees last played a game 127 days ago when they bowed out of the ALDS in Game 4 because they couldn’t save their season against a Blue Jays bullpen game. Since then, nothing has happened when it comes to the Yankees, other than trading for Ryan Weathers. The team Yankees fans watched not be good enough all year against the league’s top competition — and then not be good enough in the ALDS — is the same team the Yankees are going into 2026 with. The same team that went 20-31 during the summer, blew an eight-game division lead to the Blue Jays, barely eked out a best-of-3 win against the injury-ravaged Red Sox and then got run out of the postseason by the Blue Jays, culminating in Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and David Ortiz laughing in the faces of the Yankees and their fans on national TV, is back.

There is nothing different about the end of the 2025 season and the start of the 2026 season. A few months without baseball didn’t make this roster better at baseball. The start of 2026 is just a continuation of the end of 2025. The Yankees made that so when they decided to bring back the same not-good-enough roster and then had the balls to tell everyone it’s not the same roster. Though that part shouldn’t come as a surprise since the Yankees have been spewing “championship-caliber” bullshit for years, believe internally that they won the 2017 World Series, continue to operate with the same manager and general manager and have an owner who said this winter that the franchise with the highest valuation in the sport (and possibly all sports if put up for sale) doesn’t turn a profit.

Two weeks ago, Brian Cashman told everyone the Yankees aren’t running it back. At the time, every position player from the Yankees’ last game of last season had been brought back for this season, except for Paul Goldschmidt. Then the Yankees went and brought back Goldschmidt. So now 100 percent of the Yankees’ ALDS position player roster is back for 2026. I wonder if 100 percent is enough for Cashman to admit he did absolutely nothing this offseason.

“You’re starting anew, right?” Aaron Boone wrongly said during his first-day-of-spring-training press conference. “There’s nothing you’re taking with you, ultimately, from last year. It’s all a clean slate.”

What the fuck are you talking about, Boone? You’re literally taking everything with you from last year. The slate couldn’t be dirtier. Opening Day 2026 may as well be Game 170 of 2025.

“There are a lot of the same guys,” Goldschmidt said upon his arrival to spring training.

There are not “a lot of the same guys.” They’re all the same!

Here is the Yankees’ roster of position players from the ALDS:

Cody Bellinger
Jose Caballero
Jazz Chisholm
Jasson Dominguez
J.C. Escarra
Paul Goldschmidt
Trent Grisham
Aaron Judge
Ryan McMahon
Ben Rice
Amed Rosario
Giancarlo Stanton
Anthony Volpe
Austin Wells

Now I will bold the players from that list that are returning this season.

Cody Bellinger
Jose Caballero
Jazz Chisholm
Jasson Dominguez
J.C. Escarra
Paul Goldschmidt
Trent Grisham
Aaron Judge
Ryan McMahon
Ben Rice
Amed Rosario
Giancarlo Stanton
Anthony Volpe
Austin Wells

IT’S THE SAME LIST!

“So if we play well, it’ll be a good thing,” Goldschmidt shared as an all-time observation. “If we don’t, then it’ll probably be the reason that it’s said we didn’t play well.”

The Yankees have one path to a successful season: win the World Series. That’s it. Not just because they’re the Yankees and they haven’t won the World Series in going on 17 years, but because they set themselves up to not just eat crow, but eat a pile of shit if they don’t win the World Series after returning the same roster from last year. Not that the Yankees care about eating shit. When they failed to make the postseason in 2023, their general manager told the media the team he built was “pretty fucking good” after going 82-80, and he only shared that with the media after the organization decided not to hold their annual end-of-season press conference to avoid answering questions about the organization’s worst season in three decades. When the Yankees were embarrassed in the World Series in 2024, they patted themselves on the back just for reaching the World Series, even if their path was solely built on the AL Central. When the Yankees allowed 34 runs in the four-game ALDS loss this past October, they called it a small sample size and talked about their 94 regular-season wins, conveniently forgetting to mention they went 13-25 against the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Tigers, Dodgers and Phillies during that 94-win campaign. Boone called the 2025 team the best roster he has managed, and all he was able to get out of them was an ALDS exit before he was retained for a ninth year. There’s no end to the lengths the Hal Steinbrenner Yankees will go to tell you what you watched isn’t what actually took place and they will do it again this year if their strategy of running it back (again, a strategy they have told us isn’t what they are doing even if 100 percent of the position players are the same) fails.

“We’re running it back,” Jazz Chisholm told reporters on Wednesday as the impending free agent completely disregarded the organizational standpoint that they are in fact not running it back. Then Chisholm went off on one his bizarre, nonsensical tangents about how good the Yankees are — the same kind of nonsense he said last summer and the fall before. “At the halfway point, we thought we built a team that was going to go to the World Series. I don’t see a problem with running it back with four MVPs on your team.”

Chisholm talks like the Yankees have the last few AL and NL MVPs in their lineup and not shells of their MVP-selves except for Aaron Judge. The Yankees’ lineup is still Judge and everyone else, and what that means is it’s Judge and no one else. The Yankees are still a one-man show with a bunch of secondary pieces that can’t survive without that one man. If Judge were to go down for any extended period of time, the season would be over, just like it was in 2023. And the Yankees would have their excuse like they did in 2023, even if no baseball team should be as reliant on one player as the Yankees are with Judge.

The lineup is greatly flawed with a lack of quality right-handed bats and other than Judge having to stay healthy and as good as he has been the last four years is the need for Trent Grisham to replicate his one good major-league season, Stanton to be available and productive and Bellinger to be the player he was in 2025 and not the player the Dodgers non-tendered and the Cubs traded. There is a lot riding on Ben Rice to take the next step in his development and a lot being put on him to possibly be the second-best hitter in the lineup. There is the need for Chisholm to have his best season yet in his walk year and for Jose Caballero to do everything he can early in the season to steal the shortstop job away from Anthony Volpe. Just kidding! That’s never happening, considering the two were supposedly competing for the everyday job in September and Caballero played 18 games and had an .845 OPS and Volpe played 18 games and had a .534 OPS and Volpe still started every postseason game. (The Judge three-run home run in Game 3 of the ALDS was the best moment of the postseason, but the second-best moment was Boone hitting Jasson Dominguez for Volpe in the ninth inning in Game 4 to prevent Volpe from being booed off the field again.) Because we know what Volpe, Austin Wells and Ryan McMahon are offensively, there’s no point in believing any of those three will provide anything other than below-league-average offense. So the Yankees will play with one-third of their lineup being near-automatic outs each game.

“The expectations of this organization, whatever players are here, it’s to win a championship,” Goldschmidt said.

Spoken like someone who has a full year of Yankees media training to his name. Those haven’t been the expectations around here for a long time. If they were, the Yankees would have more than one championship since 2000. The same front office wouldn’t continue to get the opportunity to end the drought and the same manager wouldn’t get a ninth chance to win something other than an abundance of regular-season games against teams that don’t qualify for the postseason. Certainly, the same failed roster wouldn’t get another chance to do what they haven’t been able to do.

Yankees baseball is back and Wednesday was the start of the 2026 season, but let’s not act like it’s truly the start of a “new” season. For now, this season and last season are one and the same.

There’s nothing the Yankees love more than telling their fans what they see with their own eyes isn’t what has unfolded or is unfolding.

Each season, the Yankees tell you the team is championship-caliber even when said season doesn’t end with a championship (which none have for 16 straight years) or when the team doesn’t even reach the championship (which they have done once in the last 16 years and were thoroughly embarrassed in doing so).

They tell you clearly washed bats like DJ LeMahieu or Josh Donaldson will come around and even call you “crazy” if you don’t believe them, only to eventually release those bats after giving them hundreds of undeserved plate appearances.

They tell you how much they believe in their top prospects, making them untouchable in trades, but never giving them the necessary time to develop, whether because they can’t or don’t know how, or because they never really believed in them, only to later trade them or release them for nothing. Unless you’re Anthony Volpe. Then you have an unlimited leash to figure out the major leagues, and when you don’t for a third straight year, they continue to tell you he will with no evidence to defend this idea.

The manager tells everyone how sweet it will be when they finally get to the mountaintop as the team falls further down the mountain and as he continues to improve his unbreakable record of seasons allowed to manage the Yankees without winning a championship. He says this only after he spends a full season telling you egregious baserunning mistakes are overblown and poor pitching efforts were simply a mirage because every pitcher on the Yankees has “good stuff” every day.

The majority owner of the team actually told the world this offseason the New York Yankees don’t turn a profit in between his public chances to advocate for a salary cap, which would strip the Yankees of their biggest advantage.

Then there’s the general manager, who enters his 30th season on the job as if he’s a firefighter, police officer or teacher. With one championship since the turn of the century and one championship appearance in the last 16 years, Brian Cashman continues to prove the theory he’s a Steinbrenner without having the last name. Last year, he spent $15 million on LeMahieu $9.8 million on Aaron Hicks and $6 million on Anthony Rizzo. LeMahieu gave the Yankees 45 games of poor defense and a .674 OPS and Hicks and Rizzo were out of baseball. (The Yankees owe Hicks another $1 million in 2026.) Cashman’s starting first baseman (Rizzo) from the previous year’s World Series was forced into retirement and his starting left fielder (Alex Verdugo) from that series was forced to take a minor-league deal in his age 29 season.

There’s no need to write about the idea Cashman should be fired, since the Yankees are more likely to stop wearing pinstripes at home or using the interlocking NY as their logo than they are to replace the general manager who is in his 40th year in the organization. But there is plenty to write about what he said on Wednesday during a press conference to announce the re-signing of Cody Bellinger when asked about the 2026 roster being the same as the 2025 roster.

“I disagree that it’s the same, running it back,” Cashman said. “It’s going to be some differences, and the competition is going to be different too. In some cases, some teams got better. Some teams, you could argue, maybe got a little bit worse.”

The last time the Yankees played baseball was in their humiliating ALDS loss to the Blue Jays. Here are the position players on the roster for that series.

Cody Bellinger
Jose Caballero
Jazz Chisholm
Jasson Dominguez
J.C. Escarra
Paul Goldschmidt
Trent Grisham
Aaron Judge
Ryan McMahon
Ben Rice
Amed Rosario
Giancarlo Stanton
Anthony Volpe
Austin Wells

Now let’s take those players and see which are Yankees for 2026 by bolding their names.

Cody Bellinger
Jose Caballero
Jazz Chisholm
Jasson Dominguez
J.C. Escarra
Paul Goldschmidt
Trent Grisham
Aaron Judge
Ryan McMahon
Ben Rice
Amed Rosario
Giancarlo Stanton
Anthony Volpe
Austin Wells

The only name not bolded is Goldschmidt’s, and guess what, reports started to surface this week that the Yankees are interested in bringing back the right-handed-hitting first baseman who can only hit lefties. So the Yankees are re-signing Goldschmidt away from having the exact position players they ended 2025 with to start 2026. And because there are 14 names above, and you can only carry 13 position players on a regular-season roster, whether Goldschmidt returns or not, it’s a 100 percent run-back. But Cashman disagrees.

Maybe Cashman is talking about the pitching staff, where every team has turnover every year, so using pitching staff changes to say you’re not running it back is a joke. But let’s look at the 2025 ALDS pitching staff.

David Bednar
Paul Blackburn
Fernando Cruz
Camilo Doval
Max Fried
Luis Gil
Tim Hill
Carlos Rodon
Cam Schlittler
Will Warren
Luke Weaver
Devin Williams

Now let’s bold the names.

David Bednar
Paul Blackburn
Fernando Cruz
Camilo Doval
Max Fried
Luis Gil
Tim Hill
Carlos Rodon
Cam Schlittler
Will Warren
Luke Weaver
Devin Williams

The only two who are no longer Yankees are Williams and Weaver, who Cashman let walk and they both signed with the Mets. Gerrit Cole isn’t listed there because he missed the entire 2025 season and Clarke Schmidt isn’t listed because he last appeared in a game on July 3. Cole will miss the first half (or so) of 2026 and Schmidt will miss all or nearly all of 2026. Rodon had offseason surgery to remove bones that prevented him from being able to button his shirt by the end of the year (good thing he was allowed to start two postseason games, in which he allowed nine earned runs and 18 baserunners in 8 1/3 innings).

The Yankees traded for Ryan Weathers, so add him to the above list of pitchers. He’s the difference. Right now, Weathers is the one thing keeping the Yankees from potentially having a 100 percent run-back roster from Elimination Day 2025 to Opening Day 2026. Sure, on March 25 in San Francisco, the Yankees will likely have some garbage, late-winter-or-late-spring-training utility player to serve as Caballero’s replacement (this year’s Pablo Reyes or Jahmai Jones or Rougned Odor) as he serves as Volpe’s injury replacement, and yeah, they may have one or two reclamation, let’s-see-what-Matt-Blake-can-do arms in the bullpen, but on March 25 in San Francisco, there’s a very good chance 25 of the 26 Yankees on the roster will have been in the organization the prior year.

Because the Yankees are smarter than every team, have no regrettable transactions or personnel decisions and annually field the best possible team, it comes as no surprise Cashman added this amazing line on Wednesday.

“I’ve been openly willing to challenge anybody that we don’t have a championship-caliber roster and team,” Cashman said.

Pick me! Challenge me!

“But long story short — one [playoff] series, make or break, is not going to define what we think our capabilities are.”

Cashman says the 2025 ALDS isn’t going to define the 2025 Yankees. So what is? How about blowing an eight-game division lead to the Blue Jays to prevent having to play in the Wild Card Series and to prevent having home-field advantage in the ALDS? Or how about going 9-17 against the Blue Jays and Red Sox or 27-34 from June 14 through August 23? Which one of those feats should define the 2025 Yankees?

Wednesday wasn’t a day of excitement for the Yankees or their fans. We know this because the announcement of re-signing Bellinger was held online in a video call. When the Yankees traded for Alex Rodriguez or signed CC Sabathia or Mark Teixeira or even Rodon (for the love of God), the introductions of those players were held at Yankee Stadium. Bellinger wasn’t sitting on a couch with headphones on because he had family plans or other obligations, it’s because bringing him back isn’t a big deal. Bringing Bellinger back was the bare minimum the Yankees had to achieve this offseason. The Yankees didn’t need some grand event at the Stadium to show off their new toy because there is no new toy.

“It’s a different year. We’re looking for a different result, meaning a better result,” Cashman said.

When Cashman gave up on Sonny Gray after 2018 and traded him, he said, “I don’t feel like we can go through the same exercise and expect different results,” and yet, the Yankees continue to go through the same exercise every season with the same failed roster.

“Stay tuned to see where it takes us,” Cashman said on Wednesday.

I know where it takes you. We all know where it takes you. An early postseason exit followed by an end-of-the-season press conference while the postseason is still being played where you tell us Boone will be back and things will be different for the next year. Except they won’t. Not with this roster as currently constructed.