Aaron Boone uttered the words that should make every Yankees fan question whether or not they want to invest more of their time into this team.
Way back in mid-October, the Yankees decided the status quo of being knocked out of the postseason as early as possible was something they wanted to continue to do as an organization and so they gave Aaron Boone a new contract. A month after that, Boone went on CC Sabathia’s podcast to speak about the 2021 season. Aside from saying the obvious, “As you might imagine, I don’t look at my mentions on my Twitter,” Boone said a lot on the podcast.
Last week, I broke down Boone’s statements of “I make the lineup” and “We’re gonna need a shortstop.” Today, I want to look at Boone uttering the words that should make every Yankees fan question whether or not they want to invest more of their time into this team.
“Do we look largely similar to what we’ve looked like last year?”
That was a real thought the manager of the Yankees had and he had the audacity to actually say in a public forum. That’s not an original or personal thought either. Boone said exactly what the organization is likely considering and has most certainly talked about internally.
It doesn’t matter that Boone followed that question by asking, “Or is there a blockbuster trade or signing that all of a sudden moves this guy out, trades this guy and then that starts affecting everything else?” All that matters is his admission that the 2022 Yankees looking like the 2021 Yankees is a possibility being discussed within Yankee Stadium this offseason.
It’s not a thought any person associated with the Yankees should have. How could any Yankees employee, whether you’re signing checks, making deals, filling out the lineup card, batting third, watering the infield or cold calling prospective ticket buyers think having a nearly identical roster to 2021, which was nearly identical to 2020, which was nearly identical to 2019, and which was nearly identical to 2018 should be an option for 2022?
The 2021 Yankees were the heavy the odds-on favorite to win the American League, and they finished third in their division and fifth in the AL with their postseason lasting nine innings. The 2020 Yankees barely reached the postseason with an eight-team AL field, and were ousted in the ALDS. The 2019 Yankees lost to the Astros in six games after DJ LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres proved you can’t win a seven-game series with two productive postseason hitters. The 2018 Yankees were historically embarrassed and humiliated in four games against the Red Sox, suffering the worst home postseason loss in the history of the franchise.
Boone isn’t the first one to think the Yankees could or should look in 2022 like they did in 2021. Brett Gardner, the last remaining member of the 2009 World Series team and the only Yankee to have ever won anything (even if it was so long ago he likely doesn’t remember what it’s like to win), said nearly the same thing after the team’s wild-card loss to the Red Sox. Wearing his uniform for an extended period of time after what could be his final game as if he were Wayne Gretzky, Gardner used the phrase “run it back,” hoping the Yankees would return the same core and roster in 2022 that has never gotten the job done.
“Running it back” can’t be an option. It can’t be. “Running it back” means an everyday infield of Luke Voit, Gleyber Torres, DJ LeMahieu and Gio Urshela. It means trusting Aaron Hicks to play the first full season of his career at age 32, and knowingly going into another year with Gardner eventually getting everyday at-bats. It means more nonsensical and unnecessary drama on who the starting catcher should be and treating each individual Gary Sanchez at-bat like an audition for his job. It means not having enough starting pitching yet again and it means relying on your bullpen to protect a one-run lead nearly every night.
The Yankees aren’t getting to the World Series and losing because they’re short a starter or adding a big bat to the current roster away from getting over “the hump” Boone likes to refer to. They’re not one player away. They’re a-lot-of-the-roster away. No matter what Boone idiotically says about “how the league has closed the gap on the Yankees” or how “the margin is slim” within the AL, there has always been a gap for his Yankees and the margin isn’t slim.
The problem is while it shouldn’t be an option or a thought, “running it back” is most likely what the Yankees will do. There’s only so much that can change on the roster due to contracts and value, and the easiest route to a 26-man roster in 2022 is staying relatively the same as it was in 2021.
The status quo is the easiest and cheapest route for the Yankees to take and for a team that had the same payroll in 2022 as it did 17 years prior despite exponential growth in their revenue streams, theres’ nothing Hal Steinbrenner likes more than his Yankees looking largely similar to what they looked like the year before.
Way back in mid-October, the Yankees decided the status quo of being knocked out of the postseason as early as possible was something they wanted to continue to do as an organization and so they
Way back in mid-October, the Yankees decided the status quo of being knocked out of the postseason as early as possible was something they wanted to continue to do as an organization and so they gave Aaron Boone a new contract. A month after that, Boone went on CC Sabathia’s podcast to speak about the 2021 season. Aside from saying the obvious, “As you might imagine, I don’t look at my mentions on my Twitter,” Boone said a lot on the podcast.
Yesterday, I broke down Boone’s statement of “I make the lineup,” which did nothing other than make me feel at ease about the team’s failure to meet expectations since he became manager because it makes perfect sense that someone who uses the process and strategy to create a lineup he described would fail to meet expectations. Today, I want to look at Boone’s admission of the Yankees needing a shortstop.
“We’re gonna need a shortstop. So however we get there, that’s going to be the interesting thing of the offseason.”
Gleyber Torres’ error on Sept. 12 of last season against the Mets on Sunday Night Baseball was the final defensive miscue straw for a player who to that point had seemingly so many straws you’d think he hated turtles and the ocean.
After sitting by and watching Torres boot routine plays since the start of the shortened 2020 season (a season in which he arrived at Spring Training 2.0 out of shape and effectively sent his career into a downward spiral), Boone finally announced Torres would be moving back to second base permanently. Torres’ error led to a Yankees loss at the most inopportune of time, and no one knew at the moment, but three weeks later, the difference between hosting the wild-card game and going to Fenway Park ended up being one win. One single win. In a regular-season full of losses (70 of them for the 2021 Yankees) there were dozens of games the Yankees blew, gave away and laid down for, so it’s not like Torres’ last-ever error at shortstop for the Yankees was the one that led to them going to Boston on Oct. 3, but it certainly helped.
During Sunday Night Baseball on Sept. 26, Alex Rodriguez said he spoke to Marcus Thames before the game and Thames told him when Torres was called into Boone’s office to find out he was moving back second base “his face lit up and it was like a 2,000-pound gorilla was lifted off his back.” If that’s the reaction Torres emitted from being moved off of shortstop and back to second, why wasn’t the move made much earlier in the season? Boone has been praised for his communication skills and so-called ability to connect with and understand his players, and yet he couldn’t sense Torres was unhappy at short and the position was taking a toll on him at the plate, in the field, physically and mentally? Instead it took 40 regular-season games and seven postseason games in 2020 and 108 regular-season games in 2021 for the Yankees to decide to improve the most important position in the infield.
By finally giving in to the fact Torres can’t play shortstop (the same way the organization finally gave into the fact a lineup full of right-handed hitters couldn’t succeed), the Yankees moved him back to second where he played during the 2019 and 2020 seasons and became a budding superstar who looked appeared to be on his way to being a a middle-infield, middle-of-the-order presence for the Yankees for the next decade-plus.
In 1,088 plate appearances between 2018 and 2019, Torres hit .275/.338/.511 with 62 home runs and 167 RBIs. He finished third in the 2018 AL MVP voting despite making his major league debut until the end of April, received MVP votes in 2019 and was an All-Star in both seasons.
In 676 plate appearances between 2020 and 2021, Torres hit .256/.337/.366 with 12 home runs and 67 RBIs. A player who along with DJ LeMahieu tried to carry the Yankees to an ALCS win over the Astros in 2019 had gone from budding superstar to reclamation project, losing his position along the way.
The last time Torres was a good hitter at the plate, let alone a feared hitter, he was 22. He’s now 25. That’s not to say he’s old. It’s to say it’s been a really long time since Torres was worthy of screwing up the entire roster to make sure his bat stays in the lineup. But the Yankees are accommodating Torres as if he’s still the 22-year-old from going on three years ago, and the accommodation is screwing up the entire infield and roster construction.
Moving Torres to second means LeMahieu is no longer at second and I’d rather have the three-time Gold Glove-winning second baseman playing second base than changing positions daily just so a really bad defender and a no longer valuable bat can be an everyday player. As currently constructed, Torres will play second, LeMahieu will play third, Gio Urshela will play short and Luke Voit will play first. I can’t fathom that being the infield once a new CBA is signed and teams are allowed to sign free agents and make trades again, but then again, these are the Hal Steinbrenner Yankees and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had “Status Quo” tattooed in calligraphy across his shoulder blades. “Running it back” with the same roster in 2022 like Brett Gardner suggested he hopes the Yankees do immediately after their wild-card game loss is a real possibility. It’s probably the most likely outcome. Under the current roster setup, LeMahieu moves to a position he’s a lesser defender at and Urshela moves to a position he’s a lesser defender at. All so Torres be can be a New York Yankee.
And Torres will be a New York Yankee. Not because he’s deserving of it anymore, but because he’s still young and inexpensive, and mostly because the Yankees still likely believe he can get back to being the player he once was (the Gary Sanchez theory) and because his value and stock now resemble that of Facebook. (Sorry, Meta.) The only hope the Yankees would have in moving Torres would be in a change-of-scenery type of deal.
Earlier in the offseason I saw the idea of a Torres-for-Cody Bellinger swap mentioned somewhere. I will personally drive the 3,000 miles to Los Angeles and pick Bellinger up myself if the Dodgers would be willing to do that trade, which they wouldn’t be. While Bellinger might have been a less productive hitter than Torres these last two “years,” he still had two monster postseasons and helped the Dodgers win the 2020 World Series. And if the Yankees are banking on Torres returning to his 2019 form when he finished 17th in AL MVP voting and hit 38 home runs with RBIs and posted a OPS, well, Bellinger in 2019 hit 47 home runs with 115 RBIs, posted a 1.035, won the NL MVP and a Gold Glove. So yeah, I’m ready to make the cross-country drive.
Well, before the Yankees pulled the plug on Torres as an option at shortstop, they reportedly tried to trade for Trevor Story at the 2021 deadline. So the Yankees knew Torres wasn’t the present or future at shortstop as recently as July 31 and yet he remained at the position for another six weeks in the middle of a postseason race. If the Yankees were willing to make Urshela the everyday shortstop for the rest of the 2021, it should have been done much earlier than Sept. 13 in Game 144 of the season.
The Yankees would only need Urshela to play shortstop for 19 regular-season games and then however long the postseason would last (it lasted nine innings), and then they would have a free-agent class Story, Corey Seager and Carlos Correa available to them. You never want to need an everyday shortstop (especially if you’re the Yankees and supposedly competing for a championship every year), but if you’re going to need one, needing one after the 2021 season might be the best time in history to do so.
All the Yankees would need to do to add one of those three to their everyday lineup for the foreseeable future would be outbid the other 29 teams. They wouldn’t need to trade away prospects, just spend money. The resource they have a greater advantage of than every other team in the league and the resource they make more of than every other team in the league. But with Steinbrenner publicly admitting he’s personally working to lower the league’s luxury-tax threshold rather than increase it, which would be in his team’s best interest when it comes to success on the field, it’s unlikely the two remaining options in Story and Correa become Yankees. (Seager signed a 10-year, $325 million deal with the Rangers before the lockout.) Add in the Yankees’ top (Anthony Volpe) and No. 3 (Oswald Peraza) being shortstops, and there’s a better chance the Yankees give a nine-figure contract to either Story or Correa.
Prepare yourself for either a full season of Urshela, who the Yankees were so reluctant to let play shortstop everyday that they wait until the 144th game of the 2021 season, or a one-year stopgap with someone who’s an average to above average defender at the plate, but will a near-automatic out at the bottom of the lineup. Get ready for a bottom third of Gardner, Kyle Higashioka and the stopgap shortstop on many days in 2022.
There’s much more to break down from Boone’s offseason appearance on Sabathia’s podcast.
Aaron Boone’s offseason appearance on CC Sabathia’s podcast had a lot of upsetting and disappointing moments.
Today is Day 71 of the lockout. It’s been more than 10 weeks since the baseball world was halted in the most inevitable and predictable shutdown of all time. An event years in the making only made more obvious by the events of nearly two years ago when at one point the owners and players couldn’t agree on playing 60 or 70 games in the pandemic-shortened season.
There has no been little to no news over the last two-plus months, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing since the only Yankees news prior to the lockout was the daily reminder that Hal Steinbrenner is as much like his dad as Michael Kay is as much like Vin Scully. Seemingly every hour leading up to the December lockout a different big-game free agent came off the board while the Yankees sat on their thumbs and grew that much closer to granting Brett Gardner’s wish of “running it back” with the same core and essentially the same roster that hasn’t been good enough for five straight seasons and has gotten progressively worse over that time. The only news since the first of December has been related to coaching hires, and even that news wasn’t any good, as the Yankees couldn’t even complete the hire of a valued baseball mind like Eric Chavez, who ended up going to the Mets.
Spring training is supposed to begin next week with pitchers and catchers reporting. We’re supposed to already be a week-plus into getting 15-second videos on social media of bullpen sessions for pitchers who have already started workouts. Instead, Major League Baseball is no closer to being a thing again than it was more than 10 weeks ago when Rob Manfred told us a lockout would expedite the collective bargaining process.
Way back in mid-October, the Yankees decided the status quo of being knocked out of the postseason as early as possible was something they wanted to continue to do as an organization and so they gave Aaron Boone a new contract. A month after that, Boone went on CC Sabathia’s podcast to speak about the 2021 season. Aside from saying the obvious, “As you might imagine, I don’t look at my mentions on my Twitter,” Boone said a lot on the podcast. And nothing was more important than when he said, “No one’s ever made a lineup for me. I make the lineup.” Nothing was more important than that statement and nothing was more upsetting than him elaborating on the process he uses to create his lineups.
I have always believed Boone when he has publicly stated he creates the Yankees’ lineup. Not because I think he’s an honest person. We know he’s far from being that after watching nearly 600 postgame press conferences filled with lies and exaggerations about his team’s performance and injuries. I believe him because there’s too much evidence to suggest otherwise. Any Yankees fan who has watched him mismanage and ruin countless games in four years as Yankees manager knows there’s no Ivy League graduate, analytics guru or data scientist who would ever come up with, support or defend the lineups Boone consistently puts together. No one with even a casual understanding of baseball would bat Gardner second (which he did 14 times in 2021), third (which he did three times in 2021) or fourth (which he did three times in 2021). That alone is enough to prove to me that Boone is telling the truth. He has said as much multiple times in recent seasons, including saying, “Ultimately, I’m writing out the lineup and I’m making these decisions,” when asked if he’s a puppet for the front office after the team’s 2020 ALDS loss to the Rays.
It’s not hard to fill out a major league lineup card, especially when it’s the lineup card of the New York Yankees. It should be as easy as it gets, yet this is the process Boone said he uses on Sabathia’s podcast.
“My process for making the lineup is actually a little bit different all the time. There’s the ebb and flow of the season. Let’s assume everyone is healthy and we’re not going to bed that night with ‘We’re waiting to find out if this guy’s available tomorrow.’ So if our guys are available, a lot of times, I’ll buzz by my coaches the night before going home where we may have a thought. A lot of times it’s usually with Mendy where I’ll just be like, ‘What do you think about this guy in tomorrow?’ And we’ll kind of bounce things off. When Marcus was here, I said, ‘What do you think of this guy in tomorrow? This guy out? What do you think about flipping these guys in the lineup?’ So that’s usually how it starts and then when I come in, usually I’ll come into my office and Mendy will follow me in and we’ll kind of go through our different things if theres a little tweak we want to make.
Boone said that’s the process he uses if the team is completely healthy. If he said that’s how he thought about things when the lineup was full of Greg Allen, Tim LoCastro, Estevan Florial, Ryan LaMarre and Rob Brantly in mid-July, it would be somewhat acceptable, but that’s the process he uses when “our guys are available?” He’s not even close to done explaining.
“Sometimes I’ll reach out to like I’ve even done this with Cash and Cash is not usually very much involved at all. But sometimes if I have a tough decision that I’m really wrestling with, I may call Cash on it. I may call Mendy on my way home. I may call Marcus Thames when he was here on my way home. When there’s that tough decision I have when I’m thinking about getting a different guy in tomorrow or sitting a guy a day, I may go to different people and ask their opinion on it, and then ultimately, I gotta decide which way I want to go.”
When Boone interviewed to be manager of the Yankees, he was so extraordinary that the front office canceled all other interviews and didn’t even hold a second round of interviews, handing Boone the job with no prior coaching experience at any level. I’m certain he didn’t explain this process in his supposed spectacular interview.
“We have a very strong analytics department that gives us so much information that kind of helps us decisions, give us context on what we’re seeing, what we’re looking at. And I think the reality is any of the really strong franchises are very strong analytically, but ultimately, the teams that do it the best are able to … the secret sauce is how do you strike the balance? Because every day is unique amongst itself, especially in a big league season when you’re playing 162 games. So you’ve gotta be able to strike the balance, but as Cash puts it, ‘We want to have a buffet of everything available to us,’ so that we can make really good decisions and I think we do that here even though we get criticized about it a lot.”
“Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t know where it’s going. I just hope to find it somewhere along the way. Like an improv conversation. An improversation.“
OK, that final part was from Michael Scott on The Office, but everything else came out of Boone’s mouth. Now knowing exactly how his lineup creation process works, I feel much more at ease about the team’s failure to meet expectations since he became manager because it makes perfect sense that someone who uses the above strategy to create a lineup would fail to meet expectations. The man who gave that answer was given a four-year extension to manage the sport’s winningest and most prestigious franchise, and in that time he will oversee the decisions of about $1 billion in payroll.
There’s much more to break down from Boone’s offseason appearance on Sabathia’s podcast. Coming tomorrow: Aaron Boone: ‘We’re Gonna Need a Shortstop.’
My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!
As is tradition every All-Star break, here is this season’s All-Animosity Team.
The NHL All-Star Game returned after a year hiatus, but now it’s come and gone, and the second “half” of the season is set to begin. With 35 games remaining, the Rangers have put themselves in a position where winning less than half of their games would get them to 98 points. It will take a monumental collapse for the Rangers to not play a postseason game for the first time in five years (I’m counting the 2019-20 playoffs as real postseason games for them).
Because of the Rangers’ two-week break from Feb. 1 through Feb. 15, there has been a lull in animosity toward non-Rangers around the league. But in sticking with tradition of the All-Star break, here is the 2021-22 All-Animosity Team.
FORWARDS
Matthew Barzal We came dangerously close to Barzal and Artemi Panarin playing together for the foreseeable future. If not for Panarin taking less money (about $1 million per year less) to be a Ranger instead of an Islander, Rangers fans would have had to deal with those two flying around together for years to come. It gives me chills just thinking about it. Thankfully, it didn’t happen.
When Barzal is on the ice, I’m scared. I’m not scared at the level of Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin, Nathan MacKinnon or Connor McDavid, but I’m still scared. He’s the one true playmaker on the Islanders and not someone I enjoy entering the offensive zone with the puck. Every time he does his patented circling of the zone with possession it feels like it will only end badly, and unfortunately, he’s not going anywhere in terms of the rivalry.
Brad Marchand Marchand is the ultimate player who you hate to watch your team play against, but would love if he were on your team. He’s dirty and annoying, he’s a pest and nuisance, but he’s really good. He makes up one-third of the Bruins’ “Perfection Line” and the Bruins go as that line goes, and that line has been going for years.
Marchand might have been on this team solely for what he does with the puck because he’s that talented, but it’s what he does without the puck that solidified his roster spot. His lapses in judgment and total disregard for player safety whether it’s unnecessary hits to the head or irresponsible slew foots have made him universally disliked in the entire hockey world outside of Boston. I don’t envision a scenario where Marchand is in the league and isn’t on this team.
Tom Wilson OK, maybe Wilson is the ultimate player who you hate to watch your team play against, but would love if he were on your team. Like Marchand, Wilson is a really good player, however, his lapses in judgment are nearly impossible to comprehend. His presence on the ice worries me for the health of the Rangers’ elite talent, but if he were flying around throwing big hits and scoring big goals for the Blueshirts, my perception of him and the Tri-state’s perception of him would be much different.
DEFENSEMEN
Alexander Ovechkin OK, so I had to do some odd maneuvering like putting a historically awful defensive player on defense for this year’s roster. But considering he does hover around the top of the left circle on the power play, it’s almost like he’s a defenseman sometimes. A stretch? Yes, it is.
In his career, Ovechkin has 41 goals in 67 regular-season games against the Rangers and another 13 goals in 33 playoff games across five postseason series, with four of those series going seven games. He’s the ultimate “When is his shift going to end?” and “Get the puck out of the zone” player there is and when he’s waiting at the top of the left circle on the man advantage, two minutes feels like 20 minutes as you pray the shot attempts he does get somehow miss the net.
I keep waiting for Ovechkin to slow down, thinking age or games played might start to catch up to him, but in his age 34 season he led the league in scoring with 48 goals and was on a 58-goal pace before the season was shut down. In 91-regular season games since January 2021, he has 53 goals. He’s not slowing down. At worst he’s keeping pace with what he has always done, and it’s possible he’s getting even better with age.
I do respect his ability and appreciate that I’m watching greatness, a generational talent and the best goal scorer in the history of the game, but that doesn’t take away how I feel when he’s playing the Rangers. And no, I don’t want him to break Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goal record, though unless he unexpectedly decides to retire, he’s going to break it.
Zdeno Chara Chara’s last three stops have gone from the Bruins to the Capitals to the Islanders. All he needs are stints stint with the Devils, Flyers and Penguins at this point to increase an animosity that doesn’t need any increasing.
Chara isn’t close to being the player he once was and appears to be a liability on the ice more times than not, but he’s not once again on this team for the player he is, but the player he was.
I will miss him when he’s no longer in the league though. Chara and Joe Thornton remain the last members of the ’90s club of current NHLers who played in that decade with both going back to the 1997-98 season. Derek Jeter was finishing his second major league season when Chara and Thornton both made their debuts, and this year will be eight years since Jeter retired, all while Chara and Thornton keep on playing in the NHL. It’s preposterous, and the length of their careers is something we may never see again, and we’re seeing it from two players at the same exact time.
GOALIE
Matt Murray During Henrik Lundqvist’s number retirement ceremony, I couldn’t help but think how unfortunate Lundqvist was to have his career take place during a 15-year period in which the front office gave him to little no help defensively and asked him to single-handedly carry the organization to each win during his career. Lundqvist deserved better. He deserved more than one chance to play for the Stanley Cup, and he did everything one single member of a hockey team could do to win a championship.
It’s not Murray’s fault he got to play behind the 2015-16 and 2016-17 Penguins en route to back-to-back championships. And for as unreasonable as it is, it bothers me that he got to do so. I’m glad Lundqvist retired only ever playing in an NHL game for the Rangers, but I still wish he had agreed to waive his no-trade five and six years ago and went to a contender at the time and won. Then I wouldn’t have to think about the all the fortunate goalies over the years who have gotten their names engraved on the Cup, while Lundqvist who was undoubtedly the undisputed best goalie of his era never did.
I don’t have any confidence the Giants got this hire right given every personnel, roster, draft and trade decision they have made over the last seven years. But I want them to be right. I want to have a Giants season last past September. I need them to be right.
But after his introductory press conference, I followed it up by writing Joe Judge Just Might Be What Giants Need. Judge looked and sounded like the exact type of coach any fan would want to lead their team, saying everything you want the head coach of the team you root for to say. Judge could have sold me a home in a flood zone in desperate need of a new roof, septic system and furnace at three times the asking price and I would have bought it with the way he talked that day. Looking back, he essentially did sell me that.
“What I’m about is an old-school physical mentality,” Judge said at his introductory press conference. “We’re going to put a product on the field that the people of this city and region are going to be proud of because this team will represent this area.”
That statement was enough to make me a believer. To look past his lack of head coaching experience at any level. To forget that the decision makers who hired Judge were the same people who unnecessarily fired Tom Coughlin, hired Ben McAdoo, hired Dave Gettleman, hired Pat Shurmur and retained Gettleman for four seasons.
I have always been saddened that Kyle Chandler’s character Eric Taylor in Friday Night Lights isn’t an actual person and football coach, but at his introductory press conference, Judge appeared to be giving me the closest thing to making Coach Taylor come to life. Now a week shy of two years I wish Kyle Chandler were coaching the Giants. I wish anyone other than McAdoo or Shurmur were coaching the Giants.
I couldn’t have been more wrong about Judge. I should have stayed with my initial reaction to his hiring that Giants ownership couldn’t be trusted to get a head coach hiring right, considering Gettleman and his opposite Midas touch effect would be involved in the decision. After 32 games and a 10-22 record, Judge has been an extension of the McAdoo and Shurmur Giants, and with his weekly happy-go-lucky postgame press conferences following the dismantling of his team each Sunday, he’s quickly rising the power rankings of everything that been wrong with the organization for the last decade.
Judge’s most recent unintentional comedic postgame press conference helped him make an impressive jump up those rankings. On a day in which the Giants scored three points, lost by 26 points to a team whose coach is actually going to lose his job next week, turned the ball over four times and threw for an unfathomable negative-10 passing yards, the lowest point of the day for the Giants came after the team’s 12th loss of the season.
When asked why Giants fans should have faith in him as head coach, Judge went off on a tangent for more than 11 minutes reminiscent of Billy Madison’s comparison of The Puppy Who Lost His Way to the Industrial Revolution. In no way did Judge come close to answering the question.
He instead misremembered history, created his own history, spoke in general vagueness, told flat-out lies, curated fictional stories and even swore a couple of times. He said, “This ain’t some clown show organization” in describing a franchise that gone 61-99 over the last 10 seasons with one playoff appearance (a 25-point loss). He tried to use the recent sideline fight between Washington teammates as to why his Giants are in a good place and said the lack of golf bags present in the team’s locker room means the organization is headed in the right direction. The climax of his answer though came when he said impending free agents on the team come into his office “begging to come back’ and that former Giants making more money elsewhere call him multiple times a week to tell him they wish they were still Giants.
The entire rant was cringeworthy, and unfortunately for Judge, will likely follow him forever. It’s unlikely he will ever shed those 11 regrettable minutes since the only way to do that would be to become a successful NFL head coach and eventually lead a team to a championship. The Giants are as far away from being a championship team as they have ever been and Judge is as close to losing his job as he has ever been. And if he were to lose his job, it’s hard to envision another team taking a chance on him.
But Judge doesn’t view the 11-plus minutes heard around the world from Sunday as regrettable. A day after adding a new chapter to the embarrassing last decade of Giants football, Judge claimed he had no regrets about anything he said.
“Look, I was asked a specific question about what fans were asking and I responded to it,” Judge said. “People ask me a direct question, I give direct answers.”
Again, Judge was asked why fans should have faith in him. His answer was more than 11 minutes long and at no point did he answer the question. If you were going to illustrate how to not directly answer a question, Judge’s answer to the question he was asked on Sunday would be the golden example.
After having a day to sift through the bullshit Judge spewed in their presence in Chicago, the inevitable follow-up question to his claim that former Giants who “make more money” than they did or would with the Giants call him to tell him they miss playing for him was asked. Judge declined to specify names (because there aren’t any names).
“I know this is a place that players want to play,” Judge said. “It’s a place that a lot of players are going to want to play for a long time.”
Do players want to play for the Giants? Sure, if the money’s right. Sure, if they have no other offers. But if all things are equal and the Giants are going up against any other team in the league for a coveted free agent, what kind of idiot would choose to play for this team, with this roster, under this coach, front office and ownership?
“There are obviously some things that we have to do better,” Judge said after claiming the Giants, at 4-12, are a well-coached team. “I’m not going to sit here and hide behind anything. I’m not going to sit here and say we’re perfect or anything.”
If you were to listen to the 22 postgame press conferences given by Judge after Giants losses, you would think the Giants were on a 32-game winning streak under him. Nothing is ever bad, everything is part of the process and he and his team should only be measured on immeasurable metrics like culture and personal relationships and kindness.
“Obviously, the most important thing in this league is winning,” Judge said. “So we have to do a better job putting ourselves in a position to finalize and put ourselves in position to win.”
This was the first time as Giants head coach Judge has acknowledged that wins and losses are the determining factor of success in sports. So I’m relieved to know that he knows that the goal of the game is outscore the opponent and his job is to make sure his team outscores their opponent in the majority of their games.
But in a typical Judge-ian way, his answer leads you to believe he doesn’t fully understand or comprehend just how awful he has been at his job if wins are the “most important thing.” The second part of his answer would lead you to believe the Giants’ 12 losses in 16 games have been the product of bad breaks or late-game defeats. Nine of the Giants’ 12 losses have been by double digits. Outside of their Week 2 loss in Washington and Week 3 loss at home in Atlanta when they gave away those games, and their still-hard-to-understand three-point loss in Kansas City, the Giants have been run out of every building they have played in, including their own twice. Over the last five games without Daniel Jones, they are 0-5, having been outscored 141-49, losing on average by 18 points. It’s not like the Giants were a postseason team or even a respectable team with Jones either, as they were 4-7 with the “franchise” quarterback playing, and are 12-25 with him as a starter in three seasons.
Everything about the Giants is depressing. The roster is a perfect blend of overpaid, underachieving, oft-injured and untalented players. The general manager is a week away from being removed from a job he should have been removed from at least two years ago. And the head coach who was hired despite his inexperience has done nothing other than show his inexperience at every opportunity for two seasons.
Gettleman will be gone a week from now, and someone else will have the responsibility of trying to not screw up the Giants’ coveted situation of having two Top 8-ish picks in the 2022 draft. With Judge supposedly safe from the same fate as Gettleman, it means the team’s new general manager will have Judge forced on him the way Jones and Jason Garrett were forced on Judge. This likely means the new general manager will be a name promoted from within since no coveted outside candidate would sign up to be an ingredient in this recipe for disaster. The never-ending cycle created when Jerry Reese was retained and Coughlin wasn’t, which continued when Reese was fired and Gettleman was brought back will continue once again for the 2022 season. The Giants need to hit the reset button yet again, and that means giving the new general manager his choice at head coach and his choice at quarterback.
The Giants were losers under McAdoo. They were losers under Shurmur. They have been losers under Judge as he has failed on his promise to put a team on the field “the people of this city and region can be proud of.” And for that, he has earned the same fate (even if he won’t receive it) as his two predecessors: two seasons and done.
