The Yankees began the 2024 season in Houston against the hated Astros, and for the first four innings, Opening Day was playing out like nearly every Yankees-Astros game over the last seven years. It didn’t finish that way though.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The last meaningful game the Yankees played was on Sunday, Aug. 13 of last season. It was an 8-7 walk-off loss to the Marlins in Miami, a game the Yankees led by four runs going into the bottom of the ninth. That game ended the 2023 Yankees season, and the remaining 44 games were a mere formality, a two-and-a-half month slog to the finish line in which the Yankees barely finished above .500 and then retained their manager, general manager and their entire front office.

Thursday’s Opening Day game in Houston was the first meaningful game for the Yankees in seven-and-a-half months. And through the first four innings, you would have never known it was a new year and a new season. Those four innings played out like a continuation of last season. Game 1 of 2024 was looking like Game 163 of 2023.

2. Nestor Cortes was named the Opening Day starter out of necessity and through two innings pitched like the Nestor Cortes that the Yankees, Orioles and Mariners didn’t want once upon a time. During the first inning of the first game of the season to start a seven-games-in-seven-day stretch, Aaron Boone had Nick Burdi warming up in the bullpen. That’s how well Cortes was doing.

Cortes allowed three runs in the first inning and a solo home run to the 9-hitter to lead off the second. Framber Valdez and the Astros were getting big outs when they needed them and big hits when they needed them as well. Cortes and the Yankees weren’t, just like they never seem to do against the Astros.

3. Juan Soto’s first plate appearance as a Yankee poetically resulted in a walk, but he was left stranded in the first when Aaron Judge hit into an inning-ending double play. The Yankees left the bases loaded in the second when Jose Trevino banged into a 6-4-3 double play and they were left loaded again in the fourth when Alex Verdugo banged into a 4-6-3. The Yankees were getting the kind of “traffic” Boone dreams of, but they were ruining it with inning-ending double plays. (We’re coming up on the three-year anniversary of Boone saying, “Typically, the better teams are going to hit into double plays,” after the Yankees’ loss to the Red Sox on June 4, 2021.) Valdez had thrown more balls than strikes and the Yankees hadn’t made him pay.

4. Everything changed in the fifth inning, thanks to the Yankees’ two worst hitters. Cortes had put up back-to-back scoreless frames in the third and fourth, and the Astros’ lead remained 4-0. Then the Yankees’ .570 OPS duo went to work.

Trevino posted a .570 OPS in 55 games last season and Oswaldo Cabrera barely beat him out with a .574 OPS in 115 games. (Yes, Cabrera was allowed to play in 115 major-league games with a .574 OPS. That’s how bad the 2023 Yankees’ offense was.) But it was those two who got the Yankees’ fifth-inning rally started with a walk and single. The catcher who is strictly a major leaguer because of his defense and the utility player who was only in the lineup because the everyday third baseman is on the injured list, and the player the Yankees traded for to avoid having to play Cabrera didn’t arrive in Houston until 2 a.m.

5. After Gleyber Torres walked, Soto ripped a line-drive single to right to plate the Yankees’ first run. Following back-to-back strikeouts from Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, Anthony Rizzo was drilled by a pitch to score a run and Anthony Volpe drew a walk to score another. Through five innings, the Yankees had cut the deficit to 4-3.

Trailing by one in the sixth, Cabrera came to the plate with one out. For as bad as Cabrera looked in his first at-bat of the game against Valdez (a four-pitch strikeout in which his swings looked as if he were blindfolded), it was startling that he was able putting the ball in play in a 1-2 count against Valdez in the fifth for a single and then clobber a home run on a 1-2 pitch off Rafael Montero in the sixth to tie the game. Maybe it’s just one game, or maybe Cabrera is beginning to figure things out.

6. The same goes for Volpe. Volpe looked like a different player on Thursday than he did for all of 2023. His at-bats on Opening Day were battles. He singled in the first inning, walked on four pitches in the fourth, walked on four pitches in the fifth and drew an eight-pitch walk in the seventh. (He ended his day with a strikeout against Josh Hader, but there’s no shame in that.) It was the best Volpe has ever looked at the plate for an entire game. The Volpe we watched on Thursday was not the Volpe we watched for 159 games last year.

7. The Yankees took the lead in the seventh on a Verdugo sacrifice fly (a skill previous iterations of the Yankees lacked), and four innings of shutout relief work from Jonathan Loaisiga, Ian Hamilton and Clay Holmes gave the Yankees a 5-4 win. It wasn’t as smooth as that reads though, and why would it be with Holmes on the mound in the ninth?

There was no way the Yankees were going to trail by four runs early to the Astros in Houston, then mount an improbable comeback to get within one run, then tie the game on a home run off the bat of the 9-hitter the team desperately doesn’t want to play, then take the lead and coast to a win. It wasn’t going to be easy.

8. You pretty much know which Holmes you’re going to get from the very first pitch he throws, and Holmes’ first pitch on Thursday nearly took Mauricio Dubon’s head off. Dubon hit a line-drive single on the next pitch. I figured either Dubon was going to steal second and Jose Altuve was going to drive him in to tie the game or Altuve was just going to skip tying the game and club a two-run, walk-off home run to destroy a game that was three outs away from being a glorious win. Altuve swung at the first pitch and lined out to Torres.

When Yordan Alvarez walked up the plate all I could envision was Holmes leaving his sinker up and Alvarez hitting a ball to a place no other player had ever hit a ball in MinuteMaid Park. Holmes got the ground ball he needed to possibly end the game from Alvarez, but it was perfectly placed and instead resulted in a single. Wither runners on first and second and one out, it was like the Astros were trying to make their inevitable comeback and walk-off win as painful as possible.

9. Holmes put a second-pitch sinker right over the middle of the plate for Kyle Tucker to extend his arms on and drive to right field. Dubon rounded third and headed for home to tie the game as Soto gathered the ball to throw a laser to the plate. Dubon tried to evade Trevino to get to the plate with a headfirst slide, but Trevino tagged him and Dubon was called out.

I’m not sure Trevino did tag Dubon, and for that, I’m thankful James Hoye called Dubon out on the field. I’m even more thankful there wasn’t a sufficient angle of the play to overturn the call. The call stood, and two pitches later, Holmes got Alex Bregman to ground out to end the game. A nice, clean one-inning save for Holmes that included three hits and a runner getting thrown out at the plate.

10. I couldn’t sleep on Thursday night. Not because of the excitement of the win, the idea of Yankees baseball being back or the Yankees hitting on the money line as an underdog. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t get the idea of life without Soto out of my head, and the thought of him leaving at the end of the season, and ending up with the Mets, or anywhere other than the Yankees had me tossing and turning.

Soto was the Yankees’ first baserunner of the game, drove in the first run of the game, added a second walk and threw out the would-be game-tying run in the bottom of the ninth. This wasn’t a one-game blip. This is who he is. He’s the best hitter with the base eye in baseball. A 25-year-old superstar. Not a generational superstar, but an all-time superstar, who has achieved more italicized bold on his Baseball Reference page by age 25 than the rest of the roster has combined.

I realize there’s a better chance of Boone becoming Bruce Bochy than there is of Soto signing an extension without testing free agency (though maybe that has or will change given Scott Boras’ performance this offseason). But Soto is the guy and needs to be a Yankee for the rest of his career. I can’t just watch this guy play for the Yankees for another 161 games and then possible playoff games. I need to watch him play for the Yankees until my three-year-old and one-year-old are teenagers.

For now, I will enjoy every game he is a Yankee, and thankfully, there’s another one on Friday. And another one on Saturday, and Sunday, and so on. Yankees baseball is back.

The Yankees introduced Marcus Stroman as their newest addition this week and Brian Cashman answered questions about other players and pitchers from his 2024 roster.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Marcus Stroman is officially a Yankee. The newest Yankee said all the right things during his introductory press conference.

“I’m not someone who shies away from the limelight or the pressure, the lights,” Stroman said. “I think a lot of people avoid coming to New York and playing for the Yankees because of that reason. I feel like it brings out the best in me.”

We have heard similar things from other starting pitchers over the years upon becoming Yankees. James Paxton talked about how “pressure is a privilege” entering the 2019 season before proceeding to crumble under that pressure. Last winter, Carlos Rodon talked about how “just putting on these pinstripes is something special,” and then gave all Yankees fans a “special” season when he missed the first half of it and was the worst starting pitcher in the majors during the second half of it.

2. When the Yankees sign or trade for someone, they say it’s because they believe that person can handle New York without anyway of measuring or knowing who will or won’t perform well playing their home games in New York. When it doesn’t work out, they say it’s because that person couldn’t handle New York. It’s never because they targeted, traded for, signed or paid the wrong person.

“There is a population of Major League talent that does not want to play in the New York arena,” Brian Cashman said in introducing Stroman. “It’s too hot, it’s too difficult, it’s too much. That is not this player. This player wanted to be here.”

In Stroman, the Yankees are getting a pitcher who has pitched in big markets in Toronto, New York and Chicago, and in the postseason. They are getting a pitcher who is from New York, grew up a Yankees fan, has already pitched on the other side of the city and understands the microscope he will perform under every five days. It doesn’t mean it will work out. It doesn’t mean he won’t take to social media immediately following a bad start to instigate online fights with fans unhappy with his performance. For now, it just means he’s aware of what he has signed up for.

3. “The bigger the opportunity, he runs to the competition,” Cashman continued. “It’s how he seems to have been wired, all the way back to his amateur days.”

If that’s Cashman’s evaluation of Stroman, again, like I wrote last week, how was Stroman not a Yankee at the 2019 deadline? Especially since Cashman believes Stroman’s makeup dates back to his amateur days which predate 2019.

“Toronto, being in the division, was certainly going to ask more of us at that time,” Cashman said in reflecting on not trading for Stroman. “I just said, ‘For the amount of talent they wanted back, it wasn’t going to be enough of a difference-maker.’ That was my bad, because then how it played wasn’t certainly how it was intended.”

4. I wonder what the Blue Jays asked for in return in July 2019. Clint Frazier? Miguel Andujar? Tyler Wade? Estevan Florial? All the stud Yankees prospects who were later designated for assignment and released for nothing?

You have to admire Cashman saying the quote was “his bad” for how it played rather than saying it was “his bad” for not being willing to part with prospects that amounted to nothing or for not trading for Stroman, who may have helped the Yankees overcome the Astros in that year’s ALCS. 

Everyone always seems to be misquoting Cashman or taking his words out of context. In mid-November after Cashman spoke about Giancarlo Stanton and said, “He’s going to wind up getting hurt again more likely than not because it seems to be part of his game,” he later tried to backtrack and say his words were misconstrued. If Stroman fails as a Yankee, I’m sure Cashman will say his quote from this week about Stroman being “wired” to play for the Yankees isn’t what he meant.

5. Stroman can’t fail as a Yankee. He can’t because there are too many other questions marks in the rotation. Every starter other than Gerrit Cole has a lengthy and scary injury history, and it would be foolish to think the Yankees can navigate 162 games with the five names currently in their rotation. They traded away their starting pitching depth to acquire Juan Soto, and their master plan (their only plan to negate the depth they traded) fell through when Yoshinobu Yamamoto chose the Dodgers and their $75 million higher offer over the Yankees.

6. Cashman was asked about other Yankees on Thursday, including the disappointing Rodon and oft-injured Nestor Cortes.

“The feedback I’m getting is really good,” Cashman said of Rodon. “He looks like he obviously worked his tail off. Very optimistic that Rodon can return to form (and) be the pitcher that we know he’s capable of being.”

My nose still burns from the water I was drinking while reading that quote coming out of my nostrils due to uncontrollable laughter. I love a good “best shape of their life”-type story from the start of spring training, but to have one in mid-January for a starting pitcher who was the worst starting pitcher in baseball in his first year of a six-year, $162 million deal is truly absurd. Rodon looking “good” in mid-January should be the bare minimum to expect from someone who makes more than $800,000 per start whether he starts or not.

7. “All reports on him have been fantastic,” Cashman said of Cortes.

Here is the combined line for Rodon and Cortes from last season: 127.2 IP, 124 H, 87 R, 84 ER, 48 BB, 131 K, 26 HR, 5.94 ERA, 1.347 WHIP.

There’s a month until pitchers and catchers officially reports, five weeks until spring training games begin and 10 weeks until Opening Day. Let me know what kind of shape those two are in and how they look at the end of March, if they can both get to that point healthy and available.

8. When asked about Stanton, Cashman decided against unnecessarily criticizing his designated hitter like he did two months ago. Cashman commented that Stanton has a new “tact” to his offseason and that his training is “in a really good place between his diet and his offseason conditioning.”

I’m glad Stanton is eating vegetables and has possibly shied away from using a sledgehammer to pound a tire as part of his offseason strengthening routine. I don’t know that he’s an offseason workout change away from going from a .695 OPS in 2023 to even the mediocre .759 OPS (which he posted in 2022) in 2024. When Stanton wasn’t hurt last year, he was lost at the plate, taking middle-middle fastballs and swinging at sliders in the opposite batter’s box. It’s hard to believe a change in diet is going to help him with pitch recognition and pitch selection, but OK.

“He’s always been one of the most feared hitters in the game,” Cashman said of Stanton, clearly unknowing of the meaning of “always.” “And I think he’s locking forward to getting back to that.”

9. “The doctors have told us he’s 100 percent clear,” Cashman said about Anthony Rizzo’s health. “The type of concussion he hd, once he’s past it, will not return. I can’t speak to that. I’m not an expert. But there’s no looking back, just moving forward.

I’m glad Cashman clarified he’s not an expert on concussions. Here I was thinking Cashman was an expert on head injuries after he allowed Rizzo to play for three months and endure the worst three-month stretch of his career following a head collision. But nothing is better than Rizzo telling Aaron Boone of head fogginess prior to a three-game series in Baltimore in August, only to then play all three games before being shut down for the season after that series.

10. Aside from Jason Dominguez, who is expected to return sometime in the summer, every Yankee who is coming off a career-worst year or finished last season injured is either in fantastic shape or once again healthy. You don’t need to look at a calendar or outside your window in New York City to falling snow today to know what month it is. The overly-optimistic health and performance reports coming from the Yankees are all you need to know it’s mid-January.

The Yankees added to their rotation by signing Marcus Stroman to a two-year deal.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. At the 2019 trade deadline, the Yankees desperately needed to add starting pitching. Masahiro Tanaka was having the worst season of his career, James Paxton had been inconsistent and injured, CC Sabathia had an ERA hovering around 5, J.A. Happ was ineffective in his second season with the Yankees, and due to injuries, Luis Severino wouldn’t be available until September. The Yankees’ starting pitching situation was a mess with a lack of organizational depth that would grow more shallow with the eventual suspension of Domingo German.

2. The Yankees had an opportunity to improve that rotation by trading for 28-year-old Marcus Stroman, who boasted a 2.96 ERA in 21 starts for the Blue Jays through the end of July. They didn’t.

“We were interested, but we didn’t think he would be a difference-maker,” Brian Cashman said at the time about not trading for Stroman. “We felt he would be in our bullpen in the postseason.”

3. Three years before making the same claim about Jordan Montgomery (who it turns out is a pretty good postseason starter), Cashman and his team failed to properly evaluate Stroman. The Yankees went into the postseason with a three-man rotation of Tanaka, Paxton and Severino, put Happ and Sabathia in the bullpen and turned to Chad Green as an opener when they needed a fourth starter. In the ALCS, Tanaka, Paxton and Severino couldn’t give the team length, Happ allowed a walk-off home run as a reliever in Game 2, Sabathia blew out his shoulder in Game 4 and Green’s opening act in Game 6 put the Yankees behind three runs in the first inning. A masterclass in roster construction by Cashman. After the series ended, the Yankees’ elite relievers, all of which were no longer effective by Game 6 complained of fatigue. You know who would have likely prevented that fatigue? Stroman, who gave the Blue Jays and Mets length for the entirety of 2019.

4. That season was either Stroman’s best (137 ERA+) or second-best season (he had a 145 ERA+ in 201 innings in 2017) in the majors depending on how you want to view or value each. He was in his prime and had done an excellent job combating the juiced baseball, and still, the Yankees didn’t want him.

Stroman is now 32 and will turn 33 less than five weeks into the 2024 season. He’s coming off back-to-back seasons for the Cubs in which he missed 20 percent of his starts due to injury. Apparently, now the Yankees consider him to be a difference-maker.

5. On Thursday, after failing to increase their offer for the Yoshinobu Yamamoto and after lowballing reigning NL Cy Young winner Blake Snell, the Yankees signed Stroman to a two-year, $37 million deal.

So what changed in the four-and-a-half years since Cashman passed on Stroman at a time when the Yankees desperately needed him? The Yankees grew even more desperate is what changed.

6. Coming off an embarrassing 82-80 season in which the Yankees couldn’t qualify for the postseason in a format in which 40 percent of the league is eligible, the Yankees’ offseason plan was to trade for Juan Soto and sign Yamamoto. They used up every last starting pitching resource to acquire Soto, thinking the addition of Yamamoto would cancel out the lost starting pitching depth. When that failed, the Yankees were left without a plan, much like they were 13 years ago when Cliff Lee signed with Phillies, and the Yankees’ lack of a Plan B led to them replacing Andy Pettitte and the idea of Lee with Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia.

The Yankees’ rotation-enhancing options quickly went from penciling in Yamamoto as the No. 2 Carlos Rodon was supposed to be to either overpaying for Snell or Montgomery (who Cashman dealt in 2022 because he didn’t see Montgomery being a postseason starter for his team) or signing Stroman and all the baggage that comes with him. Knowing the cost of each, the Yankees made a “Hey, we tried!” offer to Snell then pivoted to Stroman.

7. Stroman has worn out his welcome at every place he has been: the Blue Jays, Mets and Cubs. The New York native, who was suspended in the minors for using a performance-enhancing substance frequently engages with critical fans on social media (which is always a good idea) and has spent the last four-plus years since Cashman made the “difference-maker” comment bashing the Yankees through social media. (Oddly enough, all past Yankees bashing done by Stroman has now been scrubbed from his social media accounts.) When Stroman pitches poorly, rather than be accountable, his first instinct seems to be to search for his name on X/Twitter and respond to anyone who has mentioned his most recent performance. Rodon blowing a kiss to heckling fans after he missed most of last season and then pitched poorly when he did pitch is minor-league softness compared to what Stroman is capable of.

Stroman has his issues, both on the mound where underlying metrics suggest his prime is over, and off the mound, where he will go off on fans when he doesn’t meet expectations. The Yankees had to fill their hard-to-root for quota somehow with the recent losses of Josh Donaldson, Domingo German and Jimmy Cordero, and by acquiring Alex Verdugo and signing Stroman, they are doing everything they can to fill those voids.

8. The Yankees’ rotation is now made up of the reigning AL Cy Younger winner (Gerrit Cole), the worst starting pitching in the majors in 2023 (Carlos Rodon), a starter who went down in the 2022 postseason with an injury and then made only 12 starts in 2023 because of injuries (Nestor Cortes), an oft-injured righty who just pitched a career high in innings to middling results (Clarke Schmidt) and Stroman, who again missed 20 percent of last season.

The Yankees still need to add another starter, whether it’s Snell or Montgomery. Bringing back Luke Weaver isn’t going to help me sleep at night, and the odds of Rodon, Cortes, Schmidt and Stroman all being healthy and available when the seasons starts at the end of March is a four-leg parlay I want no part of.

9. “Hope” should never be a word associated with the Yankees during an offseason. The Yankees have the ability to remove the idea of “hope” from their offseason plans every year, and yet, every year they continue to make that their organizational motto. You would think after 14 pennant-less and championship-less seasons, they would go back to their old way of doing business, signing and banking on sure-things rather than hoping and praying for bounceback seasons and Comeback Player of the Year nominations for members of their roster. But that’s all Yankees fans are likely left to do going into 2024 again: hope and pray that a group of oft-injured, over-30 players and pitchers somehow defy their individual injury histories and recent performance issues.

10. Hopefully, Stroman pitches well for the Yankees (as well as he would have in 2019 had they acquired him in his prime), and he doesn’t feel the need to search for his name on social media and wage a war with the largest fan base in the sport. If he doesn’t pitch well, or if he does come decide to take out any performance-related frustrations on fans, he’s at least in the right environment to do so where his new manager will be there to defend, support and lie for him to no end. Let’s “hope” Stroman is an All-Star again in 2024 like he was in 2023 and it all works out.

The Yankees lost out on free-agent Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The Japanese star signed a $325 million deal with the Dodgers and a lot of Yankees fans seem worried. I’m not one of them.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I thought I would be more upset about the Yankees not landing Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but I’m not. Losing out on Yamamoto (and losing Michael King) hurts their overall pitching staff, but it’s not enough to ruin the 2024 Yankees. The Yankees may not have the pitching depth they had before trading for Juan Soto or the depth they thought they could replenish when Yamamoto was still an option, but pitching hasn’t been a problem for the Yankees in 15 years. The offense, however, is what has led to the demise of the current Yankees core in each of their postseasons and what prevented them from even reaching the postseason last year.

2. The Texas Rangers just won the World Series with a rotation similar to the Yankees’ and an inferior bullpen. They were able to win four postseason rounds and went on the road in the wild-card series to end the Rays’ season, swept the 1-seed Orioles in the ALDS, knocked off the Astros in Games 6 and 7 in Houston and then beat an NL Cinderella story that had eliminated the Brewers, Dodgers and Phillies.

3. Does that mean I don’t want the Yankees do anything else? Certainly not. The Yankees still need to build back up their starting pitching depth. It seems as though they are content with their current lineup situation, and because of that, pitching will be their primary focus for the remainder of the offseason. As currently constructed, the Yankees have a strong team on paper and in theory. On paper and in theory, it’s a roster full of household names that should return them to the postseason. In actuality, it’s a roster that is banking on the majority of its players to stay healthy and return to their usual form. I don’t want to go into 2024 with the roster representing the type of parlay card full of +400 and +500 underdogs the Yankees have put together in recent years. Parlays are for suckers and the recent rosters the Yankees have called “championship-caliber” were suckers. The long odds on that parlay card can be shortened by signing one or two of the leftovers starting pitchers with Yamamoto off the board.

4. The Yankees’ inability to sign Yamamoto makes their trade for Soto all that more important. If the Yankees hadn’t acquired Soto and were three days out from Christmas with a replacement-level outfielder the Red Sox didn’t want as their only move, then yeah, things would be bleak for 2024. Soto moved the needle that much for me and the 2024 Yankees. They will still need a lot to happen, but they need a lot less now that they have Soto.

5. Ultimately (credit to Aaron Boone for that word), the Yankees’ season will come down to the following:

Anthony Rizzo being healthy and the offensive force he was in April and May of last season.

DJ LeMahieu being healthy and productive.

Giancarlo Stanton having his first productive season in three years, and if not, the Yankees being willing to move him down in the order, bench him or release him.

Anthony Volpe taking a giant step offensively in his second full season after a rough rookie season at the plate.

Carlos Rodon not being the worst start pitcher in baseball.

Nestor Cortes staying healthy.

If all of those things happen, the Yankees will be fine. (Fine in terms of the regular season.) If half of them happen, they should still be fine in terms of reaching the postseason. If only the Rodon and Cortes needs work out, they will still be fine. If none of them happen, well, Yankees fans will have a lot of free time in August, September and October again like they had last season.

6. The addition of Soto helps mitigate a lot of the offensive issues and uncertainty, but had the Yankees signed Yamamoto they would still be hoping to hit on a few items from that list. Like Soto, adding Yamamoto would have lessened the need for those listed items to go the Yankees’ way, but neither Soto nor Yamamoto alone, nor together, would fully safe-proof the 2024 Yankees from some sort of roster parlay.

7. This offseason has felt longer than normal because the Yankees’ season was hanging on by a thread in mid-July and officially over on August 13. There was essentially seven weeks added to the length of his offseason because of how early the Yankees were out of it. When they open the season on March 28 in Houston, it will be more than seven months since they last played a truly meaningful game.

The Yankees’ lack of depth in all departments leaves little wiggle room for them to sustain injuries and underperformance the way they were able to in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. We saw last year what happens when the current roster is banged up, and next year’s roster currently has less depth than that. If you’re a Yankees fan who’s not already praying for a healthy 2024, you may want to start.

8. I don’t care how much money Yamamoto received and anyone who thinks it’s too much money for a pitcher who has never thrown a pitch in the majors or too much period has been fooled by the owners into thinking there is a limit to how much players can be paid. At least three teams offered Yamamoto $300 million and the team that landed him already invested $700 million in another player. That same team has more than $400 million committed to Mookie Betts and nearly another $200 million to Freddie Freeman and Tyler Glasnow each. Every team can pay and overpay for players. Some just choose to do it more than others.

9. The good news is I don’t see how the Yankees don’t re-sign Soto now with Yamamoto off the table. Hal Steinbrenner could have cried poor after 2024 and let Soto walk if he had just committed to a decade of Yamamoto at $300-plus million. But now? Now the only star position player for the Yankees under contract after 2024 is Aaron Judge. A year ago, Steinbrenner said, “Fans want to see stars,” and then paid a star-less lineup for most of 2023. The Yankees have two stars now and they will hit back-to-back in the order, representing the best back-to-back situation in the sport. I expect them to have both for 2024 and beyond. I have been under the impression the Yankees would re-sign Soto from the second they traded for him, and now I fully expect it. If they don’t, I will be right back to where I was as a Yankees fan the second before the deal for Soto was finalized.

10. Missing out on Yamamoto in this dreadful free-agent class means the Yankees can’t go into 2024 as the true odds-on favorite to win the AL. (Maybe that’s a good thing since they were the odds-on favorite for 2021 and finished third in their division and fifth in the AL and their postseason lasted nine innings.) The AL was wide open for 2023 and the Yankees chose not to be a part of it with their “Run It Back” roster. As open as the AL was last year, it’s similarly open for 2024. Without Yamamoto, the Yankees can’t truly separate themselves from the pack, but there are still free-agent signings they can make to at least have somewhat of an edge on the rest of the league.

After years of shopping in the clearance aisle for position players to no success, the Yankees finally acted like the Yankees once again and acquired a generational talent.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Last month when Hal Steinbrenner was staring into a laptop rather than publicly assessing the miserable 2023 season in person, nothing he said made me feel better about being a Yankees fan going into 2024. Unless Steinbrenner guaranteed he would stop at nothing to acquire Juan Soto, he wasn’t going to make me feel better about retaining his general manager and manager and his overall evaluation of his inherited franchise.

The Yankees acquired Soto on Wednesday night after days of negotiating, trading player names and finally reviewing the medicals of all of the arms the Yankees exchanged for the 25-year-old superstar. Today, I feel as good about being a Yankee fan as I have since the team won Game 5 of the 2022 ALDS over Cleveland. (That feeling lasted barely 24 hours with the Yankees losing Game 1 of he 2022 ALCS the following night. I expect this feeling to last longer.)

2. I have seen many Yankees fans who say they have been hard on ownership and Brian Cashman in recent seasons take a step back to applaud their work here. There will be no applause from me. This trade doesn’t erase last season. It doesn’t make up for the 2022 trade deadline disaster. It doesn’t negate not signing Bryce Harper, Manny Machado or Corey Seager when it would have only cost money — the Yankees’ greatest resource — to do so. Trading for Soto was necessary and it was the type of move the Yankees should always be willing to make. The trade for Soto is the Yankees as an organization doing their job, something they no longer often do. The Yankees doing their job every few seasons isn’t worthy of congratulatory praise.

3. This deal wasn’t a luxury move, the way it was when the Yankees acquired 28-year-old Alex Rodriguez in February 2004. This move was a necessity. The Yankees desperately needed a middle-of-the-order, superstar, left-handed bat to complement Aaron Judge, and paying whatever price San Diego demanded was going to be worth it. I have seen commentary suggest the Yankees overpaid for Soto or that the Padres somehow “won” a trade that isn’t even a day old. To me, the Yankees didn’t give up anything they couldn’t afford to lose, they acquired the best player in the deal, and it will take the Padres hitting a massive parlay with the arms they received to somehow come out on top from the deal after trading away a unique talent like Soto.

4. During the negotiating period, I came across real people who were worried the Yankees were overpaying for one guaranteed year of Soto by moving Michael King and Drew Thorpe. King was a great late-game, multi-inning reliever for the Yankees and showed exceptional promise as a starting pitcher over the final two months of this past season. He also blew up his arm when he fractured his elbow in July 2022 and the 104 2/3 innings he threw in 2023 represent the most innings he has thrown since 2018. Thorpe had a great season in the minor leagues, but again, it was the minor leagues and his success in High-A and Double-A is in no way indicative of his future success or potential success in the majors. Neither pitchers are good enough to prevent the Yankees from acquiring Soto, and thankfully they weren’t.

5. Soto isn’t a superstar, he’s a generational superstar. He’s a unicorn in terms of plate discipline in today’s game as he has more walks (640) than strikeouts (577) in his career, and only in his rookie season (when he was 19 years old) did he not outwalk his strikeout total (79 to 99). He has the fifth-highest OPS+ for any player with 3,000 plate appearance through his age-24 season with the only players above him being Ty Cobb, Mike Trout, Mickey Mantle and Jimmie Fox.

6. Soto just turned 25 at the end of October and has already played six full seasons in the majors. What he accomplished through his first six years and his age-24 season is ridiculous: posted a .923 OPS as a 19-year-old, led the Nationals to a championship as a 20-year-old with a .949 regular-season OPS and 1.178 World Series OPS; won the batting title (.351 average) as a 21-year-old, recorded the first 145-walk season in 17 years (Barry Bonds) as a 22-year-old; drew another 135 walks and added a Home Run Derby crown as a 23-year-old; played in all 162 games with 132 walks and a .930 OPS as a 24-year-old.

7. To put into perspective just how young Soto is and how absurd it is that he has been in the league for six years already, here is Soto compared to the ages of other Yankees considered “kids” by the organization and fan base:

Estevan Florial: 26.0
Juan Soto: 25.1
Oswaldo Cabrera: 24.9
Austin Wells: 24.5
Anthony Volpe: 22.7

8. Once Jasson Dominguez returns in the summer, the Yankees have the ability to use this lineup:

DJ LeMahieu
Juan Soto
Aaron Judge
Jasson Dominguez
Gleyber Torres
Anthony Rizzo
Giancarlo Stanton
Austin Wells
Anthony Volpe

Here is a real lineup the Yankees used in September:

Estevan Florial
Aaron Judge
Gleyber Torres
Austin Wells
Anthony Volpe
Jake Bauers
Oswald Peraza
Oswaldo Cabrera
Everson Pereira

9. In the past, Soto has said he prefers to hit third. Whether he still feels that way and if it will be Judge then Soto or Soto then Judge in the Yankees lineup is now the team’s biggest offensive problem. For long stretches of last season, Josh Donaldson, Giancarlo Stanton, Willie Calhoun, Harrison Bader and Jake Bauers took turns hitting second and third. The team has come a long way since late last night.

10. I don’t think the Yankees traded for Soto with the idea of taking one shot at ending the championship drought with him on the roster. I think they made this move with the idea they will do whatever it takes to extend him (unlikely with Scott Boras as his agent) or re-sign him. Ideally, the Yankees would pay him before the other 29 teams have a chance to, but if they aren’t able to (and I don’t think they will be able to with the way Boras operates) then at least they have a season together to lay the groundwork needed to keep him a Yankee for the rest of his career.

The Yankees have passed on too many mid-20s position players in recent years (Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Corey Seager) with their decisions to pass immediately coming back to haunt them. The focus for the Yankees with Soto can’t just be for 2024.