I really didn’t think I would care at the inevitable outcome of this baseball season. After 108 regular-season wins and their postseason run, I thought I would be able to shrug off the Red Sox winning the World Series, but I was wrong. I was very wrong.

The Yankees failed to stop the Red Sox in the postseason after failing to beat them in the regular season. Ownership stood pat, worrying about the luxury tax and not actual wins and losses, while the Red Sox did everything they could to win a championship and they did. The Yankees came within one win of the World Series in 2017, and in 2018, Hal Steinbrenner decided to cut his team’s payroll by roughly $50 million because he was worried about money, something his family’s Yankees have never worried about. Meanwhile, the Red Sox and Dodgers came on spending, trying to improve their team in every possible way, and to no surprise, the two met in the World Series. I miss the Yankees not being worried about every penny and not caring about the luxury tax.

It’s not that the Red Sox won the World Series, well, OK, it is that. But it’s more of how they won. And I don’t mean by Aaron Boone, A.J. Hinch and Dave Roberts doing everything they could to roll out a red carpet and escort them right to a championship. I mean how they won with former Yankee letdowns Eduardo Nunez, Nathan Eovaldi and World Series MVP Steve Pearce serving as heroes in October.

The trio of former Yankees couldn’t have been more disappointing during their time in pinstripes. Nunez was an overhyped prospect who Brian Cashman who hung on to for too long before letting go for nothing. Eovaldi was a hard-throwing 25-year-old who couldn’t strike anyone out when they traded Martin Prado and David Phelps for him and he left the Yankees as a hard-throwing 26-year-old who couldn’t strike anyone out and who needed another Tommy John surgery. Pearce had one of the shortest and worst stints as a Yankee when he played for the team six years ago.

That’s the general overview of how each of the three were complete letdowns for the Yankees, but it goes much deeper than that. Much deeper.

EDUARDO NUNEZ
I don’t know if I will ever hate a player more than Nunez. Well, it’s not so much him I hate because it’s not his fault he’s not very good, it’s Brian Cashman and the Yankees’ fault for thinking he was going to be the heir to Derek Jeter at shortstop. Instead, Nunez couldn’t play shortstop, couldn’t play any infield position really, and was eventually moved to the outfield before being let go by the Yankees for absolutely nothing. In 2014, the Yankees were willing to give Nunez’s job to Yangervis Solarte, who at the time had never played in the majors, rather than go through another season with Nunez.

It was Cashman’s awful evaluation of Nunez that cost the Yankees back-to-back World Series appearances and possibly back-to-back championships. Had Cashman been willing to part with Nunez, Cliff Lee would have been a Yankee. If Lee is a Yankee, he isn’t a Ranger and doesn’t beat the Yankees in Game 3 of the ALCS, and the Yankees don’t lost the pennant in six games. Cashman kept hanging on to the bad-ball hitter waiting for him to figure how to field a ground ball or show any semblance of discipline at the plate, and it never happened.

Sure enough, it was Nunez coming up like a Gold Glove winner in the ALDS, and sure enough, it was Nunez connecting with a ball at his laces to hit for a three-run home run in Game 1 of the World Series. As hard as it is to accept the Red Sox winning another World Series, it’s even harder to know Nunez was a part of it. “Eduardo Nunez is a champion” is something I never thought I would write.

STEVE PEARCE
Here are a couple tweets of mine from Pearce’s Yankees tenure.

Steve Pearce is the worst Yankee ever.

— Neil Keefe (@NeilKeefe) September 5, 2012

I always thought people sitting on oil were the luckiest people in the world, but I was wrong. It's Steve Pearce.

— Neil Keefe (@NeilKeefe) September 7, 2012

Once Pearce left the Yankees, he played for every other AL East team and shoved it right up the Yankees’ ass.

Pearce was an awful Yankee. Yes, his time with the Yankees was a very small sample size of 12 games and 30 plate appearances, but in those plate appearances, he hit .160/.300/.280 with one home run and four RBIs. That was back in 2012 when the Yankees were trying to win the division and avoid the first year of the wild-card format, so his at-bats were going at a crucial time. Since then, Pearce has gone on to play for the Orioles, Rays, Blue Jays and Red Sox moving around the AL East and destroying the Yankees at every opportunity. Here is how he has done against the Yankees since they removed him from the team.

2013: 2-for-6, .333/.333/.500, 2B

2014: 14-for-47, .298/.411/.553, 3 2B, 3 HR, 7 RBIs

2015: 5-for-34, .147/.256/.294, 2 2B, 1 HR, 3 RBIs

2016: 13-for-47, .333/.447/.590, 1 2B, 3 HR, 6 RBIs

2017: 10-for-28, .357/.406/.750, 2 2B, 3 HR, 6 RBIs

2018: 11-for-37, .297/.395/.757, 2 2B, 5 HR, 14 RBIs

Aside from 2015, Pearce has essentially been David Ortiz 2.0 against the Yankees.

It didn’t surprise me at all when Pearce single-handedly put the Yankees away in the division race back in August and it was business as usual when he went 4-for-12 against the Yankees in the ALDS. It was just the icing on the cake when he hit three home runs and drove in eight in five games in the World Series en route to being named World Series MVP.

I don’t care what team Pearce is on next season, but if the Yankees face him, he needs to be hit on the first pitch he sees against them. I don’t care who the pitcher is, what the score is, what the situation is or how important the game is. Pearce needs to be hit.

NATHAN EOVALDI
Never trust a pitcher who throws triple-digit fastballs and can’t strike anyone out and that’s exactly what Eovaldi is. The Dodgers gave up on him and the Marlins gave up on him despite him being 24 years old with incredible velocity because he didn’t have an out pitch and he didn’t know where the ball was going. So the Yankees gave up Martin Prado and David Phelps because of the glamour of Eovaldi’s fastball, thinking they would be the ones who could fix him. They weren’t.

Eovaldi pitched to a 14-3 record in 2015, so every idiot that relies on wins and losses to determine a pitcher’s success thought he had a great season. It didn’t matter that he received 5.75 runs of support per game or that he routinely struggled to get through five innings and qualify for a win because he needs 20-plus pitches per inning. In 2016, it was more of the same. Eovaldi pitched to a 4.76 ERA over 21 starts and 24 games before being shut down for another Tommy John surgery, ending his time with the Yankees as they let him leave at the end of the season.

When Eovaldi returned to baseball this season and pitched well with the Rays, many Yankees fans started to think about a reunion, having not learned their lesson from the last time Eovaldi was a Yankee. When he was traded to the Red Sox, I laughed with excitement, envisioning him destroying the Red Sox’ chances at winning the division. Instead, he shut out the Yankees in the all-important August series (even if faced a JV lineup) and then shut them out against in September. I never thought he would be able to beat the Yankees in October in the Bronx, but sure enough he did, after getting more run support than any other pitcher against the Yankees in the team’s history.

Eovaldi beat the Yankees and the Astros in the playoffs, mixed in a few relief appearances and then became a hero for his bullpen work in Game 3 of the World Series, even though he took the loss after giving up a walk-off home run. (Only in Boston could a losing pitcher become a “hero”.) Now Eovaldi is a World Series champion and some dumbass team is going to give him an incredible free-agent contract after this stretch run in the regular season and postseason performance.

It doesn’t bother me that the Red Sox played “New York, New York” after they won or that they keep referring to the Yankees every chance they get in their offseason victory lap. It only bothers me that they won and that the Yankees didn’t because they didn’t play well against them and didn’t do everything possible to put the best team on the field.

I don’t want to hear Hal Steinbrenner talk about how angry he is that the Red Sox won and his Yankees didn’t. Steinbrenner has the ability to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s time this Steinbrenner acted like the real Steinbrenner and didn’t worry about money, only winning.

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.

Brett Gardner will be a Yankee in 2019. The Yankees decided to buy him out of his $12.5 million option for next season for $2 million and give him a $7.5 million one-year deal, saving $3 million and giving themselves outfield depth, which they desperately lacked in the second half of the season.

The return of Gardner has been a touchy subject as the longest-tenured Yankee is viewed as the unofficial captain of the team, and it’s been hard for Gardner fans to accept his decline. Generally, all Yankees fans like Gardner and appreciate the career he has had and what he has meant and produced for the team for over a decade now. But was it the right move to bring back the 35-year-old outfielder, who will turn 36 during the upcoming season?

I have been torn on this decision for a while. I have always been a Gardner fan, despite his streakiness, but it sure looked like he was done for most of the season. To determine whether or not Gardner should have been re-signed, let’s look at the good and bad of his return, starting with the bad since everyone always asks for the bad first.

THE BAD
Gardner batted .236/.322/.368 this season. That’s the worst batting average and on-base percentage and second-worst slugging percentage of his career. His .690 OPS was also the worst of his career. It’s never good when a 35-year-old puts up the worst numbers of his career in the final year of his contract and then the team brings him back for another season.

Gardner started the season the same way he has for the past several seasons: batting leadoff. But eventually his on-base percentage got too low to justify giving him the most potential at-bats over the course of a game and season, and starting Sept. 1 he was no longer batting first most of the time. (Tip of the hat to Aaron Boone who was willing to pencil in Gardner as his leadoff hitter for the majority of the first 135 games of the season despite his drastic decline in production. Just another example of “A’s across the board” for the manager.) For the last month of the season, Gardner was the Yankees’ No. 9 hitter … when he played.

The trade for Andrew McCutchen resulted in Gardner no longer being an everyday player for the final month of the regular season and into the postseason. It took an Aaron Hicks injury in Game 1 of the ALDS for Gardner to play the next two games of the series, and it took McCutchen being a complete non-factor at the plate for Gardner to remain in the lineup. After struggling to find and maintain any level of offensive production during the regular season, Gardner went hitless in the playoffs (0-for-8 with three walks) and looked completely overmatched at the plate.

On top of Gardner’s decline from leadoff hitter to No. 9 hitter to fourth outfielder is Clint Frazier waiting for his shot at being an everyday major leaguer. Let’s say Frazier is healthy in 2019 and moving forward. Where is he going to play? Aaron Judge is in right field. Hicks is in center. Gardner is in left. Giancarlo Stanton can rotate in the outfield to give those three days off. The return of Gardner not only means the Yankees are going to give a lineup spot to a 35-year-old coming off the worst season of his career, but that there is nowhere for Frazier to play, barring an injury to one of those four. (I’m not even going to get into asking where Jacoby Ellsbury is going to play because who cares? He should never wear a Yankees uniform in a real game again.)

The Yankees weren’t good enough to reach the World Series in 2017. They weren’t good enough to get out of the first round in 2018. I’m not sure that continuing to bring the same exact team back once again is going to get them over the hump. While Gardner might be very, very, very low on the list of reasons why the Yankees were eliminated short of their goal the last two seasons, his situation was a fixable one with the $2 million buyout.

THE GOOD
Gardner has been everything you want from a Yankee over a decade. He was a good, solid fourth outfielder/role player turned everyday center fielder turned everyday left fielder (thanks, Brian Cashman for signing Ellsbury!). He is the longest-tenured Yankee and though Judge is certainly the face of the franchise, it’s Gardner who is always there for a quote or state of the team when the media comes calling. From everything you hear and read, he’s an excellent leader and great clubhouse presence, and those things do matter.

Even with his ugly offensive season, Gardner still plays incredible defense, as shown by his Gold Glove finalist nomination. He plays left field at Yankee Stadium better than anyone, and the difference between having him in left or Stanton or anyone really is night and day.

For all of his flaws in the batter’s box in 2018, Gardner did bat .264/.350/.428 with a .778 OPS and a career-high 21 home runs in 2017. So he’s only one year removed from the best power showing of his career. Maybe there was an unknown injury or underlying reason why he fell off this past season. Maybe this past season wasn’t the beginning of the end, but rather an anomaly. Maybe after an offseason of rest, 2017 Gardner will be the Gardner the Yankees are getting in 2019.

Gardner might not have the stereotypical power that comes with left field and left field in the American League, but he won’t give away at-bats, will make every pitcher work to get him out and when he’s going right, he will get on base. Sure, he’s streaky, and there’s a reason why I have called him “The Streak” for a long time now, but the idea is that his hot streaks will outlast his cold streaks in 2019. If they don’t, well, the Yankees are still getting Gold Glove defense and a leader for $7.5 million, and if it doesn’t work out, he can return to the bench where he finished last season.

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.

Have you ever sat down for a test and had to bullshit your way through the essay questions, so you ramble on and on about nothing just to fill space, giving no actual answer? That’s how Aaron Boone handled his end-of-the-season press conference.

The Yankees manager said nothing insightful and somehow still believes he made the right decisions with his bullpen in the playoffs. The only good thing to come from Boone having absolutely no clue what he was doing in the ALDS is that a lot of Boone supporters, both fans and media, now wonder if he is actually the right person for the job. It only took them nearly the entire season from what Boone displayed that first weekend in Toronto to realize the manager of the Yankees should probably have some managerial or coaching experience prior at any level before being handed a win-now team.

After 15 minutes of nothing from Boone, he took the final question of his press conference, and then Yankees public relations man Jason Zillo said the following:

“We’re going to have Cash in here in a few minutes, but in fairness to you guys (at this point Boone turns to Zillo like he remembers something and points at Zillo), there’s not a great point to drop this in, but I want Aaron to be able to respond to it. Didi had an MRI yesterday. He will undergo Tommy John surgery at a yet to be determined time …”

Boone spoke about nothing for 15 minutes and forgot to mention that the team’s starting shortstop and only left-handed, non-switch-hitting bat in their lineup played in the ALDS with a torn throwing elbow and is going to miss a large portion of 2019 following surgery on that elbow. How is it even possible Boone nearly let this slide without talking about it during his part of the press conference? Was he just going to leave if not for Zillo bringing it up? Judging by Boone’s reaction Zillo bringing it up, it sure seemed like Boone was going to walk out without having mentioned this incredibly significant news.

Boone said Didi Gregorius hurt his arm on a throw when he played a ball off the Green Monster in Game 2 of the ALDS. How did a shortstop play a ball off the left-field wall? Well, in the seventh inning, Ian Kinsler hit a ball off the wall that Andrew McCutchen played as if he had no basic knowledge or understanding of geometry. The ball bounced past McCutchen and to Gregorius, who threw it back in. (The image at the top is Gregorius getting ready to make the throw that tore his elbow.)

Boone is an idiot, but we already knew that. The real news is that the Yankees are going to be without Gregorius for some amount of time in 2019 and possibly the majority of 2019. And here I was thinking the 2019 Yankees would be better than the 2018 Yankees. The 2019 Yankees can still be better than the 2018 Yankees, but it just got that much harder to make that possible.

The Yankees have a few options with how they can handle this.

Option 1
The Yankees could keep Gleyber Torres at second base, if that’s where they feel he will play moving forward in his career, and use someone like Adeiny Hechavarria or someone with his defense-first skillset to play shortstop and bat ninth (unless Boone goes into 2019 thinking Torres should continue to bat ninth no matter what). I certainly don’t want the Yankees to play any part of next season with a near-automatic out like Hechavarria in the lineup, let alone possibly the majority of next season, so this would be the worst-case scenario for me.

Option 2
The Yankees could sign Manny Machado. This would mean while Gregorius is out, Machado could play short, Torres second and Miguel Andujar third. Or Machado third, Torres short and Andujar first or outfield. The first step to this process would be to sign Machado and then determine where Andujar’s future is. Gregorius is going to be a free agent at the end of this season, so maybe Machado plays third for 2019 and then shortstop in the years to follow, or maybe the Yankees also sign Gregorius, and Machado plays third and Gregorius plays short for the foreseeable future. That would mean Andujar becomes an outfielder or a first baseman. I wouldn’t hate this scenario, but it’s not my favorite.

Option 3
If the Yankees are going to sign either Machado or Bryce Harper, I would rather they sign Harper. The Yankees desperately need a middle-of-the-order left-handed bat and I would rather have Harper for the next decade than Machado. Signing Harper would mean Option 1 above would be less of an issue since having either a defense-first player at either short or second (whichever Torres isn’t at) would be negated in the lineup by the addition of Harper’s bat. If Harper isn’t an option for the Yankees because of the regrettable decision to add Giancarlo Stanton for 10 years then Option 2 becomes my favorite option because I do want either Machado or Harper (or both!).

Option 4
The unknown. The Yankees could do something not listed here. (This will likely be what happens since no one is expecting it.)

This Yankees offseason is so unpredictable and there are so many avenues they can take to set themselves up for the next decade that it actually hurts my head to think about. The Gregorius injury comes at a terrible time because it changes the course of how the Yankees planned to operate this offseason and it hurts his own personal value since he will become a free agent after missing part of the season due to elbow surgery.

The Yankees have an opportunity this winter to build on what began at the 2016 trade deadline and to put themselves in position to sustain success for a long period of time. The construction of their infield without Gregorius is now their first major decision of the offseason. They can’t get it wrong.

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.