Yankees – Page 66 – Keefe To The City

Apr 11, 2022

Yankees Thoughts: Opening Series Could Have and Should Have Been More

It feels good to have Yankees baseball back for nearly every day of the next six (and hopefully seven) months. It feels even better that the team got off to a good start and took two out of three against the Red Sox. However, it should feel even better than it does.

It feels good to have Yankees baseball back for nearly every day of the next six (and hopefully seven) months. It feels even better that the team got off to a good start and took two out of three against the Red Sox. However, it should feel even better than it does.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Overall, it was a good weekend for the Yankees. But it could have and should have been better. (Kind of like their offseason.) The Yankees could have crushed the Red Sox with a win on Sunday night, sending the Red Sox to an 0-3 start and needing to only go 7-6 to win the season series, which is more important than ever since tiebreaker games no longer exist and the difference between going to the postseason or not could easily come down to head-to-head record. (Last season, it was the difference between the Yankees playing the one-game playoff at home or on the road.) Instead, the Yankees gave away Sunday night’s game. They had 16 baserunners in the game and left 13 on. Sure, they were unlucky at times with expected batting averages of .630, .990, .450 and .560 on balls that were outs, but they also left the bases loaded in the first and third, couldn’t score with second and third and one out in the fifth, hit into two inning-ending double plays and got the leadoff man on in five innings and only scored him once.

Yes, I went into the weekend wanting a series win, since that’s all anyone can ever want as a baseball fan. But the Yankees left a win on the table and a sweep on the table, and it’s something they did far too often last season.

2. For as frustrating as Sunday night was, the weekend as a whole was a positive, considering the Yankees recorded 87 outs and their starters only produced 31 of those outs (36 percent). Over an entire season, that’s a recipe for disaster, but in early April and coming off a shortened spring training, it’s acceptable.

I went into Opening Day with the same kind of bad feeling I went into the wild-card game with because it was Gerrit Cole against Nathan Eovaldi and because Cole can’t seem to pitch well against the Red Sox (or the Blue Jays or Rays for that matter) and because Eovaldi has dominated the Yankees ever since leaving New York as a complete bust. Two batters and six pitches into the game, the Red Sox led 2-0 and my bad feeling had come to fruition. After 10 pitches, Cole still didn’t have an out, and the Yankees were conducting their first mound visit of the season after three batters. After four batters, the Red Sox had a 3-0 lead in what ended up being a 27-pitch first for the Yankees’ “ace.”

3. After the game, Cole didn’t use the “sick my stomach” line he used after getting lit up and thoroughly embarrassed in the last game the 2021 Yankees played, but I was sick to mine. Cole had been awful again against the Red Sox (4 IP, 4 H, 3 R, 3 ER, 1 BB, 3 K, 1 HR), and this wasn’t a ‘Hey, it’s the first game of the season and the first of 33 starts for him’ performance, this was the latest example in a trend of his inability to beat the Yankees’ direct competition for the AL East.

Cole might not have been pitching with a hamstring injury like he was in October, but he did have to deal with the extenuating circumstance of having his start delayed by four minutes because of the Opening Day ceremonies.

“The festivities got a little away from schedule,” Cole said as an excuse for his first-inning meltdown.

It’s not quite the cringe-worthy, humiliating kind-of line Brian Cashman gave us all a few weeks ago when he essentially said the Yankees won the 2017 World Series, but it’s embarrassing for someone of Cole’s stature to act like a four-minute delay was the reason he walked Kike Hernandez on four pitches and then gave up three straight hard-hit balls with exit velocities of 101.4, 111.8 and 91.9 mph.

4. Thankfully, Cole’s disturbing first inning didn’t sink the Yankees’ day. Anthony Rizzo launched an important two-run home run in the bottom of the first to get the Yankees on the board in their eventual comeback, walk-off win. The next day he hit another two-run home run in another Yankees’ comeback win, and on Sunday night, it was his two-run single that tied the game in the fourth. Rizzo finished the series 3-for-10 with two home runs, 6 RBIs and three walks. He was easily the Yankees’ best position player over the weekend.

When the Yankees re-signed Rizzo, I wrote Anthony Rizzo Is Not Freddie Freeman. And it’s true, he’s not. I wanted Freeman because he’s the better player and because Rizzo was coming off the worst season of his career since his rookie season nine years ago, and players in their 30s don’t usually turn their performance trajectory around once it starts to head south. (At least not since the ’90s and early 2000s when there was a way to do so.

5. Giancarlo Stanton was the other position player star of the weekend, homering on both Friday and Saturday and becoming the first Yankee to homer in six straight games against the Red Sox. He has been a different player since the start of last season, and that’s because he has been a healthy player since the start of last season. In 2018, he played the majority of the season through a hamstring injury, in 2019, he barely played, and in 2020, it was more of the same from 2019. But since last year, the Stanton I thought the Yankees were trading for back before 2018 has been available and locked in. (Except for that swing on a pitch from Hansel Robles on Opening Day that bounced before the plate.)

6. For as good as Rizzo and Stanton were in the first three games of the season, the Yankees’ bullpen was the collective MVP of the series. Here’s their line: 18.2 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 9 BB, 19 K, 1 HR, 0.96 ERA, 0.803 WHIP. That’s simply ridiculous. That kind of line against the Red Sox’ offense shouldn’t be possible. It’s possible because this is the best Yankees’ bullpen ever.

I’m not just saying that because they pitched six hitless innings on Saturday and allowed one hit in 5 2/3 innings on Sunday. I say it because every option out of the pen is trustworthy. The Yankees don’t have to exhaust Chad Green and Jonathan Loaisiga because they have Clay Holmes and Miguel Castro and Lucas Luetge. They don’t have to always turn to those four because they have Michael King and Wandy Peralta. They have their top pitching prospecting in Clarke Schmidt out there (who was impressive on Sunday), I think everyone liked what they saw out of Ron Marinaccio’s horizontal break on his slider and we’re still waiting for JP Sears to make his debut. There’s no Nick Nelson or Brooks Kriske. Albert Abreu is gone. Brody Koerner and Justin Wilson aren’t coming into games. The Yankees’ bullpen is the deepest its ever been with reliable arms.

7. Rizzo and Stanton were great, the bullpen was outstanding and even Aaron Boone did his job well. Yes, that’s a real sentence I just wrote. Opening Day was the best managerial job he has ever done in a single game between his lineup decisions (playing DJ LeMahieu over Gleyber Torres and batting LeMahieu fifth), the order of his bullpen choices and his call to pinch hit Torres for Kyle Higashioka in the 10th. Don’t get me wrong, all of these decisions were simple and logical, but nothing comes easy to Boone, so when he does so many things right in a single day, it’s remarkable and worth praising. Boone had many chances to screw up Friday’s game and he never did.

On Saturday, he had another good game. Yes, two consecutive games of competent managing from a major-league manager. It’s been a long time since Yankees fans have experienced that. But on Sunday, Boone showed he hasn’t completely evolved into making the logical decision every time.

On Sunday, Boone sat LeMahieu. He sat his Gold Glove-winning second baseman, who hit a game-tying, eighth-inning home run on Friday, so that he could play both Torre and Aaron Hicks. A flat-out irresponsible choice for the third game of the season against a division opponent.

Prior to Opening Day, Boone spoke at length about how hard the decision was to play LeMahieu over Torres, as if he were choosing between two equal players and not the Yankees’ 2019-2020 MVP and a player who has ruined what was once a promising career. He said Torres “understood” the decision, which I’m glad an incapable defender with a .703 OPS over his last 676 plate appearances can “understand” why he’s not in the lineup. But two days later, Torres was in over LeMahieu.

8. This is going to be a constant problem this season. The Yankees’ obsession with load management and unnecessary rest (a strategy that has produced zero World Series appearances in 12-going-on-13 years) coupled with them having too many players for not enough lineup spots is going to be a daily theme. It’s not that they have too many “good” players for not enough lineup spots, they just have too many players they feel are worthy of everyday at-bats. No one more than Hicks.

The Hicks’ contract extension was a foolish mistake the day it was offered, and has grown into a regrettable decision, as Hicks entered 2021 having played in 62 percent of the Yankees’ games since the start of 2019. It’s not the money that’s the problem in ways that seven-year deals for players into their late-30s is normally a problem, since it was $70 million over seven years (and because I don’t care about the money since it’s not my money), but it is the money that’s the problem because it’s not enough money. It’s not enough money in that the Yankees don’t have to justify playing Hicks every day for a return on their investment, so Hicks can just linger on the roster for THREE MORE YEARS AFTER THIS SEASON and cause lineup chaos.

The crowded lineup is an issue because the Yankees have made it an issue. Rather than commit to playing Stanton in the outfield regularly and making Hicks the fourth outfielder, they go out of their way to clog up the DH spot with Stanton, forcing Hicks into the outfield and then forcing an infielder to the bench, and it seems like the Yankees are now going to rest an infielder everyday because of this. Hicks as a two-days-a-week player is fine with me. Hicks every day and forcing a better bat to the bench is not fine.

9. You can bet the house a regular (probably Josh Donaldson) will be on the bench in Monday’s series opener against Blue Jays and at some point in the series you will likely see Stanton (who mostly only bats) or Aaron Judge on the bench because it’s too many baseball games in a row for the Yankees’ best two hitters.

Judge needs to play. He needs to play because he’s the Yankees’ best player and the lineup’s most important hitter. And now he needs to play because he has to accumulate enough stats to try to top the $30.5 average annual salary he turned down prior to Opening Day.

I don’t know if Judge thinks he’s younger than he is, thinks he’s less injury prone than he is or think he’s the best player in baseball, but the offer the Yankees extended to him was more than fair. When reports came out he rejected an extension, I assumed he turned down like six years and $150 million. But seven years at $30.5 million per season? It’s likely he regrets that. For him to say he’s “disappointed” is off-putting. He’s disappointed he’s inaccurately valuing his own worth and turned down nearly a quarter of a billion dollars?

When Bryce Harper hit free agency, he was 26 years old, a .279/.388/.512 hitter who had won Rookie of the Year, and MVP, a Silver Slugger and was a six-time All-Star. He had only missed 17 percent of the games in his career to that point. He received 13 years and $330 million.

When Mookie Betts got traded by the Red Sox and extended by the Dodgers, he was 27 years old, a .301/.374/.519 hitter who had won an MVP, four Gold Gloves, three Silver Sluggers and was a four-time All-Star. He had only missed eight percent of the games in his career to that point. he received 12 year and $365 million.

Judge is going to be 30 in two weeks. When his new contract begins, he will a few weeks shy of 31. He entered this season as a .276/.386/.554 hitter who won Rookie of the Year and two Silver Sluggers and was a three-time All-Star. He has missed 24 percent of the games in his career from his major-league debut through the end of 2021.

If it’s true that Judge is seeking a nine- or 10-year-deal worth more annually than Mike Trout then good luck to him. Judge spent a good amount of his 20s on the injured list and we are expected to believe he will be healthier with age. Is he a fine wine? No, he’s the biggest everyday player in major-league history for which there’s no comparison as to how he will age, and he wants more annual money than arguably the best player in the history of the sport. I like 30-year-old Judge hitting second (or third like he did on Sunday) in the Yankees’s lineup. I will probably like 31-year-old Judge through 34-year-old Judge doing the same. But 39-year-old Judge and 40-year-old Judge making somewhere around $37 million per year and likely playing sparingly? No thanks.

10. I’m happy with the weekend, but I could be happier. I’m more content than anything since it was another missed opportunity from a franchise that has missed every opportunity in the front office and on the field in recent seasons.

There’s no off day on Monday, and there’s no break in the opponent either as the Yankees host the Blue Jays for the next four days. The Blue Jays entered the weekend as the odds-on favorite to win the American League, mostly because of their deep and vaunted lineup, and then they went out and scored 20 runs over the weekend. The good news is they gave up 23 runs. I don’t think the gap between the Blue Jays and Yankees is large, and there might not be a gap at all. We’ll start to find out on Monday night.

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Blogs • Yankees

Apr 8, 2022

Aaron Boone Manages Beautifully on Opening Day

The result was there in that the Yankees beat the Red Sox, even if the way the Yankees went about getting the result was excruciating and painful.

Opening Day always puts me in a good mood, and after the way the 2021 season played out, followed by six months of no Yankees baseball, sandwiched around a three-month lockout that delayed the start of the season by a week, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. on Friday wondering how I would get through the next seven-and-a-half hours. Twenty minutes after waking up, I was reminded how I would get through the next seven-and-a-half hours when the 18-month-old down the hall woke up and let me know he was energized and ready for the day since he hadn’t stayed up watching late-night baseball like yours truly. With my pregnant wife (who’s due in less than a week) sleeping, I would be starting this Opening Day with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Even though the offseason had been a huge disappointment with the Yankees purposely choosing to gamble on their entire 2022 season, not even the penny-pinching Hal Steinbrenner or the still-whining-about-2017 Brian Cashman could damper my mood. As I sat through my 243rd career viewing of Mickey and Professor Von Drake trying to restore all the colors of the Clubhouse, I started to think about the Opening Day lineup.

Josh Donaldson has to lead off. Anthony Rizzo will bat third because Aaron Boone feels he has to break up Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton. There’s no way DJ LeMahieu won’t be in the lineup. Gleyber Torres can’t play over LeMahieu.

Before I could think about how the bottom of the order would be constructed, I was being handed The Very Hungry Caterpillar to read.

As the morning went on, Judge’s contract extension became the focal point of the day, overshadowing the start of a new season. Judge had set a soft (and fake) deadline of first pitch of the season to agree to an extension with the Yankees (since if the Yankees offer him $300 million midseason, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to tell them the deadline had passed), and he had turned down the Yankees very fair offer of a seven-year extension from 2023 through 2029 at $30.5 million per season. For someone who will become a free agent for the first time at the advanced age in the baseball world of 30, and for someone who has missed 24 percent of the Yankees’ game since his major-league debut for various injuries, Judge comes off as rather foolish to reject the deal. I’m not sure if he’s in tune with how the free-agent market has played out in recent years, but a couple of weeks ago, Carlos Correa, whose three years younger than Judge and plays the more premium position, had to settle for a contract.

Cashman openly told the media and public the terms of the deal, so that the media and public would turn on Judge for not accepting the deal rather than turning on Cashman and ownership for not getting a deal done. Three-plus years ago the Yankees didn’t even meet with then-26-year-old free-agent Bryce Harper because they had Giancarlo Stanton locked up for a billion years, had Aaron Hicks who they were close to extending for seven years, had Clint Frazier waiting for his chance to be given a full-time or regular chance in the majors and would have to pay Judge, of course. Since then, the Yankees have done everything they can to not let Stanton play the outfield, Hicks has missed 68 percent percent of games following his extension, Frazier was released for nothing this offseason and now Judge still hasn’t been paid or extended. Nearly everything the Yankees have told their fans over the last four offseasons has been a lie. But again, Steinbrenner and Cashman couldn’t ruin my Opening Day.

The only people who could ruin my Opening Day would be Gerrit Cole, or the Yankees’ offense or Boone, or some combination of the three.

Cole tried his hardest to ruin the day, just like he had ruined the last game the Yankees played, against the same Red Sox in the one-game playoff in October, and just like he had ruined September by pitching like Nick Nelson, which had forced the Yankees to play that one-game playoff on the road.

Cole walked Kike Hernandez to begin the game and none of the four pitches were even close to the zone, as he looked like 2011 Dellin Betances trying to throw strikes. Cole needed to find the zone, so he grooved a first-pitch fastball to Rafael Devers, who took it for a strike. Cole went back to his fastball, and Devers planted it in the right-field seats. Two batters and six pitches in, and the Yankees trailed 2-0.

Four pitches later, Xander Bogaerts had himself an off-the-left-field-wall single, and 10 pitches into the season, the Yankees were conducting a mound visit. I couldn’t believe what I was watching, but at the same time, I could very well believe what I was watching as Cole has always struggled against the Red Sox, even during his time with the Astros, and he has also had trouble as a Yankee pitching well against the Blue Jays and Rays, all of which is a very big problem. It felt like I was reliving the wild-card game, but worse since Cole at least got two outs in that game before it unraveled and ended the Yankees’ season. So far he had faced three batters and hadn’t recorded an out.

After four batters, Cole still didn’t have an out. J.D. Martinez doubled down the right-filed line, and the Red Sox’ lead increased to 3-0. I wanted to laugh in order to not cry, but all I could do was sit in stunning disbelief. All I could think was thankfully my wife being due at any moment had prevented me from wasting my time, money and day at Yankee Stadium for this game.

Cole eventually got out of the first, needing 27 pitches to do so. For someone on a 15-20 pitch pitch count, he had just used 34-36 percent of his daily allotment of pitches to get three outs. Entering the game, the Yankees were likely going to need 12-15 outs from their bullpen, and now they were likely going to need to get something like 15-18 outs from their bullpen, which would impact their entire weekend. The game was on the brink of becoming a disaster, not just for Friday, but for Saturday and Sunday, and leading into the Blue Jays series as well.

With my most despised player in all of baseball in Nathan Eovaldi on the mound, Josh Donaldson swung at the first pitch of his Yankees career and grounded out to second. Judge swung at the first pitch of his post-turned-down-a-$30.5 million-per-year extension and blooped a single to right. Anthony Rizzo took the first pitch of his at-bat and then sent the next one into the right-field seats. The Yankees now trailed 3-2.

Cole settled in to put up zeros in the second, third and fourth, and Giancarlo Stanton hit a Yankee Stadium special for a solo home run to tie the game in the fourth. Cole’s day was over and the game was tied 3-3. Eovaldi didn’t have much left either, and so it would become a bullpen game for the last five innings, where the Yankees would have a decisive advantage, being able to rely on the strongest facet of their team with the Red Sox needing to rely on the weakest facet of theirs. The only thing that could screw it up would be the one who would decide which Yankees relievers would be used: Boone.

First Boone went to Chad Green, who pitched a scoreless fifth. Then he went to Clay Holmes, who did his job getting three ground balls (his specialty) with expected batting averages of .170, .250 and .120. The .170 went for a double inside the third-base line. The .250 moved the runner over to third. The .120 resulted in an RBI single with the infield pulled in. Holmes had done exactly what he was expected to do and the Yankees were once again losing, 4-3.

I can’t hear Garrett Whitlock’s name without thinking of the Yankees not protecting him in the Rule 5 draft to retain Nick Nelson and Brooks Kriske. And here he was, following former Yankee bust Eovaldi with scoreless inning after scoreless inning against the Yankees. The Yankees’ lineup was going down with ease over and over, and I was just waiting for the Red Sox eventually add an insurance run or two and put the game out of reach.

There has been an unnecessary amount of talk of late about whether LeMahieu or Torres should play second base regularly, and it’s been hard to hear and stomach. It’s inexplicable that Torres could play over LeMahieu. This isn’t the beginning of 2019 when Torres was coming off an unbelievable rookie season and LeMahieu was signed as a super utility player and wasn’t in the 2019 Opening Day lineup. This is the beginning of 2022, and Torres has been barely a playable option since the start of the shortened 2020 season, while LeMahieu bad been the team’s MVP in 2019 and 2020 before playing through a hernia injury in 2021.

Thankfully, Boone made the sensical decision to play the two-time Gold Glove-winning LeMahieu at second base on Opening Day. As one of the only Yankees to have success against Eovaldi, the Yankees needed both LeMahieu’s bat and glove in the lineup, not Torres and the prayer that he might ever again become the player he was in 2018-19. With one out in the eighth, LeMahieu hit a game-tying home run off Whitlock. 4-4.

The game remained 4-4, and in the bottom of the ninth, Judge doubled with two outs, and the Red Sox chose to intentionally walk Rizzo to bring up Stanton against Hansel Robles. Stanton struck out on three pitches in one of the least competitive at-bats you’ll ever see, which included him swinging at the first pitch that bounced several feet before reaching the plate.

The gimmicky automatic runner on second in extra innings rule had found its way into Opening Day for the Yankees for the second straight season, and the Red Sox plated that automatic runner to take a 5-4 lead. In the bottom of the 10th, Boone would call on Torres to make his season debut as a pinch hitter for Kyle Higashioka, who had the kind of forgettable day at the plate that he will have most times as a now everyday catcher in the majors. Torres was able to lift a fly ball to center to tie the game at 5. (After the game on YES, John Flaherty said he was confused why Boone pinch hit Torres for Higashioka. Apparently, Flaherty has never watched Higashioka play baseball.)

In the 11th, Michael King worked a perfect inning, looking as sharp as he always has out of the bullpen. (He should never be allowed to open or start a game. Just use him out of the bullpen.) And in the bottom of the 11th, Donaldson led off with a single up the middle to score the automatic runner and win the game for the Yankees.

Cole tried to ruin the game, and nearly did. The Yankees’ offense tried to ruin the game, and nearly did. The only one of my fears who never came close to ruining the game was Boone.

From batting Donaldson first, to playing LeMahieu over Torres and batting LeMahieu fifth, to pulling Cole after the fourth and going to Green then Holmes then Miguel Castro then Jonathan Loaisiga then Wandy Peralta then Aroldis Chapman then King, to pinch hitting Torres for Higashioka and to not bunting in extra innings, it was a masterpiece for Boone. It was easily the best managed game of his time as Yankees manager. Don’t get me wrong, all of these decisions were simple and logical, but nothing comes easy to Boone, so when he does so many things right in a single day, it’s remarkable and worth praising. Boone had many chances to screw up Friday’s game and he never did.

Four batters into the game, I had been dreaming about the lockout and how glorious those three months were without the Yankees to get worked up and angry about and to lose sleep over. By the end of the game, I was celebrating a walk-off win over the Red Sox with my 18-month-old son. (OK, I was celebrating and brought him into the celebration.) He didn’t know dad had just staved off a -170 money line loss, the Yankees had avoided yet another embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Red Sox, Cole once again couldn’t pitch well in a big game against not just a division rival but the rival, LeMahieu looked like his old self and Boone had finally displayed some semblance of being able to manager a Major League Baseball team.

The result was there in that the Yankees beat the Red Sox, even if the way the Yankees went about getting the result was excruciating and painful. It was a big win since every win is big, as proven by last year’s standings tie, which forced the Yankees to play the one-game playoff on the road, and it was mostly made possible by the decisions of Boone. What a way to start the season.

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

Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Offseason

Apr 5, 2022

Yankees’ Underwhelming Offseason Has to Lead to Overwhelming Season

Unfortunately, as a Yankees fan, the roster the Yankees have put the together is the one I have to root for. After months of writing and talking about the missed opportunity the franchise purposely created for itself, this week I need to put that aside and pray that what changes the Yankees did make will be good enough to win in 2022.

This offseason sucked. There’s no other way to look at it. The Yankees had an opportunity to completely upgrade their roster, change the comfortable-with-losing culture their manager has instilled within the clubhouse and become the clear favorite to win the American League and get back to the World Series. They instead chose to make marginal-at-best roster upgrades, extend the manager for three more years (with an option for a fourth year) and you would have to be a Steinbrenner, a good friend of Brian Cashman or the biggest Yankees apologist of all time to consider them the favorite, as of now, to win the pennant.

Unfortunately, as a Yankees fan, the roster the Yankees have put the together is the one I have to root for. After months of writing and talking about the missed opportunity the franchise purposely created for itself, this week I need to put that aside and pray that what changes the Yankees did make will be good enough to win in 2022.

No one expected the 2016 Yankees to be any good. And they weren’t.

They got off to a 9-17 start, and it was obvious they had to tear apart the team and play prospects, and by this time every fan wanted them to do just that. Free agency had been the Yankees’ strategy since the early 2000s and a way for the team to plug holes on their sinking ship. It worked at times as they were able to tread water, have winning seasons and reach the playoffs, but over the previous 15 years, they had won one championship. Eventually you need to start over. Eventually you need a new boat. The game had changed too much and the Yankees needed a new boat and Yankees fans wanted a new boat.

At the end of play on July 6, 2016, the Yankees were 41-43 and it looked like they would certainly be sellers at the deadline in three weeks, but ownership wasn’t on board. The Yankees then went on an 11-5 run through July 26, and were now in striking distance of a wild-card spot — only four games back — and ownership hadn’t budged on selling and giving up on the season for future seasons.

The Yankees then lost their next four games, one in Houston and a three-game sweep in Tampa Bay. It was the best thing to happen to the organization since the Astros, Indians, Expos, Orioles and Reds passed on Derek Jeter in the 1992 draft, allowing the Yankees to select him with the sixth overall pick. The losing streak pushed the Yankees out of reasonable contention, ownership gave Brian Cashman the green light to trade his veteran assets and begin the transition into “rebuilding mode.”

Andrew Miller (Indians), Aroldis Chapman (Cubs), Carlos Beltran (Rangers) and Ivan Nova (Pirates) were all traded, and Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira announced their retirements. Gary Sanchez and Aaron Judge were called up to become everyday players, and in the process, Brian McCann was relegated to backup duty, which would lead to his offseason trade to the Astros. (A trade in which the Yankees would pay McCann to beat them in Game 7 of the ALCS). The Yankees had finally decided to show off the depth in their farm system, and thanks to that four-game losing streak at the end of July, the depth only got deeper with the top prospects they received in return.

The 2017 Yankees weren’t supposed to be good either, picked by many to finish near or at the bottom of the AL East in what was certainly going to be a rebuilding season. But there ended up being no “rebuilding.” The Yankees seemingly hit on every prospect who reached the majors and the team went from preseason dud to postseason bound, winning 91 games and putting up a plus-198 run differential.

The 2017 Yankees overcame a 3-0 first-inning deficit in the wild-card game. They overcame an 0-2 series hole to the 102-win Indians to advance to the ALCS. They overcame another 0-2 series hole to the Astros to bring a 3-2 series lead to Houston for Games 6 and 7. Ultimately (to use Aaron Boone’s favorite word), they came one win shy of reaching the World Series for the first time in eight years.

For 2018, the Yankees essentially replaced Chase Headley, Starlin Castro and Jacoby Ellsbury with Giancarlo Stanton (the reigning NL MVP), Miguel Andujar, Gleyber Torres and the Aaron Hicks who was drafted in the first round. But once again, they came up short in the postseason.

The 2017 postseason loss wasn’t crushing. Rather it was an exhilarating ride, being back at a raucous Stadium seemingly every night in October and watching a young, homegrown core get within a game of the World Series. The 2018 postseason loss, on the other hand, was crushing. After once again winning the wild-card game, and taking a game in Boston, the Yankees became the favorite in what had become a best-of-3 with two games at the Stadium where they didn’t lose. Not only did they lose both, they were embarrassed in every facet of the game, especially managing, and their rival celebrated on their field en route to a championship season.

Because of the way the season ended and the team it ended against, 2018 is viewed as a disaster, and rightfully so. But if you go back to 2016, 2017 and 2018 were never supposed to be about the Yankees. They were supposed to be about the Indians and Astros and Red Sox and Cubs and Dodgers, and they were. The timeline Yankees fans were given and expected prior to Opening Day 2016 was always 2019, these Yankees just happened to arrive early. The 2017 and 2018 Yankees gave us two unexpected years of championship contention even if it didn’t end with a championship.

Going back six years, 2019 was always circled as the first season the Yankees would truly contend for a championship, and they did. But in what has become a decade-long trend, the team fell short with inconsistent starting pitching in October coupled with an inability to get a timely hit. Two years after losing to the Astros in the ALCS in seven games, the Yankees lost to them again, this time in six games, losing four of the final five games of the series for the franchise’s fourth ALCS in 10 years. Ultimately (I’m trying to use this word as often as Boone does in one of his postgame press conferences), the first season of the Yankees’ championship window came and went without a championship.

The 2020 season was to be the Yankees’ best chance at ending their championship drought, but things started to unravel in spring training with Luis Severino going down for the season, James Paxton needing a back procedure, and the entire starting outfield of Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Hicks expected to miss as much as the first half of the season. The shutdown in mid-March allowed for Paxton, Judge, Stanton and Hicks to heal, but it turned a 162-game season in which the Yankees’ depth would separate them from the rest of the division and likely league into a 60-game season mess. A second straight injury-filled season led to a mediocre 60-game performance from the Yankees, and in the postseason, the bats once against disappeared and Boone did all he could to eliminate his team in five games against the Rays.

The Yankees were the odds-on favorite to win the American League in 2021. They got off to a 5-10 start, were 12-14 at the end of April and 41-41 on the Fourth of July. A 13-game winning streak in July and August saved their season, only to be followed by losing 12 of 15 in August and September. The odds-on favorite to win the AL finished fifth in the AL, third in their own division and their postseason was over after nine innings.

The night the Yankees lost Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS I wasn’t upset. The series loss and losing both chances to advance to the World Series was disappointing, but the future of the team was so bright and so promising that losing to the eventual champions in seven games in a season in which the Yankees weren’t supposed to even be part of the postseason race didn’t hurt the way many other postseason eliminations have. Then again, I didn’t think the Yankees would be here having played four seasons with nothing to show for it other than embarrassment (2018), frustration (2019), humiliation (2020) and disaster (2021).

The grace period with these Yankees ended after 2018. (Unless you’re Cashman and believe the Yankees actually won the 2017 World Series, then the grace period is still going.) The 2022 season is now the current core’s fourth season in their “window of opportunity” to win a championship, and the window has closed much faster than expected, if it’s even still open. The season-crippling injuries to Severino, Judge, Stanton, Hicks and Luke Voit coupled with the underperformance of players like Sanchez, Torres, Sonny Gray and James Paxton over the last four years have caused the championship drought to continue. Only two players remain from the Game 7 lineup from the 2017 ALCS: Judge and Hicks.

There’s no more consolation prize for coming within a game of the World Series or winning 100 games and then getting blown out by your storied rival or losing in five games in the first round or eeking your way into the playoffs on the final pitch of the regular season. There’s no more excuses and no more “next year”. These Yankees were expected to truly contend in 2019 and it’s now 2022.

The Yankees set themselves up for the most second-guessed roster construction of all time if their 2022 creation doesn’t work out. Before and after lockout, they passed on every star, passed on every starting pitcher and passed on the A’s firesale. At the team’s end-of-the-season press conference on Oct. 19, Cashman said he would be making “upgrades” and that he would use the “free-agent marketplace” and “trade market” to acquire the available “legitimate options” for said upgrades. The “legitimate options” will be playing for the Dodgers, Braves, Rangers, Mets, Red Sox, Twins and Padres in 2022. None of them will be playing for the Yankees.

This is the team Yankees fans were given to root for and to get behind. This is the roster we are being asked to support and follow and invest our time and money into for the next six (and hopefully seven) months.

A year ago on Opening Day, Gerrit Cole couldn’t get through the sixth inning against the Blue Jays (a trend that would continue all season for the Yankees’ ace against the Blue Jays, Rays and Red Sox). Boone went to Nick Nelson, of all relievers, for the 10th inning in a 2-2 game with the automatic runner on second, and he promptly allowed Randal Grichuk to break the tie with a double. Trailing 3-2 in the bottom of the 10th, Boone’s No. 3 hitter Hicks took three pitches, all strikes, for the first out and Stanton took two strikes then swung through the third pitch of his at-bat before Torres struck out on five pitches. I wish I had turned off YES after the last pitch of that game and not turned it back on again for the rest of the season. Hundreds of wasted hours, dangerously high blood pressure, heartache and mental and physical fatigue would have been avoided.

I don’t want to look back on the 2022 season like I do the 2021 season and regret having wasted so much time. With the roster Cashman has created, it’s a real possibility. It’s not just a possibility, it’s the most likely outcome. For now, I will do my best to believe this roster can win. As a Yankees fan, I don’t have a choice.

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

Podcasts • Yankees • Yankees Podcast

Apr 5, 2022

Yankees Podcast: 2022 Over/Unders

Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes joined me to go through our annual over/unders for the Yankees’ roster.

Yankees baseball is back and so is the annual Yankees over/unders podcast.

Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes joined me to go through our annual over/unders for the Yankees’ roster.

Apr 4, 2022

Yankees Podcast: Optimism for 2022 Season?

The Yankees had the opportunity to put together a clear favorite roster in the American League for 2022. They instead chose to put together a roster that could be really good if an abundance of things go their way.

The Yankees had the opportunity to put together a clear favorite roster in the American League for 2022. They instead chose to put together a roster that could be really good if an abundance of things go their way.

Frank Marco of Bronx Pinstripes joined me to talk about the Yankees’ offseason moves and why there is optimism for the roster and team they have built.

Subscribe to the Keefe To The City Podcast.

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