Cody Bellinger is a Yankee (for at least next season since he has an opt out after 2027 and who knows if there will be baseball in 2027). He returns to the team on a five-year, $162.5 million deal to recreate the same lineup the Yankees finished last season with.
The Opening Day (Night) lineup on March 25 in San Francisco against Logan Webb now looks something like this:
Trent Grisham, CF
Ben Rice, 1B
Aaron Judge, RF
Cody Bellinger, LF
Jazz Chisholm, 2B
Giancarlo Stanton, RF
Austin Wells, C
Ryan McMahon, 3B
Jose Caballero, SS
(You just know Aaron Boone will have Judge batting third instead of second to give him fewer plate appearances.)
And that lineup looks like it did when the Blue Jays annihilated the Yankees in the ALDS. The only missing piece is Anthony Volpe whose absence actually enhances the lineup. That’s the lineup that mustered one run in Game 1, couldn’t score in Game 2 until the Blue Jays trotted out the bottom of their postseason roster with a 12-0 lead, briefly came to life to extend the season in Game 3 and then scored two runs on six hits against a Toronto bullpen game in the season-ending Game 4 loss. It’s the same lineup that disappeared for the entire summer and only reappeared when the schedule featured a September of teams with nothing to play for.
As of now, the Yankees believe they were a full season of Ryan Weathers in the rotation, a full season of part-time play from Amed Rosario and a half season of Gerrit Cole away from being a championship-caliber team because those three are currently the differences between the 2025 Yankees and 2026 Yankees. Maybe they’re right. Maybe if the Yankees had won one more game during the regular season and finished atop the division and the AL, they would have had the bye into the ALDS, would have been better rested for that series and would have used home-field advantage to eliminate the Blue Jays. It’s hard to believe that a team that allowed 37 runs in a four-game series would have been able to swing a 3-1 series loss in their favor simply by having the home-field advantage, but OK.
Last season, the Yankees were unable to beat the Blue Jays or Red Sox with any regularity in the regular season, going 9-17. They also went 2-4 against the Tigers and 2-4 against the Dodgers and Phillies. Built to beat up on bad teams with bad starting pitching and bad bullpens, the Yankees did what they were constructed to do. But against the league’s best, and in the postseason against quality pitching every game, they failed again. They barely eked out a series win over the banged-up and inferior Red Sox and then were blown out by the Blue Jays playing a brand of baseball the Yankees abandoned long ago. Now they are prepared to truly “run it back” in 2026 with the same offensive personnel that wasn’t good enough to hold an eight-game lead over the Blue Jays in the summer and wasn’t good enough to get out of the division series in the fall.
Yankees fans want their team to operate like the Dodgers, and they should, but they won’t. Yankees ownership uses their time with the media to advocate for a salary cap while suggesting the Yankees aren’t a profitable business, while the Dodgers, coming off back-to-back championships signed arguably the best closer in baseball and then gave out the highest average annual salary of the offseason as well. The only similarity between the two franchises now is the belief that if you reach the postseason enough times, eventually everything will go right and you will win it all. The problem with that is the 2013-2019 Dodgers had the same lack of postseason success the Aaron Boone Yankees have had. It wasn’t until the Dodgers traded for Mookie Betts, signed Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and started spending more than the Yankees that they were able to win it all.
The 2026 Yankees will go with the Boone era organizational strategy of running it back and believing this season ends differently than the last one. Sign second-tier free agents, trade for projects, continue to tell yourself homegrown players on the verge of being busts figure it out and pray this October is the October when the stars align.
Bringing Bellinger back with bare minimum the Yankees had to achieve this offseason, so it’s hard to feel good about the franchise that generates more revenue than any other team in the sport and is in the bottom half of the league of revenue-to-payroll ratio doing the bare minimum. There’s a lot of work to be done and less than a month until the start of spring training to do it.
In actuality, the Yankees’ work is done because they believe last year’s team was good enough to win it all, so why wouldn’t they just bring that same team back? This time the ball will bounce their way, the randomness of the postseason will unfold in their favor and luck will be on their side in a way it has been in October only once since 2000. They just know it will. This time things will be different even if the roster is the same.
Last modified: Jan 21, 2026
