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 was the 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.

The Yankees are no better today than they were when they were embarrassed in the ALDS by the Blue Jays. In fact, they’re worse. Because at least when they were getting run out of Rogers Centre and eliminated at Yankee Stadium, they still had Cody Bellinger, the best Yankees version of Devin Williams and the possibility that Luke Weaver could turn it around. Now Williams and Weaver are Mets and Bellinger remains a free agent.

Every offseason under Aaron Boone I have joked about the Yankees “running it back” for the next season, and while they have mostly “run it back” from season to season, there has always been at least some slight personnel change from a lineup perspective. From 2025 to 2026 though, they may truly run it back, especially if they re-sign Bellinger.

Because the Yankees’ front office believes they are smarter than everyone else, there’s no doubt they believe the 94-win team they had last season was a “championship-caliber” club, even if they blew an eight-game lead to the Blue Jays, barely eked out a best-of-3 win over the Red Sox and then got humiliated by the Blue Jays in the ALDS. Joel Sherman has frequently talked about the Dodgers’ internal mindset being that if you reach the postseason enough, eventually everything will go your way, which is clearly the same philosophy the Yankees operate under. But it wasn’t until the Dodgers got Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani atop their lineup and started spending more annually than both New York teams that they were able to rid themselves of their postseason shortcomings. The Yankees don’t have anything close to the 1 through 5 the Dodgers send out every night (the three aforementioned along with Will Smith and Teoscar Hernandez) and they don’t want to spend anything close to the Dodgers to compete for the best available free agents, whether position players or pitchers.

It’s hard enough to get excited for baseball season when it’s under 10 degrees in New York City, dark every day by 4:30 and the holidays are over, it’s even harder when the offseason highlights to date have been Hal Steinbrenner telling the world with a straight face the Yankees don’t turn a profit and Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone talking about Sonny Gray. As the Yankees embark on Year 9 under Boone and Year 17 since their last championship, with six weeks until spring training, the start of the 2026 calendar year feels a lot like the end of the 2025 Yankees season.

It doesn’t bother me that the baseball offseason is a slog compared to what it used to be (before the Bryce Harper/Manny Machado class). There’s no rush to sign anyone given the lack of a salary cap and who cares if the top free agents sign at the beginning of December or the beginning of February? It doesn’t matter to me if the Yankees better themselves today or a month from now. It only matters that they better themselves in the winter instead of waiting until July because the team that wasn’t good enough to get out of the ALDS in 2025 isn’t going to be good enough to win it in 2026 without upgrades, and Bellinger isn’t an upgrade since he was on last year’s team. The Yankees don’t just need Bellinger, they need Bellinger and more this winter. Unfortunately, I doubt the smarter-than-everyone decision makers feel the same.

I liked Sonny Gray. I wanted to keep liking him too, but he made it impossible. Not because he wasn’t with the Yankees what he was at his best with the A’s (and what he has been since leaving the Yankees). It wasn’t even because of his performance, which was OK in 11 starts in 2017 (3.72 ERA and 4.87 FIP) and then abysmal in 27 starts and 30 games in 2018. It was because of how he handled his time in New York and how he evaluated his performance.

Long before exaggerating and flat-out lying about performances became the nightly routine it is now in the Yankees’ manager’s office and clubhouse, Gray was at the forefront of telling you what you watched wasn’t how it should be interpreted in the Aaron Boone era. As Gray pitched to a 4.90 ERA and pitched himself out of the rotation in 2018, he frequently acted as though his efforts were better than the results showed.

In his last start of May 2018, Gray was destroyed by the Angels. He was given a 4-1 lead through the second inning and made it disappear almost as quickly as he got it. His line for the night: 3.2 IP, 7 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 3 BB, 7 K, 1 HR.

“I thought I commanded my two-seam well,” Gray said after his ERA ballooned to 5.98. “I think it was my four-seam that every time I threw it, it kind of leaked back over the middle of the plate. Slider was good. Yeah, I think the stuff was good.”

In 3 2/3 innings, Gray put 10 runners on base, walked three, allowed seven hits, allowed three extra-base hits, walked Kole Calhoun (.160/.195/.199), walked in a run and hit a batter. But there he was telling everyone his “stuff was good.” It was scary to think what Gray would look like if he didn’t have his “good stuff” and then we found out. For the next two months, he stayed in the rotation and continued to get the shit beat out of him. Every once in a while he would throw a gem just to make you think for a moment maybe he figured it out only to follow it up with a disaster. The final straw came on August 1 when the 115-loss Orioles got to him for eight hits, seven earned runs and two walks over 2 2/3 innings in a loss. Gray was removed from the rotation after that and traded after the season.

Instead of becoming a young, controllable starting pitching success story for the Yankees, Gray was just another in the long line of young, controllable starting pitching failures Brian Cashman has acquired as Yankees general manager. After 28 seasons as general manager, Cashman has still failed to acquire a successful young, controllable starter. Gray, Jeff Weaver, Javier Vazquez, Michael Pineda, Nathan Eovaldi, James Paxton, Jameson Taillon, they all failed in New York and were traded or let walk in free agency. They all blew up in the postseason or were left off postseason rosters completely.

There was a reason the Yankees gave up three of their better prospects in the summer of 2017 for Gray and there’s a reason why the team let him start Game 1 of the 2017 ALDS and Game 4 of the 2017 ALCS. There’s a reason why the Yankees let him keep starting all the way until August in 2018 even though he was nearly a guaranteed loss every time he took the ball. There’s a reason why so many teams were connected to him when the Yankees shopped him and why the Reds ultimately decided to trade for him and give him a $30.5 million extension after the trade, disregarding his awful 2018 season. And there’s a reason why David Ortiz said the following about Gray in 2015:

“The last few seasons, the toughest guy I’ve faced is Sonny Gray from Oakland. This kid’s stuff is legit … the first time I see this Gray kid on the mound, I can’t help but notice he’s 5’10” and skinny. He looks like the guy who fixes my computer at the Apple Store. I’m thinking, Here we go. This is gonna be fun. Then he took me for a ride, man. Fastball. Sinker. Slider. Curve … Whap. Whap. Whap. You have no idea what this kid is going to throw. He drives me crazy.”

The reason for all these things is that Gray had the ability, talent, stuff and repertoire to be a perennial Cy Young candidate. The pitcher Ortiz was talking about is the one who pitched to a 2.88 ERA over 491 innings in his first three seasons in the league and who shut out the Tigers over eight innings in Game 2 of the 2013 ALDS. That’s the pitcher the Yankees thought they were getting. That’s the pitcher I thought the Yankees were getting.

The Yankees essentially did get that pitcher … when they were on the road. When Gray was away from Yankee Stadium, he was his usual self, but when the Yankees were home, it was like watching Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS every start.

Home (15 games, 11 starts)
59.1 IP, 78 H, 47 R, 46 ER, 35 BB, 45 K, 11 HR, 6.98 ERA, 1.904 WHIP

Away (15 games, 12 starts)
71.0 IP, 60 H, 26 R, 26 ER, 22 BB, 78 K, 3 HR, 3.17 ERA, 1.155 WHIP

At Yankee Stadium, opposing batters teed off on him like a collective MVP candidate (.318/.406/.527), while on the road opposing batters hit him like a backup catcher (.226/.295/.320). Unfortunately, the Yankees couldn’t destroy the rest of their rotation by moving everyone around to accommodate Gray’s inability to pitch in the Bronx, so they instead made Austin Romine his personal catcher as if Gary Sanchez was the problem. When the hopeful magic trick of having Romine turn around Gray’s season proved ineffective, the Yankees continued to stick with the meaningless experiment.

The 2018 Yankees went 11-12 when Gray started and 89-50 in all other games, winning 100 games despite Gray’s miserable season. He was left off the postseason roster, and the second the season ended, Cashman went to work openly showing his displeasure with Gray’s performance and ending his Yankees tenure by saying things like “It hasn’t worked out thus far” and “I think that we’ll enter the winter, unfortunately, open-minded to a relocation” and “It’s probably best to try this somewhere else” and “Our intention is to move Sonny Gray and relocate him.”

In Gray’s first day as a Yankee, he met with the media and talked about how excited he was to be a Yankee. He went out of his way to pen a piece in The Players’ Tribune titled ‘New York, I’m Ready to Go.’ In it, he said, “I couldn’t be happier” to be a Yankee, wrote about watching the 2009 Yankees and how his new teammates “have been awesome” and how he was “welcomed with open arms.” Gray would go on to be a guest on CC Sabathia’s podcast to reinforce all of these ideas.

Because of all this and because Gray went above and beyond to express his admiration of the Yankees and his happiness being a Yankee, it makes his comments over the last week since being traded to the Red Sox more than puzzling.

“I never wanted to go there in the first place,” Gray said of the Yankees this past week, which seems odd since his 2017 piece in The Players’ Tribune is hundred of words saying the complete opposite.

“It’s easy to hate the Yankees,” Gray said, which is fine. It’s something I would expect anyone who joins the Red Sox to say, whether said in jest or not. But it comes off as fake when you factor in every anti-Yankees claim Gray made at his first Red Sox press conference contradicts everything he said in 2017 and 2018.

“I just wasn’t myself,” Gray said of his time in New York. (Whose fault is that?) “I don’t know what led to that or anything.”

I think we know what led to that: pitching in New York. Here are Gray’s 2018 splits again:

Home (15 games, 11 starts)
59.1 IP, 78 H, 47 R, 46 ER, 35 BB, 45 K, 11 HR, 6.98 ERA, 1.904 WHIP

Away (15 games, 12 starts)
71.0 IP, 60 H, 26 R, 26 ER, 22 BB, 78 K, 3 HR, 3.17 ERA, 1.155 WHIP

Gray is aware that pitching for the Red Sox is the equivalent to pitching for the Yankees and possibly worse, right? If he pitches the way he pitched with the Yankees with the Red Sox, he will deal with the same scrutiny and I’m sure he will deal with it the same way. Wherever Gray’s next stop is, he’ll tell everyone he never wanted to go to the Red Sox in the first place, even though he had to waive his no-trade clause to go there. And that’s what I’m rooting for and every Yankees fan should be.