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.
Last modified: Jan 2, 2026
