The New York Yankees have broken my brain

On 8 June, I published a column paying fealty – and penance – to the beleaguered Yankees brain trust. I liked the way they plotted in quiet dignity to retool a pennant-winning team shorn of Juan Soto, and I applauded their classy reticence amid cheap trash talk from the gloating Los Angeles Dodgers.

Call it maturity. Call it delusion. Call it wilful ignorance. Regardless, I saw things from a new perspective. I embraced pragmatism while re-evaluating – and, in some cases, recanting – years of frustration with Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone.

Well, my piece offered a kiss of death, quite frankly. Since that column went live, the wheels have fallen off for the Yankees. Groundhog Day has dawned again, with the same old issues producing the same old results – the annual summer swoon derailing another promising campaign.

Indeed, after 13 barren years covering this confounding team, and many more following it, I have reached a disconcerting conclusion: the New York Yankees have broken my brain, and I no longer know what to think or feel about their current incarnation.

Since my column, the Yankees are 24-32. They have tumbled from first place in the AL East – 4.5 games up on Toronto and 8.5 games up on Boston – to third place – 6 games back of the Blue Jays and 1.5 games back of the Red Sox. Once a lock for the playoffs, eyeing a return to the World Series, this team is now clinging to a one-game lead for the third wildcard spot. There is a very realistic chance they will be home come October – an unthinkable notion just two months ago.

Other calamities have occurred, as well, beyond the upturned standings.

Aaron Judge, at his messianic best, suffered an elbow flexor strain, spending 10 days on the injured list and returning as a compromised DH.

Devin Williams, once an all-world closer, imploded, adding three blown saves to a 5.60 ERA.

Max Fried and Carlos Rodón, an imposing two-headed monster, came back down to earth, sporting ERAs over 4.00 since I showered them with praise.

Anthony Volpe, the supposed second coming of Derek Jeter, has looked more like Andy Cannizaro, hitting .218 while leading the American League with 15 errors.

Jazz Chisholm Jr., his middle infield partner, is second with 13. Oh, and he was recently doubled off first on a pop fly to second – the kind of boneheaded play that drove Morris Buttermaker to drink.

Meanwhile, Boone, the Yankees’ very own Buttermaker, refuses to punish sloppy play. No matter how many baserunning gaffes we see. No matter how many fundamental lapses we endure. And no matter how many times guys lose track of the outs. Boone just condones it all. Affirms it all. Praises it all. Because the Yankees are ‘elite,’ they have the talent to be great, and ‘it is all in front of us.’

Enough, already.

Stop patronising the fans who live and die with every pitch.

Undoubtedly, my column aged terribly. It reads like a frozen cold take exposed, and I’m here to offer a mea culpa. I got a whole lot wrong in that piece, and addressing those miscalculations – rather than burying them – feels essential. If only the Yankees felt the same.

Fundamentally, my column focused on the Yankees’ methodologies, which I misread in some respects – perhaps out of an innocent desire to accentuate the positive and, ultimately, see this team win its first world championship since 2009. Perhaps, subconsciously, I indulged in wishful thinking. Or wilful ignorance. Ultimately, I bought what the Yankees were selling, and the product is defective.

I agreed with Cashman’s remarks about the Yankees having excellent people adhering to productive processes. I said the Yankee brain trust is the envy of sports, and that leaving them to cook could relieve fans from skyrocketing blood pressure. I downplayed the Yankees’ prizing of analytics; praised their record of 32 straight seasons above .500; exaggerated their building of a logical foundation for sustainable long-term success; attempted to rationalise their aloof myopia; and dressed their stultifying stasis as reassuring consistency.

There is a kernel of truth in many of those portrayals, I still contest. The Yankees are respected among baseball’s inner sanctum. They do know better than me, and many fans, how to build a playoff-worthy baseball team. There is pride in avoiding losing seasons for over three decades. And they do have a pipeline of young homegrown talent – Judge, Luis Gil, Jasson Domínguez, Ben Rice, Cam Schlittler, Will Warren, George Lombard Jr., Spencer Jones – that will prolong an organic window of contention.

Ultimately, however, there is a fatal flaw in the Yankees’ modus operandi; a flaw I harped on for years before my recent mental blip. What is that flaw, exactly? The lack of an honest, altering feedback loop between their processes and the outcomes they deliver.

In many areas, the Yankees do adhere to best-in-class methodologies, but even those methodologies do not guarantee success in baseball, a game influenced by incorrigible luck. The Yankees’ inertia – their perennial ability to go close but not close enough – hinges on a refusal to honestly assess those luck-propelled outcomes and tweak the authoring methodologies accordingly. 

In practice, that reluctance – whether borne of arrogance, ignorance or a failure to modernise – creates a team that is good but not good enough. A team that emerges fruitless from 11 straight playoff trips. A team that loses the World Series due to fundamental mistakes then does exactly the same thing a year later. A team that fails annually but refuses to change its generative algorithm; the very algorithm that delivered failure in the first place.

Overwhelmingly, the Yankees’ terminal defect is one of input, of pre-configuration, of prioritising the wrong data. They worship at the altar of launch angle and embrace the maximalist endgame of analytic theory, which deifies the home run as the only thing on a baseball field that guarantees runs and, thus, improves the mathematic probability of winning. Hence a lineup of cookie-cutter hitters who flail at the baseball while trying to dispatch it into the seats. Hence Volpe, a slap-hitting archetype, swinging from his heels amid a chronic identity crisis. Hence Chisholm Jr., the Yankee ethos incarnate, squandering supreme athletic ability by trying – and failing – to imitate Ken Griffey Jr. 

In their proprietary model, the Yankees weigh certain criteria disproportionately – a symptom of their obstinate belief in sabermetric dogma. Offensively, they love OPS, exit velocity and home runs. They are indifferent to strikeouts, baserunning instincts and intangible acumen. On the mound, they adore K/9, spin rate and arm extension. They overlook craftiness, reading swings and pitching to contact.

The result is a disjointed team that plays a binary brand of baseball, akin to the Vegas high roller who only bets on black. A team that leads the majors in homers but is unable to manufacture runs when the long ball is dormant. A team that is entirely disinterested in game context necessitating approach changes – in hitting to the right side with a runner on first; in choking up on the bat with two strikes; in swinging for the fences only when the count recommends it. A team that was never taught the nuances of winning baseball.

Such preferences – and such frailties – have been baked into their development and procurement of players for over a decade, yielding emblematic Yankees like Giancarlo Stanton, Joey Gallo, Luke Voit, Josh Donaldson, Gary Sánchez, Clint Frazier and – most recently – Ryan McMahon, who led the National League in strikeouts before becoming the Yankees’ main trade deadline positional upgrade.

A healthy, objective feedback loop between processes and outcomes may have led the Yankees to different – and more effective – players. If they transparently reviewed their 2021 wildcard game loss to Boston, for example, and tweaked the boom-or-bust template that got them that far, they may have targeted a more consistent contact-hitting third baseman like Yandy Díaz or Nolan Arenado instead of Donaldson. Similarly, after being swept by Houston in the 2022 ALCS, an unfettered feedback mechanism may have led the Yankees to solidify their starting rotation with a proven bulldog like Jacob deGrom rather than Rodón. If the Yankees changed, ultimately, they may have snapped the third-longest title drought in franchise history.

Alas, they never did any of that. They never pivoted from their ironclad philosophy, which is guarded like the gold at Fort Knox. And while the above pondering smacks of opportunistic revisionism, Yankee fans were calling – shouting, praying, pleading – for these things to happen contemporaneously. We have seen the same movie on repeat for almost a generation, and the ending never changes. No amount of yelling alters the script.

After missing the playoffs entirely in 2023, the Yankees gestured towards recalibration by engaging an ‘outside company’ to provide a contextual comparison of team processes, as articulated by Hal. Rather than a McKinsey-style audit, however, with independent consultants appraising the Yankee blueprint, that entire project fizzled into meaningless appeasement. It was a lazy attempt to placate a despondent fanbase by throwing them a buzzword bone, but only actually entailed the Yankees paying to view how an outside firm – Zelus Analytics – utilised data.

New York did hire the legendary Brian Sabean as an executive advisor to Cashman, who has been with the organisation since 1986 and in charge of its baseball operations since 1998. And Omar Minaya, the former Mets general manager, also came in to offer a different voice. Sabean and Minaya were supposed to develop that missing dispassionate feedback loop, and they may have contributed to the arrival of more well-rounded players like Cody Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt and Trent Grisham, but Cashman still operates with impunity because Hal views him as an indispensable extension of the Steinbrenner family. And that impunity – that ‘job for life’ insouciance – is the biggest factor I overlooked in my recent column.

Yes, there is undoubted excellence in a string of 32 straight seasons above .500. Such a record speaks to the Yankees doing many things right. But that excellence, and those achievements, are considered so in the context of Major League Baseball writ large. They are not, strictly speaking, achievements when judged by the demanding Yankee barometer. In the Bronx, rings are the only token of a vintage season, and 16 years have passed since last they were handed out.

Earlier this year, before the traditional midseason downturn, I liked the look of this Yankee team. I sensed a gathering alchemy among the players, led by a council of stoic veterans in Judge, Bellinger and Goldschmidt. I thought those guys would police a clubhouse filled with mercurial youngsters, with pointed reminders keeping Volpe, Chisholm Jr., Domínguez and other error-prone bucks on a winning path. That has not materialised, however, as a condoning culture of affirmation – of avoiding confrontation – has continued. As such, a team once favoured to win the American League pennant has malfunctioned into mediocrity, with little sign of a genuine turnaround.

There are some bright spots. I loved the acquisition of David Bednar, a beer-chugging bullpen renegade who may have saved Boone’s job with a gutsy five-out, 42-pitch performance in Texas last week. And Camilo Doval is another electric arm that can light up games. But when Boone continues to use Williams almost daily, coughing up lead after lead, and when the offence is so inconsistent, launching bombs or mustering two measly hits, the outcome will remain familiar. Predictable, even. We know who the modern Yankees are, and there is no inkling they will change.

In another recent piece, I explored the concept of ‘lovable losers’ – those teams whose torture transcends sports and engenders mainstream appeal. The bygone Red Sox and Cubs, for example, in curse-riddled times of yore. Well, the inverse – marquee teams once defined by winning who are now mired in existential droughts – is worth exploring, too. The Yankees are firmly ensconced in that group, alongside the Montreal Canadiens, Ferrari, Manchester United and the Yomiuri Giants. The Dallas Cowboys probably lead such a confused cluster, and concerning parallels between America’s Team and the Bronx Bombers grow by the day. At least Jerry Jones fires underperforming coaches, though. The Yankees just double down while ignoring criticism.

Annoyingly, the Yankees also gaslight their fans with alarming ease and regularity –consciously or otherwise. Regardless of the results, Hal says Cashman is the ultimate GM; Cashman says his people and processes are world class; and Boone tells us error-stricken players are elite. Deep down, we know those things are untrue. We see the reality with our own eyes. But still, the Yankee brass spins a false narrative. And occasionally, it works, as evidenced by my recent endorsement of their spiel.

Maybe I fell for the propaganda, imbibed it by osmosis after hearing it for years. Maybe I have been gaslit, or tricked into magical thinking. Maybe I have contracted Stockholm syndrome, where hostages gradually empathise and support their captors – Yankee Stadium as the Norrmalmstorg bank.

It is difficult to admit such unconscious sycophancy, which in some minor ways mirrors the obsequiousness observed under the yoke of dictatorship – an incremental and unnoticed morphing from opposition to apathy to acceptance to advocacy. Sure, I can walk away, unlike the subjects of far more serious real-life suppression, but there are mild similarities there, regardless, if you excuse the melodramatic insensitivities.

Yankee fans know nothing will really change, so they try to make the best of a bad situation. It is a classic unhealthy coping mechanism – an attempt to protect oneself from predictable recurring trauma. Cognitive dissonance leads to partisan misperceptions, with confirmation bias entrenching an us-against-them dynamic. That, in turn, leads to confusion when evidence of reality is presented, and delirium makes it hard to find a way forward.

Again, this may all sound a little extreme or insensitive to people who deal with actual hardship. Baseball, ultimately, is among the most important of the unimportant things in life. However, this stuff matters to Yankee fans, who continue to enrich those who disappoint them by sheer dint of passion, loyalty and yearning. The team that wooed these people many years ago – the Evil Empire of George – set the standard by which the current incarnation is assessed. And a failure to uphold that standard cannot be blamed on fans who cherish its bygone exceptionalism.

Like many fans, I’m guilty of conflating the present-day Yankees with their omnipotent forebears, but that is not a mistake – nor an unfair demand – necessarily. Sure, I’m ailing through the latest narrative collapse – the erosion of everything I thought I knew and the implosion of everything I beckoned into existence – but the philosophical impulses underpinning that pain should not be curtailed. In fact, those lofty expectations should always come with the territory. They are the New York Yankees, after all, and holding them to the highest ideals should always be part of our remit.

Right now, unfortunately, the Cashman-Boone Yankees are consistently adrift of those ideals and that standard. In reality, the Yankees are probably somewhere in between the extremes to which I, and many other fans, fluctuate – somewhere between myopia and strategy, reticence and hunger, arrogance and faith. They are probably just another team, in other words, trying to find elusive equipoise and sporadic success in a sport of increased parity. And that, itself, is a sad realisation in the grand Yankee miasma. It confirms, by proxy, the fall of an institution that once commanded its own stratosphere.