Good Riddance to the 2023 New York Yankees, a Bunch of Sad Losers

For the entirety of the summer and a mercifully thin slice of fall, something reeked in the Bronx, and it wasn’t the fumes coming off I-95. I took in this odor firsthand, at great financial expense, and for very little reason other than tribal allegiance to the rough beast of my Core Four–obsessed childhood. Now that baseball’s marathon of a regular season is officially over, though, it’s time to come clean (or at least attempt a good scrubbing): The 2023 New York Yankees were simply ass. I didn’t know it in April, I had a feeling in May, I was certain by June, and still I came back to Yankee Stadium in July, August, and even September. There is little pride in this statement. (Again, them boys were butt.)

They could not hit. They had one starting pitcher and one position player worth a dime. They brandished a style that consistently made those who paid to watch it suddenly and overwhelmingly sad. At the final game I attended this season, during the Yankees’ second-to-last home stand, I saw a beer vendor who, in the middle of hawking his wares off the first-base line, preemptively dismissed the team’s latest ill-fated attempt at a rally by serenading second baseman Gleyber Torres as a “fucking bum”—and this was before the infielder had even dipped a toe in the batter’s box.

The atmosphere was toxic. It was not good. We Yankee fans wanted a winner. We always want a winner. These expectations are, as the game’s poet laureate Roger Angell once wrote, “admirable but a trifle inhuman.” That there is a team for front-runners to root for when they desire a world without failure is essentially the Bronx Bombers’ sales pitch, their tempting black book. This team does not bottom out (even in this “disaster” of a season, they went 82-80, their 31st straight year without a losing record). It’s what they exist to transcend and now, also, the mark of their descent: They’re not supposed to fall this low.

On Sunday, the worst summer in Yankeeland since the Clinton administration came to a close. It marks their first fourth-place finish in the American League East since Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee were still part of the division, and it completes a season and a half of unreservedly mediocre baseball—their on-field performance slow, stiff, and lacking in adaptive strategy as the upper levels of the franchise sank further into decay. Things have obviously gone wrong for the Yanks, but it has not happened quickly, or even plainly. When I sat in the stands, huddled in the bars off East 161st Street, or flipped on their broadcasts, what I saw, heard, and felt was that these Yankees didn’t do one thing catastrophically wrong—they did many things badly and were doomed by the failures of their past.

For years the Yankees have been unable to identify and develop the kinds of athletic, low-cost young stars who are the engine behind a modern, sustainable titan. They have overseen the regressions of core players in nearly every level of their squad. They have been betrayed, on multiple occasions, by poor tactical adjustments and a maddening inability to conform to the times. These failures presented themselves regularly—at pretty much any instance when they were stripped of their 6-foot-7 security blanket—and often at the most inopportune times.

Virtually every one of the non–Aaron Judge Bombers (with the possible exception of Torres) vacillated between over-patience at the plate and taking hacks like nearsighted lumbermen. The lineup couldn’t touch high-velocity fastballs for the entire year. They had one reliable left-handed bat, and he was concussed for two months before anyone noticed; they called up a prodigal switch-hitting center fielder in September only to watch him tear his UCL 10 days later.

The storm surge of slipups didn’t end there. What was hyped before the season as arguably the best rotation in baseball ended up relying on starters who ranged from erratic to rattled to irregular. The rookie who was touted as a new-age Derek Jeter posted the second-worst on-base percentage of any MLB hitter with enough qualifying at bats. The Yankees endured their first nine-game losing streak since 1982. Their last quality left fielder was drafted in … 2005.

The quick and dirty synopsis is this: The roster had two reliably excellent players, Gerrit Cole and Judge, the latter of whom missed a third of the season after tearing a ligament in his toe while running through a literal wall to clinch a win. Beyond that, the Yankees had a bunch of question marks of varying promise and peril, both on and off the field. Tracing the tangle back to one cause, actor, or entity is a fool’s errand, but it underscores the breadth of the institutional rot at hand.

The first instinct may be to peg the blame on manager Aaron Boone, which is reasonable given his unbearably upbeat public-facing profile. The man is always clapping. This constant positivity stands in glaring contrast to the flawed machines he’s guided: He took over in 2018, and though his squads have repeatedly won in the regular season, they’ve also repeatedly fallen apart in October. Six seasons in, Boone’s best moment as a Yankee was the time in 2019 when he laid into home-plate umpire Brennan Miller. His worst moment is a toss-up—it could be his pitching decisions in the 2018 playoffs, or his pitching decisions in the 2019 playoffs, or his pitching decisions in the 2020 playoffs, or his pitching decisions throughout 2023. (Beware: If you stare too hard at these moves, you could burn your corneas). Ask Boone, though, and he’ll tell Yankees fans that they simply need to be patient.

Others, like me, hold general manager Brian Cashman responsible for this year’s aging, sluggish, and stale roster. For all of his successes constructing the late ’90s and mid-aughts Yankees, Cashman has bricked a plurality of his shots for at least the past five years. In 2019, he signed outfielder Aaron Hicks to a seven-year contract extension; Hicks batted .232 over parts of eight seasons with the team before being cut in May. In 2021 and 2022, Cashman swung trade deadline deals for outfielder Joey Gallo and starting pitcher Frankie Montas, respectively; the former was so bad that Yankees fans booed him in a spring training game, and the latter has pitched only 41 innings more than I have since he was acquired, while posting a 6.35 ERA.

Still others—because they are understandably weary of billionaires, or do not like trust fund babies, or just don’t remove their eye from the ball—blame owner Hal Steinbrenner, for his spending habits or lack thereof. As FanGraphs and Pinstripe Alley have both investigated, the Yankees franchise has recently decreased its spending on payroll in proportion to its revenue, which has skyrocketed. Instead of offering Bryce Harper a $330 million contract at age 25, the team traded for Giancarlo Stanton and his $265 million deal when Stanton was 28. Rather than invest in a blue-chip corner infielder, the Yankees moved from Miguel Andujar to Gio Urshela to the exhumed corpse of Josh Donaldson. They chose not to trade for a 34-year-old Justin Verlander in 2017 because he was owed too much money; rather, they signed 35-year-old J.A. Happ in 2018, and then (when that contract expired) 34-year-old Corey Kluber in 2021, on deals of a combined $45 million. They didn’t make an offer for then-Pirate Gerrit Cole at age 28 when all it would’ve cost was a player they would later waive and watch join Pittsburgh anyway; they signed Cole for $324 million after he’d already crushed their dreams.

Add it all up, and there’s no conclusive scapegoat. Blame the GM, and it’s hard to ignore the shortcomings of the coaching staff. Condemn the owner, and it’s tough not to come back to his band of long-tenured executives and underperforming sluggers. It’s not entirely clear who is most responsible for the rot at hand; the only thing that is obvious is that the Yankees too often get the worst out of their players who are not future first-ballot Hall of Famers. And they don’t have enough of the latter to make up for the former.

Maybe it’s all the cost of coyness in their player-acquisition operations, their fetishization of diamonds in the rough over plain, high-money tentpoles. Maybe it’s the aftermath of self-hamstringing their budget even as their revenue balloons. Maybe it’s what happens when they single-mindedly chase talent that excels in launch angle and exit velocity—though one would think if that were the case, a lot of other teams would also suffer more. The only definite is that (in the words of the team’s most lavishly paid disappointment) things have “gotta change.” And as their shining captain said around the same time, “a lot of stuff going on”—in the clubhouse, batting cages, bullpen, training room, manager’s office, and executive suites—“needs to be fixed.”

Because these are the Yankees, there’s a nonzero chance that this will all clear up: that they’ll figure out how to be, basically, ever-so-slightly less bad. You know, fail upward. Stumble into a shortcut. Throw a coat of sweet-scented exceptionalism over what reeks. It’s what we’re here for (those of us who cheer for the pinstripes, at least). Land the most talented player in the history of the sport, and a team’s floor tends to rise. Nab the Dominican god of walks, and there’s no need to run: Just stroll your way around the bases.

Shoot, blow it up altogether outside of nos. 45 and 99, and the Yankees can start fresh, but not from scratch. It’s the crooked deal when the mighty take a tumble. They’re broken, unless they get just slightly better, in which case they might well be fixed. In the meantime, I say good riddance to these Yankees—until, of course, the Bombers are reborn on third.