24 August 2023
Brian Cashman talked on Wednesday about the “disaster” and “mess” the 2023 Yankees have become. He was talking about a team that he and he alone built, one that he has actually been building for years, a team whose poor performance he now says has shocked him. We’re all shocked that the Yankees are in last place in the last week of August. But Cashman can’t possibly think they were ever going to be good enough to win it all this season, after how little he did between last season and this to close the gap on the Astros, the team the Yankees can never get past in October.
Cashman also talked about his own track record as being a reason why he is the man to get the Yankees going back in the right direction again. And he sure does have a track record of winning seasons, over a quarter-century since he became the caretaker of the last great Yankee dynasty, something cited in his defense about as often as they play “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch at the Stadium.
But what the track record has really become, with all those winning seasons, since the last World Series is this: He builds teams that don’t make it past the league championship series, when they make it that far. Over the years, Cashman has spoken on more than one occasion about how hard it is to win the World Series; what a crapshoot October is. Somehow, though, the Red Sox have won four World Series in this century, and the Giants won three in five years.
Now we are supposed to believe what is happening now at Yankee Stadium is some sort of aberration. Maybe last place is. But this dreary, plodding, overpriced team is also a culmination of years of flawed decisions from the Yankees general manager, starting with Giancarlo Stanton.
“I think we’re all going to be evaluated,” Cashman said. “Including myself.”
Well, he may be evaluated by Hal Steinbrenner. But he isn’t going anywhere, for a number of reasons, starting with this one: Even if Steinbrenner decided it was time for a change, he would have absolutely no idea who to hire to replace Brian Cashman. And the reason for that is that the only baseball person Steinbrenner listens to and has ever listened to and might continue to listen to from now until the end of days, is his general manager. There is only one voice that matters with the Yankees. It is Cashman’s. It is why there is no more powerful, and secure general manager in sports than the Yankee general manager.
But perhaps this is a time for Steinbrenner, who constantly gets an earful about analytics, to take a step back and look at a number like this:
Since the last time the Yankees were in the World Series, in 2009, Steinbrenner has spent a total of $3 billion on teams not good enough to make it back to the Series. That’s just in payroll alone, according to Sportrac.com. In all of those 14 seasons including this one, only once did Steinbrenner spend under $200 million on baseball players in a full season, and that was in 2018. In the 60-game, COVID season of 2020, the Yankees spent $111 million, and go ahead and do the math on what that would have gamed out to over 162.
There is the idea floated now that Yankee fans have such short memories that they forget the Yankees did make another league championship series last year against the Astros, before they got good and swept. Yeah, they did make that ALCS, right after they played a life-and-death division series against a bunch of kids from Cleveland whose payroll was almost $200 million smaller than the one belonging to the firm of Steinbrenner and Cashman.
When the Yankees lost to the Rays in a division series in 2020, when the Yankees were working off that $111 million, short-season payroll, the Rays were paying their baseball players $28 million. In the end, the Yankees couldn’t hit against the Rays in Game 5 — one run — the way they couldn’t hit against the Astros in the 2017 ALCS, when they came as close to the Series as they have since ‘09. They got ahead three games to two in that series and then scored a grand, whopping total of one run in the last two games in Houston.
And somebody please explain to me what the Astros stealing signs that year had to do with that.
Now we also hear that they were hurt badly last October because Matt Carpenter and DJ LeMahieu were hurt, as if Carpenter — who had started out the ‘22 season with a Rangers’ farm club called the Round Rock Express — who had hit 15 homers for the Yankees in his 47 games with them, was some kind of lock to turn into Reggie Jackson against the Astros. Sure he was. But then the Yankees always have reasons for coming up short.
John Mara, whose Giants won two Super Bowls over the Patriots after he took over the football operation from his father, finally went outside the family to hire Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll. Now Giants fans — who were every bit as angry as Yankee fans are now with what they saw after the second Super Bowl against the Patriots — feel as good and excited about their teams as they have in a very long time.
Mara isn’t just an owner. He’s a fan, sometimes to his own detriment. What Yankee fan thinks Hal Steinbrenner is that kind of baseball fan? Again: As much as Steinbrenner is very much on the line now, he’s not going to do anything about Cashman because he wouldn’t know what to do. And by the way? Doing something dramatic here doesn’t mean letting Cashman fire Aaron Boone for Cashman’s own mistakes. If one of them goes, they both go. Boone isn’t the one who created this disaster. He’s not the one who created this mess.
Three billion. Fourteen seasons. No World Series. There’s your analytics right there.
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