At some point Hal’s gotta act like a Boss
If Yanks don’t make October noise it might be time for big changes
The Yankees might surprise us one more time this season and not only win a Wild Card game against the Blue Jays or Red Sox — if they can get to the Wild Card game — but then show they have a full month of winning baseball in them come October.
But if they do fall short of the postseason, or get bounced out of it in a division round the way they did last season against the Rays, a team spending about $130 million less on baseball players than they do, then the Yankees will arrive at a crossroads when this season is over, if they haven’t arrived at one already.
And then we find out what kind of an owner Hal Steinbrenner really is, and just how detached he is from his own fan base.
The Yankees are still the biggest winners we have around here in sports, by a lot. They have had a quarter-century of winning teams, and there is no diminishing the authentic historic significance of that. Except if you are still in the World Series business, at the home office for the World Series, which is them.
The Yankees still like to sell championship or bust, except it gets increasingly difficult to do that when you have been champions of your own division twice in the last decade. Now they are trying to beat the Red Sox and the Blue Jays — and maybe even the A’s — just to get to play a onegame season. Other wild card teams have won that game and gone on to win it all. And again: Maybe the Yankees can turn into that kind of team. For now, though, they are another $200 million Yankee team still grinding to just make the tournament.
The Dodgers might end up a wild card team, even with 100 wins. It would be the first time since 2013 that they haven’t won their own division. In those years they’ve won one World Series, probably had another one stolen from them by the Houston Asterisks, and lost in five games in 2018 to the best Red Sox team ever assembled. How come the Dodgers can do that, starting out by being champions of their division, and the Yankees can only do it two years out of ten? What’s stopping them?
It is why the next monthand-a-half will go a long way to determining not just the future of Brian Cashman and not just the future of Aaron Boone, but the direction of this organization going forward.
I received an email on Friday morning from a friend who is as smart and passionate and reasonable as any Yankee fan on the planet. He attended his first game as a 7-year-old at the old Stadium in 1977. So he came to the Yankees with those teams, with Reggie and Munson and Guidry and Sweet Lou. And then, after college, he got the whole show from Torre’s Yankees, the last Yankee dynasty we will ever see. This is part of what he wrote: “This is the most important storyline in New York sports right now — the future of the New York Yankees. Hal Steinbrenner has to determine whether he is better served by acting boldly or embracing stability. Maybe he’s afraid of change, but when you have one of the best jobs in pro sports to offer very attractive candidates, those fears really seem silly, unless Hal really doesn’t have the stomach to serve as Yankees owner. Again, all he needs to do is look north to see how being cold and cutthroat has served the Boston Red Sox. If the Red Sox thought it had grown stale with Theo Epstein only 4 years after he led them to their 2nd World Series championship, where are we with a front office that has delivered only one championship in the last 20 years?
“This isn’t about Brian Cashman’s legacy. However it ends, he will leave here as one of the most accomplished executives in the history of the Yankees franchise. He absolutely deserves credit for keeping this team competitive every season, both on the back end of the Torre dynasty and in recent years. He had to replace iconic legends like Jeter and Mariano and had to endure the uneasy demise of Alex Rodriguez in order to maintain winning records and he did. He rebuilt the team without tanking the way the Houston Astros did at the start of the last decade or repeatedly faceplanting their way to the cellar the way the Red Sox have done several times over the last decade and twice had a team that was on the doorstep of
the World Series.
“But the future of the Yankees should no longer be based solely on Brian’s job resume. And we have to acknowledge that his resume also lists its share of ignominious flops, with this current version of the Yankees shaping up to be perhaps the biggest flop. You hear that if the Yankees ever let him go, he won’t be out of work for five minutes. So the pro-Brian crowd can sleep easy knowing he’ll land on his feet. The Yankee fans who want change aren’t saying he should never hold another job in baseball. Only that maybe it’s time for him to go ply his trade with the Colorado Rockies or some other team and let somebody else with a new set of eyes and ideas chart the course for Steinbrenner’s team.”
Whatever happens the rest of the way, Cashman’s place in Yankee history is more than secure. Monument Park secure. His Yankees absolutely made it to the ALCS in 2017 and 2019, and Yankee fans are always going to believe that the Asterisks stole those two series. And might somehow rouse themselves again, starting with the last two weeks of the regular season, a regular season that ends with them playing three against the Red Sox in Fenway and then three against the Blue Jays.
But if the 2021 Yankees don’t play deep into October, if they don’t get close to winning the dozen games that means they’ve won it all, then where are they, really, with the current vision of the team? Where are they with a program that never ever seems to have enough starting pitching, and has a plodding swing-and-miss offense that lacks both versatility and speed and even flair, and is joined at the hip with Giancarlo Stanton forever? Can they win a dozen postseason games the way they just won 13 in a row? Stranger baseball things have happened.
But if they can’t, in another season when they can’t even win their division, then it will be time for the owner to actually act like one.