It’s been 17 years. A decade plus seven of the New York Yankees walking right up to the line of being a championship-caliber team and stopping right there. <\/p>\n
If it’s an elaborate Andy Kaufman-esque prank by Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone, the commitment to the bit is almost impressive. Yet Yankees fans aren’t laughing. Far from it, in fact.<\/p>\n
The Yankee Stadium crowd’s reaction says it all after the Yankees were swept out of the 2026 playoffs by the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday. When Trent Grisham struck out with the tying run in scoring position, there wasn’t one of those collective groans, followed by pained silence. There were loud, unmistakable boos.<\/p>\n
A fanbase doesn’t revert to boos in that situation if the outcome is genuinely shocking. Or, at the very least, if the ride there was fun. <\/p>\n
Boos like that happen only when the jig is up, especially when that exact moment of defeat has become an annual rite of passage. The Yankees keep selling their fans false hope, and they’re clearly tired of buying in only to get conned. Those boos say, “Not this crap again.”<\/p>\n
They want 27 World Series titles to become 28. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for the organization to get the message.<\/p>\n
What Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone Have Done to the Yankees<\/p>\n
Huh? What’s that? The Yankees have had 34 consecutive winning seasons? Cashman has been in the front office for all of them? Boone has been in the manager’s chair for the last nine?<\/p>\n
Congratulations! Nobody cares.<\/p>\n
It’s the championships, stupid, and any attempt to label Yankees fans as spoiled for such high expectations misses the mark. They’re not blind to the team’s history<\/a>, nor are they blind to the fact that the Yankees remain a business behemoth. Per Forbes<\/a>, it’s an $8.5 billion franchise that raked in $710 million in revenue last year. <\/p>\n There’s no excuse for this team not\u00a0to\u00a0be at the top of the baseball world with some consistency. The fact that they have done so just once in 25 years inevitably makes one look around and ask, “Who the hell is running this place, anyway?”<\/p>\n Defenders of Cashman and Boone are out there. Boone’s own players\u00a0consistently praise<\/a>\u00a0him, with three-time MVP Aaron Judge generally serving as his strongest ally. At any time, a veritable army of reporters goes to bat for Cashman for all he’s accomplished<\/a>.<\/p>\n True, Boone is good with the media and an effective heat shield<\/a> for his players. And true, Cashman probably doesn’t get enough credit for his development wins<\/a>. He’s the guy who believed in Judge and Cam Schlittler, and who can pat himself on the back for Ben Rice, George Lombard Jr. and Spencer Jones.<\/p>\n Yet if they get to own the positives of the modern-day Yankees experience, they must also own the negatives.<\/p>\n For all the Yankees’ excellence at hitting home runs (Fact Check: True<\/a>) and blowing away opposing hitters (Fact Check: True<\/a>), what has mattered more in recent Octobers is just how bad they are at playing the actual game of baseball. Their collective proneness to mental gaffes and physical comedy is what doomed them in the 2024 World Series. This year, they did the same in Game 2 of the ALDS<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cashman and Boone’s ongoing failure to fix the problem* is only becoming a more glaring failure. Whereas the Yankees’ fondness for homers in whiffs feels coded to the late-2010s, the 2020s are different. The Rays and Milwaukee Brewers prove that a team doesn’t need the Los Angeles Dodgers’ resources to play an “all of the above” style of baseball that is as overwhelming as it is aesthetically pleasing.<\/p>\n *So much for that weird “audit<\/a>” in 2023, am I right?<\/p>\n The stacked failures are compounded by what was wasted. Those include the prime years of Judge, who might be the greatest right-handed hitter ever. They also include Gerrit Cole’s prime years, a Cy Young Award winner who’ll end his career with a compelling Hall of Fame case.<\/p>\n At some point, shouldn’t somebody have to pay for this?<\/p>\n What Hal Steinbrenner Has Done to the Yankees<\/p>\n The answer is yes. A hard yes. Steinbrenner should absolutely fire Cashman and Boone and look elsewhere for people who can turn fresh perspectives into a better path forward for the Yankees.<\/p>\n Easier said than done, to be sure, and the Yankees only need to look across town at the Mets to see that. They also have vast wealth, and they arguably have an even greater desire to win. Yet Steve Cohen has yet to crack the code, at least in part because David Stearns isn’t all he was cracked up to be<\/a>.<\/p>\n But then there are the Dodgers. Setting aside the very real questions<\/a> about Mark Walter’s business empire, they have long since usurped the Yankees as the model for what happens when great power meets great ingenuity. Andrew Friedman is astoundingly good at running the front office, while Dave Roberts is everything a modern manager should be. They are the anti-Cashman and anti-Boone.<\/p>\n