The topic is foolishness. Men hacking at cork and cowhide with twigs. Who will whiff slightly less often? Whose missteps won’t lead them to more pitfalls?
On the diamond, everyone eventually gets got. Even all-time deities are dispatched more often than not. The winner is the loser who foils enough failure. That’s baseball, Suzyn. A monument assembled in anguish. A perfect joke.
One team goes home happy. Many others lose. Few lose in this way, at this stage, with this cast.
The New York Yankees fell apart. Come October, the print is never particularly fine. No ring-fittings if you can’t hold steady. No matter the opponent. No matter the moment. No matter the odds. The 2024 Bombers could summit many heights but never proved quite capable of fulfilling that end of the bargain.
Strip away the static. Forget the names and the mythos and the long-inherited fury they provoke. Whittle them down, past artifice, past expectation. Their flaws were right on their pinstripes. You could see them all summer.
Consistently maddening baserunning decision after baserunning decision. An improved but top-heavy lineup, too prone to prolonged slumps, too challenged by top-level pitching. They scored the third-most runs per game in all of baseball and left the most runners on base. They had Aaron Judge at his absolute peak and Juan Soto at his most “generational”—the two best hitters in the AL by nearly every metric; to match they had Alex Verdugo and Anthony Volpe, out of all qualifying batters, two of the worst eight. Their bullpen lacked true swing-and-miss arms, the latest inadequacy bubbling to the surface for a team caught in a yearslong lurch toward market exploitation, at the cost of overall balance. No lead was ever safe, no out routine, no run assured. In a year of unmatched regular-season parity, the Yankees were the rare team with the talent and personnel to secure a no. 1 seed while managing on a bi-nightly basis to leave runs on the board.
Even the change of seasons didn’t alter these patterns. It may have even masked them. In the ALDS against the 86-76 Kansas City Royals, New York held KC to 12 total runs across four games—but managed to score more than four themselves only once. The brevity of their ALCS matchup against the Cleveland Guardians belied a similar trend: tight games, against an inferior opponent, often into late innings. The Yankees were, even in victory, sloppy. (See: their Game 3 loss to Cleveland, when they managed to bungle a historic comeback in the most brutal ways possible.) Judge, their offensive fulcrum, slumped through the vast majority of both series as the team struggled to plate men in scoring position and continued to make defensive gaffes at the most inopportune times. They passed the tests they were given, yes, losing a total of two games entering the Fall Classic. But parse through the minutiae of each outing, and the outcomes hardly look like flying colors.
Now shift the subject to absurdity. Repeating the same debacles, over and over, while expecting different results. What is the proof of Einstein’s loop? Is it swearing they’d eventually pull their trousers up when they left Chavez Ravine? Is it dutifully watching them fail, again and again, to cover those crudely stitched Dockers, at all times, leads, and stakes?
What about bringing in a starter with a bum elbow who hasn’t pitched in five weeks to close out a game up one with two men on? Or taking your closer out of the game before the rally even began because the converted starter had already thrown a grand total of 19 pitches? Does it resemble treating a string of high-impact defensive tests like laid-back February afternoons in Florida or Arizona, even after six months of criticism for such tendencies?
Might absurd be 43 men left on base in the biggest five-game stretch since the Great Recession; going 9-for-45 at the plate with runners in scoring position? Having twice as many errors in the series as your opponent had groundout double plays? Blowing two contests with in-game win probabilities of at least 89 percent? No, that’s something else. Something low-down. Something foul. Something like the Judge, following up on the greatest clean right-handed regular season ever by stalling again and again on the biggest stage.
We are parsing collective failure. No one in pinstripes avoided muck on their hands. Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who was reported to be “expected back” with the team in 2025 mere hours after the defeat, continued his pattern of late-game mistakes and practice-field laxity. Yankees GM and executive VP Brian Cashman might have upped his Q rating following the offseason Soto trade, but in a detractor’s eyes, the fingerprints of the modern Yankees braintrust are all over this loss. It’s unclear how loud the criticism of coaching and roster construction, top-to-bottom ideology, and strategic adaptation will get in the coming weeks—cue (checks notes) well-known Yankees freedom fighter Ralph Nader’s recent description of management as “relentless losers”—but the dream that slid into debacle happened first and foremost on the field.
The Steinbrenner family wouldn’t exactly be out of pocket for concluding that if the squad’s fundamentals were scrubbed, Soto re-signed, a bat was added, and internal progression assured, they might have another chance to right the wrongs of this series. After a 12-year gap between pennants, the Yankees were swept out of the World Series in 1976 only to claim back-to-back titles over the Dodgers in ’77 and ’78. But modern baseball is far more wonky than its Golden Era predecessor. Windows today close as quickly as they open. There is a better-positioned colossus that just took their lunch money with Sinatra crooning in the background. That’s hard to argue against. The prickly truth is that the good in the sport is just as impermanent as the bad. Sign-stealing intervention or not, it took the Bombers 15 years to get back to these heights. If they aren’t willing to bludgeon the rest of the league financially or skilled enough to improve their roster in other ways, there’s no reason to think they’ll be back in less time.
The only solid thing was this chance. Under pressure, they couldn’t help but show who they were: a team unable to avoid the weight of their own possibilities. A team capable of stealing a road opener and throwing it away in a few minutes’ time; of mounting a 5-0 lead in a home elimination game and lighting it on fire thanks to three Little League errors in less than 15 minutes. The type of team to waste the greatest postseason power outburst since back when Babe Ruth was calling his shot because their 32-year-old captain can’t catch a routine fly ball. An outfit that throws away a crowning World Series outing by the premier arm of his era because they can’t manage to cover first base on a dribbling grounder. A team built to pounce on a squad of four Hall of Famers—coming off a $1 billion offseason—only to fold at the slightest sign of resistance, in every moment of consequence, in each game.
Great, maddening, incredible, flawed, and foolish. Your 2024 New York Yankees: a team talented enough to get there but damn sure not serious enough to win it.
