2 weeks Ago
While we wait for the Boston Red Sox to either stage a miracle in these final eight games of the season and gain a playoff berth or — more likely — see the local nine eliminated from playoff contention in the coming days, let’s take another look at Boston’s longtime rival, the New York Yankees. Last week, we looked at the Pinstripers’ championship seasons and how their philosophy of team-building led to World Series titles in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. But then the Yankees instead focused on securing the game’s best players, cost and character be damned, and sacrificed a good amount of the chemistry that bonded the previous incarnations of the Bronx Bombers.
As a result, the 26-championship franchise has but one baseball title since 2000. More stunning is the fact that the Yankees haven’t even been back to a Fall Classic since the last time they won it: in 2009. Under the Yankees’ bombastic late owner George Steinbrenner, who bought the team in 1973, a list of general managers and particularly managers were given a short leash in terms of leading the team to postseason glory.
Prior to his death in 2010, “The Boss” employed 22 managers for the Yankees beginning in 1973, including, memorably, the late Billy Martin serving five different stints in the Yankee Stadium dugout. In terms of GMs, Steinbrenner had a less-frequent revolving door of top execs, but he still employed 13 different men to oversee the team-building duties. But even though Steinbrenner’s sons have overseen the franchise since their dad’s death, they have proven to be much, much more patient in terms of front-office personnel.
To wit, the team has only had two managers since 2010 (Joe Girardi and current skipper Aaron Boone), and the same GM — Brian Cashman, who served as assistant GM when Gene Michael and Bob Watson built the team that would become the Yankee dynasty from 1996-2000 (and two other World Series appearances in 2001 and 2003) — since elevating Cashman to the top spot in 1998. What I don’t understand in Yankee-land is why Boone and Cashman still have their jobs, given that a Steinbrenner (Hal) is still at the top of the team masthead and the Yankees haven’t won a championship in the past 14 seasons, and Boone has led the pinstripers to AL East titles just twice in his six seasons (although it looks pretty good for this year’s edition, as NY leads the Orioles by four games entering weekend play). Still, Cashman can only count one World Series title since 2000 on his résumé, and again, no trips to the Fall Classic since 2009, and Boone still hasn’t won anything of note despite managing a whole bunch of certified and highly paid superstars over his tenure (with a top-three MLB team payroll every year since 2019), including pitchers Gerrit Cole and Aroldis Chapman and outfielders Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, and this season, Juan Soto.
Maybe the Yankees can and will win it all this postseason. Their team ERA is seventh-best in the majors and fifth-best in the AL (at 3.72), although their team batting average (.
248) is 10th-best in MLB, although they lead in homers with 223, due in large part to another MVP-caliber season from Judge (and his 53 homers). The Yankees also have the majors’ seventh-best bullpen ERA (.365).
But has Cashman built a team great enough to win a World Series in 2024? Because after having a hand in building the late-1990s dynasty, Cashman and his teams have fallen short each year except for 2009, and upon further inspection, that team had purchased a pair of high-priced free agents first baseman Mark Teixeira and workhorse starting pitcher CC Sabathia, but it also had a whole bunch of ...
how shall we put this? Cheaters. Though the dynasty teams, which won during the heart of the steroid era, were relatively clean of any PED suspicions, they did have members of championship teams that were either admitted, or widely suspected of, steroid use, including pitchers Andy Pettitte (1995-03, 2007-13) Roger Clemens (1999-03, 2007), Denny Neagle (2000), Ross Grimsley (1999-2000), Ricky Bones (1996), Dan Naulty (1999) and Darren Holmes (1998), along with infielder Chuck Knoblauch (1998-2001) and outfielders Jose Canseco (2000) and David Justice (2000-01). The early-2000s teams also included PED-suspected or admitted players such as DH/1B Jason Giambi, outfielder Gary Sheffield, and pitcher Kevin Brown.
The 2009 championship team was much more tainted, however, as Pettitte was still on that team (probably clean by this time), but second baseman Robinson Cano was suspended 80 games in 2018 (four years after he left the Yankees), outfielder Melky Cabrera ( 2005-09) received a 50-game suspension after testing positive for high levels of testosterone in 2012, and of course, there was, at the hot corner, one Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez. A-Rod admitted in 2009 to using steroids from 2001 to 2003 while with the Texas Rangers, and four years later, the three-time AL MVP was nabbed again and was banned for the entire 2014 season. Prior to 2009, he had denied ever taking PEDs, but if you ever read the book “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez” by Selena Roberts, you know that it’s more likely than not that young A-Rod was doping even back in high school.
Also linked to PEDs on that 2009 team was catcher Francisco Cervelli (2008-14). But before outraged Yankee fans write in scathing diatribes about how many cheaters there may have been on those four championship Red Sox teams — yes, Manny Ramirez was definitely a doper. And while David Ortiz was named in the Mitchell Report, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in 2016 said in a kind of exoneration, “I think that the feeling was, at the time (Ortiz’s) name was leaked, that it was important to make people understand that even if your name was on that list, that it was entirely possible that you were not a positive.
I do know that he’s never been a positive at any point under our program.” Notably, former Yankees Clemens and A-Rod were not selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame during their 10 years of eligibility because of the doping allegations, while Big Papi was elected on his first chance on the ballot. I’m not saying that the Yankees’ World Series titles since 1995 are in any way tainted, but it sure does seem strange that when the core of the late-1990s dynasty retired or got older and were expendable, the players that have replaced them have but one championship since 2000 (despite a skyrocketing team payroll each and every year), which is a lifetime in Yankees fans’ eyes.
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