FanPost

Thinking about the 2018 Yankees – Opinion

Disclaimer: This is all opinion, not much stats.

I’ve been a fan of the New York Yankees since I was old enough to understand what they even were. I was born in the wake of the Yankees late 1970s World Series success and lived through both their longest playoff drought (and some of their worst years since they were owned by CBS) and their greatest and longest period of success.

The Yankees Dynasty of the late 1990s was a thing of beauty, and without the kind of internet we have today, it was unexpected (at least by me at the time). This was before widespread blogs and sports networks like SB Nation, before MLB Network and MLB.tv and At Bat. I didn’t live in NY at this time, so seeing actual games was few and far between (except when they played the Orioles at Camden Yards). Thus my expectations were low and my excitement at them winning was high.

After 2000, when the Yankees beat the crosstown rival Mets in the World Series (yay!) for their third consecutive title (and fourth in five years), the team has won another World Series in 2009 and flirted with winning others in several years (2001 and 2003, most notably).

However, winning four World Series in five years (and winning the AL East pennant 12 times from 1998 to 2012) sets an impossibly high precedent for fans. They come to expect that level of success at all times, even when the whole of MLB is working against the Yankees achieving that success again. Even when the league expands the Wild Card system, even when they continue to allow pretty abysmal division winners to make the playoffs. Just this year, the potentially third and fourth best teams in the AL have to duke it out in a one-game playoff while a team with a worse record could win their division and automatically make the playoffs (and not have to play in a Wild Card game). Then the league and MLBPA agreed to a CBA that increased penalties for exceeding the Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) threshold (specifically hurting teams with a lot of money, like the Cubs, Dodgers, Red Sox, and yes, the Yankees).

Then we get into the fact that the Steinbrenner running the Yankees has changed from George to Hal. George wanted to win at all costs (money was no object, as we saw with both good and bad results), but Hal has a more measured approach. It’s easy to characterize his philosophy as profits over winning (since he appears to not want to "waste" money by paying a CBT penalty ever again), but it’s too early to tell. 2018 will be the first year, possibly since the CBT was created, that the Yankees won’t be incurred a penalty, definitely since 2003, according to this site: https://www.statista.com/statistics/219716/year-by-year-luxury-tax-payments-in-major-league-baseball/.

Yankees Luxury Tax Payments

On one level, I can understand Hal Steinbrenner’s point about the fact that the team has spent a lot of money in luxury tax payments. However, the tradeoff is that the Yankees had possibly the most chances of any team in MLB to win the World Series (at least from 2003 to 2012).

We’ll have to not only wait to see what they do in this coming 2018-2019 offseason, but also in future years when their homegrown stars reach their arbitration or free agency years (barring a change in the team’s extension policy).

Which brings me to present day. Here, on September 12, the Yankees have a record of 90-55 (at this point last year, they were 78-65), and some fans are still not happy. Because the team has fallen behind the Red Sox on a historic run (currently 99-46). Despite the fact that the Yankees are 12 wins better than last year, some fans are treating this season like the biggest failure ever. But is it really a failure? Or are our expectations just too high? How can a team be so much better than last year, but be considered a failure just because they can’t catch a historic team (and I’d say, to quote Yogi Berra, "it ain’t over ‘til it’s over")? How can fans be so devoid of appreciating context that they can’t see that not only are the Red Sox on a historic pace, but the Yankees are part of a four-team cluster at the top of baseball (Red Sox, Astros, Yankees, As) that are playing better than the rest of baseball.

What could the Yankees organization possibly have done at the beginning of the season that would have changed anything? Signed Lance Lynn and been the team that experienced his terrible beginning to the season? Traded for JA Happ and experienced his lackluster first half? How could they predict that Aaron Judge would get hit by a pitch and miss six weeks (or more) of playing time? How could they have predicted that Gary Sanchez would have a horrible pseudo-sophomore slump? How could they have predicted that Sonny Gray would turn into the 2018 version of AJ Burnett (Yankee edition) or Javier Vazquez (Yankee edition)? How could they predict that Luis Severino would hit a wall in the second half (OK, that one they should have seen coming, maybe)? Even though Cashman thought the price for Gerrit Cole was too high, even if he had made that trade, there are no guarantees that Cole would have had the same success with the Yankees that he's had with the Astros.

If you don’t like their hitting or pitching philosophies, I don’t blame you. However, understand that they implemented those philosophies strategically and throughout their entire system. Any modifications or deviations (i.e., if you want them to be more like the Astros and Red Sox in their hitting approaches), then not only will it take time to fix the MLB part of the organization, but the entire system (like inserting Neo back into the Matrix, gotta find the door with the glowing light, insert the key, and then choose to be assimilated into the system).

Conclusion

My expectations are pretty low for the Yankees, maybe because I watched them in the 80s and early 90s: don’t have a losing season. Obviously, I want to see them win the World Series again, but I really don’t want to see them perform so poorly that they lose more games than they win.

Ultimately, the 2018 Yankees are a really good team playing in a division that has a historic team ahead of them. Other than the struggles of Greg Bird and Gary Sanchez, I don’t see how anyone can be unhappy with how this team has performed (again, relative to years past, they’re notably better). I'm enjoying seeing Hicks continue his success, Torres and Andujar fight for Rookie of the Year honors, Didi continue to get better, and the Yankees winning more games.

It'll be somewhat disappointing if they lose in the WC game, but not, in my opinion, the end of the world.


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