It's possible that on the day I die, the one thing I won't regret is that I will no longer remember the 2023 New York Yankees season. The general manager called it a "disaster" and he was being generous. Yeah, the kids came up and made it kind of fun to watch the last couple of weeks, but all the problems that were present last offseason (and the one before that and the one before that) were not addressed and are the exact same issues that are supposedly being discussed even as the detested Houston Astros continue to play baseball games that count. Ouch.
Aaron Judge would be fine if he could just avoid playing in Dodger Stadium forever. Gerrit Cole, however difficult he is to watch sometimes (tons of pitches, diva behavior) is still an elite starter. Gleyber Torres made large strides in the second half at the plate, and still sometimes looks distracted in the field.
Those are the highlights. The lowlights are everything else.
There is still no starting centerfielder, left fielder or third baseman for the Yankees going into 2024. The starting rotation does not have a reliable second starter, forget a third, fourth or fifth. (Yes, Clarke Schmidt looked good. Let's see him do it for a whole year.) Nestor Cortes needs to be the 2022 Nestor Cortes, and we haven't really seen him pitch much since then.
The Miami Marlins used to have a really good player called Mike Stanton. Anybody know where he is these days?
We've been promised "major changes" before. What we got was the previous year's not-terribly-successful team with a new coat of varnish. If that happens again, Hal Steinbrenner's going to find out what happens when people DON'T show up at the rate of 40,000 per night.
I'm not one who blames Aaron Boone for everything. I think he's a perfectly serviceable major league manager, given that the analytics department makes the bulk of the calls and he's only there to answer questions before and after the games and deal with the players, who appear to love him. He'll be back and that's okay with me.
Brian Cashman has been a very good general manager for a long time but appears to have been in a baseball coma for the past three or four years. The team's been going downhill and he doesn't seem to notice. It was only by the grace of the Boston Red Sox, of all people, that this year's squad didn't finish in last place in their division. The toughest division in baseball, by the way, had three teams - THREE - enter the playoffs and nobody made it to the second round. So don't tell me about that anymore.
Should Cashman be fired, or does this fall on the Steinbrenner family and their (ironic) aversion to change? It's a good question. Cashman will be back, and the Steinbrenners aren't going anywhere, so maybe it doesn't matter. Changes on the field need to be made. Does anybody in this organization have the guts to make them?
I'll get back to you in 2024. Whether I get back to Yankee Stadium is another question. We'll see.
