Dom Amore: What’s wrong with the Yankees? Start with the long absence of the old Boss’ urgency

In the days following George Steinbrenner’s passing in July 2010, I wrote a piece saying the Yankees would never be the same.

Now, it didn’t take a Nostra-Dom-us to write that. There was only one “Boss.”

In fact, he let Bill Dowling, a Yankees’ general counsel during the 1980s and later the owner of the New Britain Rock Cats, know that rather emphatically one morning, insisting he trademark “The Boss” so this guy Springfield, or Springer couldn’t go around calling himself by that name.

This was impossible, and Bruce Springsteen is still “The Boss” to his fans, and, after lo this many years, so is George Steinbrenner to his. But, Dowling says, he was on his toes after being temporarily fired, Steinbrenner style, looking to protect the Yankees’ brand and intellectual property.

Before he became an American icon, Lou Gehrig came of age in Hartford

This was the positive effect of the Yankees’ ownership that took over in 1973. Steinbrenner demanded the impossible, and as a result extracted the best his employees had in them.

“He never let anybody get too comfortable or complacent,” Hall of Famer Rich “Goose” Gossage, who’d had his run-ins with Steinbrenner, said that summer of 2010.

“The drive, the desire to win at all efforts that he instilled permeates the whole organization,” Reggie Jackson said, at that same Old Timer’s Day, following The Boss’ death at 80.

Having been around the team for The Courant every day between 1999 and 2007, I never buy completely into the “if George were alive” narrative, but given the current, disastrous state of the Yankees it is apparent that the things Reggie and Goose mentioned, it’s not George Steinbrenner, but his urgency that has never been replicated.

They broke a nine-game losing streak this week, and and quickly went to work on another. They’re 61-66.

On June 4, the day after the incomparable Aaron Judge injured his toe at Dodger Stadium, they were 36-25, so the analytics indicate they are 25-41 over the last 66 games, falling to the bottom of the AL East, so deep Jacques Cousteau, since we’re recalling the 1970s, couldn’t locate them right now.

We know all that, of course, and we know about the series of bad decisions, by which we mean, decisions that have not worked out even if the analytics said they had a reasonable probability of doing so. Holding onto young players until their value was gone (Clint Frazier, Gary Sanchez); acquiring players who may prevent runs (Harrison Bader and the various catchers), but can’t knock them in; acquiring players with injury-filled histories who have been often injured since donning the Yankees uniform (Giancarlo Stanton, Frankie Montas, Carlos Rodon, to name a few.)

The Yankees, of late, seem to be hung up waiting for players to return to their pre-pandemic form, as if that was the year before last.

But why? Why have all these things happened? It gets back to Goose and Reggie. The Yankees’ organization has gotten too comfortable, too willing to look at, say, the 2022 season and say, “We won 99 games, let’s not panic over a bad week in October,” ignoring the fact that the Yankees were around the .500 mark the whole second half.

At his worst, during the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Yankees’ last extended blue period, Steinbrenner was the problem. Too impulsive, too quick to dispatch managers, coaches, GMs, or to force bad trades if he fell in love with someone else’s guy (Ken Phelps, Ken Phelps, Ken Phelps) or got tired of looking at one of his own.

It was utter chaos, and it crashed with sub-.500 seasons between 1989-92.

After Steinbrenner returned from his suspension in 1993, GMs Gene Michael, then Bob Watson, and then Brian Cashman had a little more leeway than their predecessors, and managers Buck Showalter and Joe Torre had, well, maybe a little more leeway than their dozen predecessors.

There was creative tension, yes, but a good balance was struck, the Yankees spending their lavish resources wisely, holding on to the right prospects like Bernie Williams and the “Core Four,” making deadline deals that worked because The Boss exhorted his “baseball people” to fix things when they were wrong. The process was still chaotic. The results: seven AL pennants, five World Series championships through 2009.

I don’t believe that, if he were alive today, George Steinbrenner would necessarily have fired Cashman or Aaron Boone or anybody else years ago. But he would have ever been looking over shoulders, watching with dismay from Tampa and calling New York with questions and answers, making sure nobody was allowing good enough to be good enough. Just making the playoffs “is the wrong mentality to have,” Derek Jeter said earlier this year.

The Yankees, make no mistake, were long overdue for a washout season, having not dipped below .500 since 1992 and missed the playoffs only a handful of times since 1995, streaks about to end. Other teams, even the biggest spenders, have had many. Look no further than across town to Steve Cohen’s Mets, to see that. But the what-about-ism was never The Boss’ bag, either.

This is all to say that now that the disaster has struck, and the Yankees have sunk to the bottom of an AL East filled with young, vibrant teams and smart, efficient front offices, it’s time to abandon “the process” and look at results.

Analytics are only as good as the people applying them, and how they are applied. And people and approaches do get stale. Cashman has had a Hall of Fame level run with the Yankees, generally a stand-up guy, and it would be no surprise here if he resurfaced somewhere else with success, but things have run their course with this management team. True of Boone, too, now that he sounds utterly out of answers night after painful night.

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The primes of Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole are fleeting, in danger of being wasted as Don Mattingly’s fleeting prime was wasted in the 1980s. The Boss’ son, Hal, has correctly noted that his father was often criticized for being impulsive in those days, but he seems so bent on proving he is not his father that he is too much different, too reluctant to part ways with executives that have become part of the family; too comfortable if you will, too resistant to cutting losses and eating contracts to try to make the team better.

WWTBD. What would the original Boss do? Well, George would do something. He would look at the results and stop trusting the process. … And, yeah, he’d probably insist on signing Shohei Ohtani, no matter the luxury tax.