Yankees to Stick With Boone and Cashman After 2023 Struggles
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. That bit of wisdom over time has been attributed—rightly or wrongly—to the legendary physicist Albert Einstein. But it certainly applies to the New York Yankees.
Yankees general partner Hal Steinbrenner announced on Tuesday that manager Aaron Boone and, in effect, general manager Brian Cashman, will return in 2024, meaning the club is sticking with the status quo.
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“We are working our butts off,” Steinbrenner told selected members of the New York media in a mid-day zoom call. “We are going to do everything we can to right the ship for 2024. But it was a bad year in 2023.”
For more than a decade now, the Yankees have used the same baseball paradigm conducted by many of these same smart people trying to build a team to win the World Series. Every season since 2009 has ended with the same results:
Eleven teams other than the Yankees have won the World Series, including the Houston Astros, Washington Nationals and, most recently, the Texas Rangers for the first time.
The Yankees have spent months of soul searching about changes to the organization and its approach since finishing the regular season at 82-80, seven games behind the last American League Wild Card berth and 19 games in arrears of the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East.
Their $278.7 million player payroll in 2023 ranked second in Major League Baseball behind the New York Mets, well above the luxury tax threshold. Heading into next season, the Yanks already have $202.9 million committed to players—barely second to the Mets—and they haven’t even begun rebuilding a team that’s had 31 consecutive winning seasons.
Yet, what became clear Tuesday as the annual General Managers Meetings started in Scottsdale, Ariz., is that the Yankees are coming back with the same three people making the same decisions in 2024 that just created the franchise’s first playoff miss since 2016.
Steinbrenner and his family own the team valued by Sportico at an MLB-leading $7.1 billion, so he’s not going anywhere.
Tuesday he said the team will bunt more, and that Boone is returning for his seventh season and last guaranteed on his current contract. There will be no extensions. Not now, anyway. That’s not the Steinbrenner way. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Steinbrenner said he discussed Boone’s status at length with current and former players and on a call with his baseball operations staff.
“Without giving my opinion on the call, they all came to the same conclusion which is, Aaron is a good manager,” Steinbrenner said. “He should be our manager in 2024. That was the first big decision I needed to make.”
This despite the fact that 11 teams—seven that missed the playoffs—have changed their manager, general manager or both, including the Mets, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs, all fellow high-spending payroll teams.
Four of those 11 clubs are still without managers— Houston, San Diego, Milwaukee and the Los Angeles Angels—as the offseason markets are now open in earnest.
The Yankees instead have brought in Zelus Analytics to do a deep dive into the way they conduct their own analytics and baseball business. The company, interestingly enough, was co-founded by Doug Fearing, who had 20 years of experience in research and development for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The other 65 team members listed on its website seem to have little association with baseball.
Hours after the Steinbrenner call Tuesday, Cashman made an in-person appearance during a scheduled media session in the hotel courtyard at the GM Meetings.
He spoke about Zelus and the Yankees’ need for two more outfielders and pitching help.
“Always pitching,” he said.
He added the Yankees would take a look at injured two-way player and free agent Shohei Ohtani, who recently underwent his second Tommy John ligament replacement surgery on his right elbow and won’t pitch again until 2025. Since Cashman said the Yankees are committed to figuring out what went so badly wrong with Giancarlo Stanton last season, there doesn’t seem to be a need for a new designated hitter. The Yankees are committed to Stanton for $128 million through 2028.
But Cashman seemed angry and somewhat hostile at times talking about the blame game for what went wrong with the 2023 Yankees. After all, they won 99 games and the division title in 2022 before being swept by the eventual World Series-winning Astros in the AL Championship Series.
“A lot of things are floating around that are just BS,” Cashman said, citing stories that say the current Yankees have been overrun by analytics. “Somehow analytics is the focus of the blame game on the reasons our 2023 season went south.”
Cashman did admit that a lot of this “blame game” was generated from inside the organization and culminated with a very contentious three days of meetings, during which many topics were heatedly discussed and ultimately debunked, he said.
What’s not BS, he was asked?
“Injuries are not BS,” he responded. “We lost a lot of quality hitters along the way. It’s not BS that we lost Aaron Judge for two months when he ran into a wall in L.A. Nestor Cortes started his season off with a hamstring injury. That’s not BS. Anthony Rizzo’s concussion. You subtract what you would get from those guys with the alternative and it’s a different ball team.”
Certainly, according to Spotrac, the Yankees led MLB with $82.1 million worth of injuries to 28 players, costing 2,184 missed days. But the Rangers were third at $60.8 million worth of injuries to 21 players, costing them 1,150 days. And they just defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks in five games to win the World Series.
The D-backs, with 84 wins, were a much more athletic team than the Yankees. Arizona was second in baseball with 166 stolen bases. The Yankees were 21st with 100. Considering the league’s new rules including the pitch clock, bigger bases and restricted pick-off moves, the Yanks must adjust. What’s going to change?
“In the end my job is to be open-minded, hire the greatest people we can possibly find and then clearly make better decisions than we have recently,” Cashman said. “Because it didn’t play out the way we wanted in the last iteration, in the last season.”
Nor the last 14 seasons since their 27th World Series championship. Steinbrenner is banking on the same group, the same ideas and the same approach ending in a different result in 2024. Is it the definition of insanity? We’ll soon see.
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