You Have to Listen to the Notes They're Not Playing
Why even after a rough week, standing pat at the deadline was the Yanks' best move
Off the top of my head, I’d say there’s three distinct camps of people who were critical of the Yankees’ whimper of a trading deadline last week. They are:
The False Binary Pontificator: I’d put most of the Yankee-covering media in this group. From a Michael Kay on-air rant I still haven’t watched, to the Jomboy guys soyfacing in disbelief, it seems as though the Yankees’ decision to be neither buyers nor sellers flummoxed everyone who gets paid to have an opinion on the matter. After all, as apparently two different coaches famously first said, if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. If you live and breathe sports, those are stupid enough words to live by. No need to muddy things by considering the opportunity cost of pulling the plug on an above-.500 season in early August, when 40% of the league makes the playoffs now. Forget weighing the risk-reward of mortgaging the farm in a historic seller’s market.
The Pound of Flesh Pessimist: These are mostly fans, and the wannabe media personalities who pay $8 a month to post poorly written “show more” tweets. Look, watching the Yankees is aggravating these days, and There’s No Accountability. So why not just blow the whole damn thing up? Sell whoever you can, for whatever you can get. Look toward 2027. Once you’ve entrusted Brian Cashman and his crew to do all that, fire them all and hire Derek Jeter as GM. He’d never let the fans down. Eight months after signing Aaron Judge to a nine year contract, what the Yankees need now is prospects, prospects, prospects. Speaking of prospects, the Yankees hold onto theirs for too long…
Denial Stage Mets Fans/Red Sox Nihilists: At best, this is good old fashioned schadenfreude, and at worst, it’s what I believe Zoomers refer to as “copium.” At the end of the day, this may be a lost season in the Bronx, but at least our team locked up their generational superstar for life, instead of say, salary dumping him for a guy who just got benched for disciplinary reasons, and another guy they already DFA’d. But hey, I talk to a lot of Red Sox fans, and they’ll be the first to tell you their team sucks. The Steve Cohen-led Mets, on the other hand, are currently on year number three of Taking Back New York, and coming up on playoff series win numero uno any October now. Though, based on the accounts of several current and now-erstwhile Mets players, it sounds more like it’ll be a couple Octobers from now. Wait, what was that Cohen comment in the first link about “dead money” in 2024? Those don’t sound like the words of a guy who’s going to back up the Brink’s truck for Ohtani. Yipes!
What all these factions fail to realize is that the Yankees aren’t just built to win now, they’re built in such a way that you couldn’t truly tear things down, even if you wanted. Assuming the front office exercises Gerrit Cole’s 2029 option to void his opt-out after this season, he and Judge are owed a combined $536 million after 2023. Both are superstars in their primes, but there’s reason to wonder how many prime years each has left.
Judge is 31, and a major reason he got to free agency in the first place is that there are few examples of players as physically big as him who continued to be productive well into their thirties. A certain outsize teammate of his is possibly a good player comp, but the forecast there is looking increasingly grim. Cole will be 33 this winter, is currently the American League Cy Young frontrunner, and with the likes of Aaron Nola and Sandy Alcántara both having down years, he may arguably be the last year-in, year-out workhorse in baseball. He by all accounts has perfect pitching mechanics, and his father reportedly kept a spreadsheet of every pitch he threw — in-game, bullpen sessions, etc. — when he was growing up. If any pitcher’s going to continue to post through their age-38 season, it’s him. But as a squirrelly older fan once told me on the 4 Train back from Yankee Stadium, pitchers are like thoroughbreds, man. Ya never really know.
Judge and Cole have full no trade clauses, so they’re here to stay. That means it’s imperative that the Yankees compete in 2023, 2024, and 2025, because after that, all bets are off as to what you’re getting out of either player. 2023 isn’t looking so hot right now, but crazier things have happened. Through 115 games, exactly two years to the date of me writing this, the 2021 Braves were 59-56, the same as this year’s Yanks. They’d go on to win the World Series. The 1995 Yankees were three games under .500 through as many games — in a strike shortened season, when there was only one Wild Card spot, no less — before going on a 21-6 tear in September to nab the first and only playoff berth of the Don Mattingly era. Most famously, the 1978 Yankees were in third place — pre-Wild Card format — and 7.5 games out as late as August 24, before surging to repeat as World Series Champions.
Do I think something similar is in the cards for this years Yanks? Following a deflating series loss to the imploding White Sox, probably not. The just breaking news of Nestor Cortes’ rotator cuff strain admittedly feels like the coup de grâce. But go down the list: who were you trading last week? Giancarlo Stanton, DJ LeMahieu and Carlos Rodón are all albatrosses of varying degrees, and add an additional $282 million and change in immovable contracts. A contender surely would’ve wanted Harrison Bader for his glove alone, and before he bullied Ron Marinaccio and Keith Moon’d his way to the Restricted List, Domingo Germán was a serviceable-ish starter in a weak market. But even in a seller’s market, is anyone parting with franchise-altering pieces for two months of either of those guys? I doubt it.
Maybe a team would’ve given up something substantial for Gleyber Torres, who’s controllable through next year and, despite currently being tied for the AL lead in homers among second basemen, has become a target of ire in Yankeeland due to his fielding and base running lapses. But, if Randy Miller is to be believed (and, him blocking me on Twitter aside, I’m not so sure he is) it sounds like the Marlins balked at the Yankees’ ask of two young Major League starting pitchers.
There just wasn’t a realistic scenario where selling at the deadline was worth giving up on a precious remaining year of prime (albeit nine-toed) Judge and Cole. As the Phillies showed last year, if you can squeak into the playoffs, anything can happen. The Yankees are uniquely equipped to be that anything. Stanton is the streakiest hitter alive, and if he went on an October tear even half as good as the one he had during the 2020 postseason, the offense would look drastically different. Maybe Rodón gets healthy and gets right before the end of the year. You pair him with Cole in a three game Wild Card series against a weak AL Central opponent, and even as the road team, that’s a favorable proposition.
So then why not buy? Well, there was basically no one to buy. Cody Bellinger could’ve been to the 2023 Yanks what David Justice was to the 2000 team, but the Cubs took him off the market, and right now they’re glad they did. The Padres weren’t trading Juan Soto, and the Nationals held onto Lane Thomas. Platooning Randal Grichuk with Jake Bauers or Billy McKinney could’ve been nice, but the nerds reportedly vetoed it, and it’s hard to get too worked up over Randal Grichuk. At least, other than when he was doing stuff like this:
River Ave. Blues, whose blog I barely read but don’t remember being as pathologically negative as his tweets, compared this trading deadline to the 2016 one where the Yankees were sellers. Jomboy echoed a similar point. That year, the Yankees got swept in Tampa the weekend of the deadline to fall to an even 52-52, and Cashman had seen enough to trade away Carlos Beltrán and Andrew Miller for prospects. But that was an expectedly mediocre team, rich with the kind of high end, veteran bullpen pieces that are perennially attractive to deadline buyers, yet of little use to teams going nowhere. This year’s Yankees were expected to be better than the team that won 99 games and went to the ALCS last year, and while the bullpen is similarly loaded, it’s largely with younger, more controllable arms.
It’s more apt to compare the ‘23 Yanks to the 2015 team, which was buoyed by renaissance seasons from Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez, and on the day of the July 31 deadline, sat in first place in the AL East with a six game lead. That team had visible flaws, but was doing well. So what did Cashman do at the deadline? Basically nothing. The third place Blue Jays, on the other hand, acquired a slew of players including David Price and Troy Tulowitzki, and sure enough, they stormed on to win the division. The Yankees would still go on to make the playoffs, but in the AL Wild Card game, they ran into a buzzsaw in the form of original Astros boogeyman Dallas Keuchel.
In the mid-2010s, the Bronx didn’t burn quite like it does now, and I think the lack of passion allowed for more nuanced takes. Not only was standing pat the right move for 2015, it was the right move for the future. The front office did nothing as far as the transaction log was concerned, but as the ensuing years would prove, they did something in holding onto prospects like Luis Severino, Gary Sánchez, and Aaron Judge.
Time will tell as to whether the likes of Jasson Dominguez, Oswald Peraza and Spencer Jones stick in the organization and flourish, but the recently updated Baseball America list has the Yankees tied for the most top 100 prospects in baseball. This year’s Yankees haven’t had the kind of season to warrant cracking into those reserves, but with the likes of Cole and Judge, and the way they’re constructed, they merit at least a chance to prove they’re the team everyone thought they’d be on Opening Day. The last week or so has been an inauspicious start, but the lessons of the past ring true.