The Yankees let the trade deadline pass with very little activity. This leaves the team little chance of a playoff run. And it’s left the fans in a torches-and-pitchforks kind of mood.
The Yankees faced some tough decisions at the trade deadline.
They have spent the season roughly 1.1 million dollars over the Cohen Tax threshold. That means that for every dollar they spend on a player, the team must pay a 90% fee to MLB. Hal Steinbrenner seems to have made it clear that the payroll could not go any higher. In fact, Brian Cashman indicated that he needed to get under that limit.
It’s hard to blame Prince Hal for feeling that way. That is not being cheap, it’s being prudent. There’s a reason there was only one team over that threshold this year besides the Yankees.
Obviously, then, they were never going to bring in any expensive new players.
You Gotta Know When to Hold 'Em
The team also needs to keep its current crop of prospects. Cashman traded away a lot of talent last year, a lot of it pitching talent. So they needed to keep what they had, if not add to it, again, especially pitching.
That means they were never going to put together a package of three or four prospects for a player who might make a difference this year.
That might have made them sellers at the deadline. There are many fans who wanted them to make big moves either way. If they couldn’t be buyers, the thinking goes, then tear down the team and rebuild it.
But who would they have sold? Don’t get me wrong, I fully expected them to trade Harrison Bader and maybe even Gleyber Torres. Bader is especially perplexing as he is a free agent at the end of the year.
Earlier in July, I wrote that they should make no trades. Once the team cratered, though, getting what they could for Bader made a lot more sense.
Outside of those two, however, there was no one else to trade. This team has most of its payroll wrapped up in a handful of players, players the Yankees are wise to hold on to. Of course, no one was ever suggesting trading Aaron Judge or Gerrit Cole.
And they just got Carlos Rodon. He might be off to a slow start, but he’s still worth betting on.
The remaining high-priced players have little to no trade value. If the Yankees moved Anthony Rizzo or DJ Lemahieu, they’d have to pay most of their contracts anyway and take next to nothing in return. Stanton, meanwhile, has a no-trade clause.
Nobody else makes enough money or is having a good enough year to gain anything by trading them. Or they’re inexpensive and under team control for a few more years, like Jake Bauers and Billy McKinney.
You put it all together, and the Yankees' best move–outside of Bader–was to make no move. This team was built to win a World Series and it's still the Yankees' best plan to keep it intact and let the players decide the season.
That, however, has not mollified their outraged fan base.
Yankees Fans Speak Loud And Clear
Some of those fans at Yankees Stadium made that plain for all to hear by chanting, “Fire Cashman” the other night. And that's not the first time they've done that this year.
It’s a sentiment echoed in a variety of Yankees forums.
It must be pointed out, however, that not everyone agrees. I was part of a live Twitter discussion Tuesday night where there were some fans sympathetic to Cashman (thanks to the host for a great discussion).
The general consensus, though, even from those great fans, is that Cashman has to go. The thinking is that, if his hands are tied by the team's existing payroll and dearth of prospects to trade, he’s the one who tied them.
After all, Cashman’s the one who signed all the high-priced players. He’s the one who made those disastrous trades last year.
For some fans, that’s all part of a pattern they’re tired of looking at. Many of his recent trades, for instance, have not worked out.
Take his acquisition of Joey Gallo. Gallo seemed lost in the bright lights of the Bronx, only hitting .159/.282/.339 in his brief time with the club. It might not be fair to blame the GM for getting a good player that most fans wanted him to get when that player underperforms, but that’s the way it is.
The same is true for almost everything Cashman has done lately.
Last year’s Jordan Montgomery for Harrison Bader trade was a head-scratcher when it was executed, and now seems an unmitigated disaster.
He also decided to give up a ton of pitching prospects for Frankie Montas, Lou Trivino, Andrew Benintendi, and Scott Effros. Yet none of them helped the Yankees win last year or this. That would be hard to do for Benintendi since he left as a free agent at the end of the year, but that’s part of the point.
Every single player the Yankees acquired ended up getting hurt.
On Tuesday, manager Aaron Boone revealed that reliever Lou Trivino will undergo Tommy John surgery. He’ll miss the entire 2023 season, and then some. All three of the pitchers the Yankees sent to Oakland have started for the Athletics this year while Trivino and right-hander Frankie Montas are both out indefinitely after surgeries to their throwing arms.
The Yankees traded three minor-league pitchers for 33 games of Andrew Benintendi before the outfielder got hurt and signed elsewhere in free agency. Promising reliever Scott Effross is also out for the entirety of this season, sidelined after his own Tommy John procedure.
All of that has left the Yankees a team in last place. They’re also three and a half games out of the Wild Card race behind both Boston and the Angels. And that has the fan base in an uproar.
A let’s-get-torches-and-pitchforks kind of uproar.
Yankees Have Been On a Downward Spiral
Of course, it took no trade deadline for the fans to want Boonie to be gone. The Yankees faithful watched former manager Joe Girardi win a World Series in 2009, then develop a new batch of Baby Bombers into a formidable force.
They saw how he took a young Yankees club to game seven of the ALCS in 2017. They arrived ahead of their time and might have made the World Series if the Astros hadn’t been banging on garbage cans.
Then, in an inexplicable move, Cashman removed Girardi and replaced him with Aaron Boone.
Fans of all teams know the one most important rule in sports: You never mess with success. Don’t you think Jerry Jones wishes he’d let Jimmy Johnson do whatever the hell he wanted as long as he coached the Cowboys for another decade?
But Cashman, in an act of hubris, made the move. And the Yankees have gotten worse ever since.
Boone, by some fans’ accounts, is a horrible in-game manager and has no clue how to motivate this team. Where Girardi, statistically speaking, got the best of them, Boonie seems to get their worst.
For the second time this week, New York Yankees fans were heard chanting 'fire Aaron Boone' on Wednesday following another disastrous decision by the club's manager.
On Monday, Boone pulled starting pitcher Domingo German with one runner on base and one out in the ninth inning while the Yankees were leading the game 2-0. The Yankees went on to lose the game 3-2 after closing pitcher Clay Homes allowed the next four batters to reach base.
Wednesday night Boone once again turned to Holmes in a similar situation, and it led to similar results.
The Unforgiven
The swap of Girardi for Boone seemed to some an unforgivable act. Naturally, then, the fans have not forgiven him. Especially as they look out at a Yankees club that used to fight and claw for every win that now seems punchless on a nightly basis.
Those angry fans might be satisfied, however, if Cashman did nothing else but fire Boone at the end of the season.
That seems unlikely.
Cashman, perhaps because of ego, has done nothing but praise Boone, even touting how much the players love their manager. That’s great. But his job is not to win Most Popular Manager of the Year–it’s to help the team win.
This is sports and that’s the only way the manager should be evaluated.
And that's just one more reason the fans want Cashman to be fired. If the only way for Boonie to go is for Cashman to go, then so be it. To some fans, Cashman is driving the Yankees into the ground while Boone is stepping on the gas.
None of this is likely to have any impact on Hal Steinbrenner. He seems incapable of even considering replacing his daddy’s choice of GM. And maybe he’s right. I think many teams would jump at a chance to hire Cash, including the Mets.
The fans, meanwhile, might not all like that. But if Cashman were to take Boone with him, I get the feeling the vast majority would be all in favor.
A team can’t let the fans make the decisions for them. That way madness lies. But the fans deserve to be heard.
They’re the heart and soul of any team, the ones that shell out their hard-earned dollars to go to the games. They watch every pitch and every home run. They take to Twitter or Facebook or the game threads to create Yankees’ communities. They swell with pride for every victory, and feel the sting of every loss.
They sometimes even read little-known blogs dedicated to their favorite team.
And that, all of that, is why this one’s for you.
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