The Yankees keep trying to recapture the past, and that is not doing much for their present and it is potentially destroying their future.
First, let’s try to understand the recent past. And by that I mean, appreciate it. No club is ever again going to produce 21 straight winning seasons — and who knows? Maybe it does go to 22 this year. The longest current non-Yankee streak is six by the Cardinals and Rays, so get to us in 2028 if all works out.
Even with a second wild card, is any team really going to make the playoffs 17 times in 19 seasons as the Yankees did from 1995 to 2013? Consider that since 2004, the Red Sox have won three championships and missed the playoffs four times (with a fifth miss likely this year).
The game has changed too much for any club to assemble that kind of consistent success for two decades. Having a financial advantage is less relevant today than ever for many reasons, but notably:
A) The advancements in statistical analysis have brought a significant leveling of the field.
B) The flood of money into the game means every franchise can sign its elite performers before free agency, so players on smaller-market squads who you could once envision just biding their time until they joined the Yankees (think: Andrew McCutchen, Paul Goldschmidt, Felix Hernandez) do not hit the open market, at least not in their primes.
C) The sterner drug testing for steroids and amphetamines has made overpaying for 30-somethings an even riskier venture.
Also, while a thick wallet is credited for much of the Yankees’ success the past two decades, I believe it misses the key factor, which also will not be replicated anytime soon, if ever again: The Yankees developed en masse five of their greatest players, and that group proved durable and capable of handling New York and October.
Really, with all that has been written and said about Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams, I do not think what they meant is properly assessed.
We are talking about 20 percent of a roster. And not just any 20 percent, but stars at catcher, shortstop, center field, lefty starter and closer. I don’t want to downplay how difficult it is to form a winning roster, but it is a lot easier to fill in the other 80 percent when you begin with that 20 percent at such key positions year after year.
And don’t downplay the year-after-year sustained excellence and — in general — health. For example, the Cardinals’ feeder system is the envy of the sport, but from last year to this year, Shelby Miller and Trevor Rosenthal have taken a few steps backward and Michael Wacha has broken down.
It is hard to keep even a talented group healthy, hungry and humming from one year to the next. So imagine the fortune of what the Yankees had. It would be overly simplistic to say all the positives that have occurred for the Yanks the past two decades is about this. But because those guys showed up at the doorstep and stayed and prospered, it made everything else easier to construct around. Even the 2009 champion that was burnished by the purchases of CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and A.J. Burnett still was fortified by high-level results from the Core Four.
Thus, the Yankees should take the end of Jeter’s career — the last tie to this remarkable period — to appreciate that no organization is going to have a quintet of players with all of the positive attributes appear simultaneously. And no amount of money can buy that. In fact, the more the Yankees pursue this by thinking they are just one more pricey piece or three away from setting themselves up for years, the more damage they will do into future years.
No team is going to make the playoffs every year. None. The key is building a strong infrastructure that dips but doesn’t break because it is over-larded with the aging and expensive.
Do I think the upper echelon of Yankees management will see this light? No, I do not. I think it is more likely the Yankees buy Max Scherzer and trade their farm for Troy Tulowitzki as a way to scream to their fan base: “We are the Yankees. We are never going to stop trying to win.”
I believe the top of the Yankees masthead is horrified by dwindling attendance and TV ratings and the idea that the Mets could become good and relevant, and the only trick this pony knows is to spend.
By winning all of these years, the Yankees have not had access to the top of the draft, and generally they have done a poor job of drafting and developing what was available. The sense around the sport is the Yankees’ past two drafts have been better and the system is improving. Still, there are not many ready-made solutions internally and the idea of losing enough to get a top-10 pick a few times is as palatable to the Steinbrenners as playing patty-cake with an alligator.
But by doing it the way they are doing it, the Yankees’ best scenario for next season might be that Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia are deemed physically incapable of playing. Thus, the Yankees reap insurance money on their two most expensive players in 2015 and through the end of their contracts in 2017. The same might be said at some point about Carlos Beltran and his arthritic knees (if the Yanks were even able to get insurance on those damaged body parts).
No one is suggesting the Yankees lower their payroll, but instead just re-imagine it. The success of the A’s is based not on drafting well (which they haven’t), but by largely populating their roster with players in their primes. Just about every important Athletic is between ages 25 and 30 — a more important roster-building technique in what is believed to be The Post-Steroid Era. When they gamble in free agency with a Scott Kazmir or by trading their best prospect Addison Russell for Jeff Samardzija or by dabbling in Cuba for Yoenis Cespedes or looking on the trash heap for someone with talent who has yet to break through such as Brandon Moss, the A’s stay disciplined in finding players in their primes and not tied beyond them.
Also, the A’s have had success by conceiving their roster from 25 to 1 rather than 1 to 25. For whatever reasons, injuries are more devastating than ever now and depth of roster is more important than a single star atop the marquee.
The Yankees have to think about their safety nets as much as which luminary they are marketing on YES. It is a place to spend money, diversify the portfolio, protect themselves in case of injury while not becoming inflexible with too many aging, expensive pieces.
Look, with copyright apologies to Rick Pitino, the Core Four isn’t walking through the door. And the current model of trying to go to the top of the market to solve that issue isn’t working. As they say goodbye to Jeter, the Yankees have to think about saying hello to a different way to do business.