My boys are cooked. For Yankee nation, this has become a kind of yearly tradition. In 2023 metatarsal ligaments were torn and concussions went undiagnosed: The Bombers cascaded from 11 games over .500 through the season’s opening third to nine under through the next two-thirds, then whiffed on the playoffs entirely. The year before that, they were gods of April, May, June—61-23 in their first 84 games. Then they lost 25 of their next 37 outings, eked past the Guardians in the divisional series, and were swept unmercifully by the Astros in the American League Championship Series. The season before that, the Yanks started 28-19, half a game back of the division lead. They proceeded to lose 22 of their next 35, never reaching closer to the top of the AL East than four games (the cherry on top: getting punked for a wild-card slot by the patron saint of chaw).
Last year, the best one-two punch at the plate since the days of pin-striped sultans and iron men appeared to protect them from their midsummer malaise: They shuffled their way to 28 games above .500, commenced with the annual bloodletting (L’s in 23 of the next 33 contests), but then righted the ship, or at least seemed to.
You know the ending. They made it to the World Series and yakked all over themselves. Five-run lead, eviscerated. Three errors, consummated. Outclassed, outmatched, outgunned. They ended the calendar year by getting ditched at the altar by Juan Soto, for a suddenly very rich little brother, no less.
Recent Yankee history may not repeat, but it does rhyme. They came back this spring and started 42-25, amassing an 8.5-game AL East lead through the first 67; went 19-28 through the next 48, fifth worst in the sport; and are now 2.5 games back of second place in the East. The Bombers are not the worst team in Major League Baseball this season, but they are, again, nowhere close to the greatness they showed a glimpse of embodying. There are many reasons another summer has gone off the rails for these Yanks, but none of them ultimately justify the result. A team that spends as much as they do, that earns as much as they do, that includes the greatest (non-Bondsian) hitter of our lifetimes has no business reaching a different version of the same fundamental conclusion, year after year after year.
Disclosure: The writer is not impartial. The writer paid half a paycheck to watch Freddie Freeman lift a slider into orbit last October. The writer Charlie Browned his way out of Chavez Ravine, chin attached to chest. One guy in a Shohei Ohtani jersey pointed and laughed at the writer, and it was, unfortunately, so funny that the writer’s wife giggled, too. I invest an unhealthy portion of my day-to-day bliss in unserious people, and I do so knowingly. Will until I die. Fandom is priceless and an ailment. These glasses are not rose-colored.
They are, it would seem, not exactly clear. On May 28, New York led the league in OPS and run differential and held a seven-game lead in its division: In the 60 games since, that lead has evaporated completely, and as of Thursday, the Yankees are a half game away from being out of a playoff spot. Devin Williams, the All-Star closer the Yankees acquired last offseason, had given up 26 earned runs in the 141 innings before the trade to New York; he has allowed the same number in just 43 innings in pinstripes. Their shortstop—who could field but not hit—is now, it appears, afflicted by the yips defensively. A week ago, their starting catcher forgot how many outs there were in a tie ballgame and got tagged walking back to the dugout.
In the past two and a half weeks, the Yankees have given up six leads, including one in which they were up by six; coughed up a lead; come back; and coughed it up again. At the trade deadline, Brian Cashman, longtime general manager and persona non grata to bleacher creatures, picked up three relievers to bolster a gassed bullpen, along with an All-Star third baseman (their last one broke his ankle). They’ve gone 1-5 since. You don’t have to listen closely to hear the ring of nosedives past. Remember: Yankee modernity presents in iambic pentameter. What I’m asking you here is not to feel bad for the evil empire but instead whether inertia is even that evil at all.
The longest championship drought in Yankees history has not been defined by abject failure or even a lack of success. Since 2009, New York has a .570 win percentage, second best after the Dodgers in all of baseball. But season after season—particularly in the campaigns coinciding with manager Aaron Boone’s tenure—they just can’t kick the impulse to eventually, when the going gets tough, go belly up.
You can parcel out blame up and down the franchise. Roster-building deficiencies have reared their head repeatedly: They don’t have enough slump-proof stars, they still haven’t found an answer at shortstop or in left field, they have a knack for finding supremely talented closers who cannot handle the competitive environment, and they’ve struggled to develop a bona fide bat beyond their once-in-a-century captain—who, it’s worth noting, reached his current level at the plate by making swing adjustments on his own.
Boone has done them no favors: His bullpen management continues to boggle the mind, his refusal to bench struggling young players is equally confounding, and he’s repeatedly shown an inability to halt their midsummer spirals—to pierce the fog. On the field, the team remains prone to polarized offensive production, high-leverage flops. Young contributors show promise, then inevitably regress. Great defenders who can’t hit turn into flawed defenders who still can’t hit. Talented hitters watch their failing defense sap their mojo at the plate. All-Stars from flyover states shrink in the Bronx spotlight.
Last year’s squad was ridiculed for its defensive limitations, so this year, they brought in a collection of position players with higher defensive floors. It mostly worked, but then a whole new range of deficiencies emerged. As has been its way, in 2025 and the decade-plus preceding it, when New York fixes one problem, another crops up. Money and how it spends it is a part of this, although in a messier way than it appears. Hal Steinbrenner’s Yankees might not spend like his father’s squads, but their issue is less an unwillingness to open the purse strings and more that they’ve often opted to split up expenditures across the aggregate and often picked those aggregations terribly. The Yankees and the Dodgers are the only two franchises that hold more than one of the top 10 largest contracts in the game—in New York’s case, those of Aaron Judge and the recovering Gerrit Cole. Given Judge’s production alone, you could make the case that those two deals are underpayments; the problem has been and continues to be what they’ve augmented those two deals with: a woeful amalgamation of Aaron Hickses and DJ LeMahieus and Marcus Stromans. Right now, they’re paying those three as much not to play for them as the Phillies are paying Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber, and those three are getting only $3 million less than the Dodgers are paying both Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman combined.
The Bombers are rich and talented enough as a franchise to never bottom out. Their front office, in Cashman’s decades-long tenure, has developed a knack for winning on the margins, particularly in pitching development, and has always had a willingness to swing for the fences in player acquisitions. This year’s team is not bereft of success stories: It has its most productive outfield offensively since Bernie Williams, Gary Sheffield, and Hideki Matsui were patrolling the house that Ruth built. Carlos Rodon, the no. 2 starter, is in the midst of his best season in pinstripes, and newly signed southpaw Max Fried has—until a recent, blister-induced downturn—filled the role of bona fide ace for a rotation riddled with injuries. Even when you account for New York’s recent slump, it ranks second in wRC+ and still maintains the third-highest run differential in the sport. I’d argue that—at least on the field—this iteration of the team doesn’t require wholesale change: It needs better health in the rotation. But if it plugs a star like impending free agent Kyle Tucker into a longtime position of need, this team could ease its way right back into contention. And it can always afford another star.
But as the team is currently run, that route is a virtual impossibility, both because its eye is overly fixed on marginal roster victories and because it’s saddled with dead money, which, of course, was produced by trying to achieve those marginal victories in the first place. Fire Boone, and that reality still isn’t fundamentally altered. Revamp the front office, a tactic the Yankees have already tried, and they’re still cooking with the same ingredients. These Yankees are not terrible (they’re too big to fail in that way), but when a franchise with all of these advantages, financial and otherwise, is mired in these kinds of results—when even their greatest successes are marred by a pervading sense of stagnation—the time for cursory changes has long since concluded.
The uncomfortable truth of the 2025 New York Yankees appears to be the same one as the year before that and the year before that: If they want to outgrow their late-stage inertia, it’s on the guy upstairs—Steinbrenner—to put it in motion. Only deft hands or big bucks can cut through the fog of almost good enough. An empire in decay is no place for half measures. Inaction, in this case, is the bleakest and most new-age Yankee omen of all.
