The Yankees are a good team. This isn’t something that (most) people would disagree with. They’re in a position where they can absolutely make a run at a second pennant in three years and compete for a 28th World Series championship.
But the prevailing feeling when anyone in the public baseball sphere mentions the Yankees is that we’ve been through all this before, which is absolutely true. They were in this exact situation a year ago, chasing down a last-place team having an unexpectedly great season.
They’ve had several teams in the Aaron Judge era that have felt like the one, but only one of them have even gotten to the World Series. After years and years of this cycle, many fans have a sense of apathy surrounding the organization, something that’s formed from being good year after year, but never truly breaking through.
I get that it can be annoying, and we’ll all be having the same discussions we always do if this season also comes up short, but while we’re still in that mid-September mindset of having everything still in front of you, it’s important to take a step back. Stop and smell the roses, as the famous saying goes. The Yankees secured a winning season on Tuesday, their 34th consecutive such season, the second-longest streak in North American sports history to the 1926-64 Yankees’ 39-year streak.
It’s a streak that induces very different reactions depending on who you ask. A Yankees fan might tell you, “Who cares?” For a franchise that hasn’t won a World Series since 2009, in the current third-longest drought in franchise history, why should we care about consistently winning more than 81 games? It’s a franchise with a permanent “World Series or bust” mentality, so it should be treated as such.
But you ask anyone else around baseball? It’s considered monumental with each passing year. Various executives and reporters constantly laud the Yankees’ organization for their consistency and many people around baseball call Brian Cashman a Hall of Fame executive, not only for the dynasty era that was mostly inherited from Stick Michael, but also for never having a real “down” season. As we see monthly with our approval polls, the gulf between internal and external perception of Cashman in baseball is as big as any executive in the history of sports.
So who’s right here? Can they both be right in a certain way? Maybe, but I’ll use this opportunity to provide the outside perspective as a Yankee fan, who’s surrounded by people who sometimes get lost in the never-ending expectations of one of sports’ most iconic franchises and can’t (or won’t) step back and truly contextualize what it means to do what the Yankees do year in and year out, even if it doesn’t come with enough jewelry for our liking.
34 years is a long time. In 1992, George H.W. Bush was president. There were only 26 teams in baseball, Derek Jeter was drafted, and Aaron Judge was born. All but nine players who’ve appeared for the Yankees this year were born after that season ended on October 4. So many Yankees fans, myself included, weren’t even a thought back then.
In all that time since, so much has changed, especially in the sport of baseball. The luxury tax became a thing in 1997. Four new franchises were founded. 54 different starting pitchers threw 200 innings in 1992, compared to just three last season and potentially even fewer this year. We went from a sport with all sorts of unwritten rules to every last one being dismantled.
Across all that time, the Yankees have remained an above-average team at worst. Every single year, regardless of circumstances, injuries, personnel, management, or anything else. They’ve transitioned eras from Jeter to Judge, survived season-derailing injuries to both multiple times, payroll cuts, and aging rosters. No matter how bleak things look before or even during the season, this streak has prevailed.
It’s only really come in danger a few times. In 2013, the team was hovering around .500 deep into August, but never played below it after the 10th game of the season despite Jeter’s recurring injuries and the Core Four on their way out. An even older roster in 2014 finished with just 84 wins, the fewest in 22 years, and were just 76-74 deep into September, but stayed above water.
As we all unfortunately remember, the closest call of them all was in 2023, when Judge’s toe injury shook the foundation of a very mediocre offense, and injuries ravaged the pitching staff. A nine-game losing streak sunk them as low as 62-68 in late August, and with the team out of contention, they spent all of September playing their top prospects. Somehow, the streak stayed alive with a 20-12 finish.
A lot of things are said whenever this streak is brought up, particularly by Yankees fans. The first point relates to the team’s lack of playoff success in the last 15 years, which is a valid point, but it would have more credence if this team had a ton of 85-win seasons keeping this streak alive. They have just three of those out of 34, with 27 playoff appearances, seven pennants, and five World Series championships. Could it be more? Absolutely. Should it be more? Sure, but that’s still a lot of success.
I don’t want to play the “Yankees fans are spoiled” card, but it is true to an extent. We are fortunate to know that, almost every year for three decades, there will be playoff baseball in October. It might not go our way as much as we’d like, but the Yankees go into every season with the reasonable expectation of competing for a championship, something that so many teams don’t come close to. Being a Knicks and Giants fan gives you the perspective of not being so fortunate; playoff berths for these iconic New York franchise were few and far between (before this recent, glorious Knicks renaissance , of course).
The second point that arises is one that is more commonly used by other fans: “The streak only exists because there’s no salary cap.” I can agree that there might be a season or two that, with curbed spending, the Yankees dip to somewhere between 75 and 80 wins, but the Yankees are a very good organization in general. Of the five biggest spenders in the sport, I’d argue no organization would be better equipped for a league with the salary cap than the Yankees.
The Dodgers and Mets are so outrageously over any likely salary cap, so removing that excess payroll will remove a lot of wins, which says a lot considering the Mets are already not very good. Other teams like the Phillies, Cubs, Blue Jays, and Braves are all good enough franchises to be fine without big spending, but the Yankees’ pitching development and general success on bargain-bin signings and trades suggests they’d succeed even under a different format.
A high payroll isn’t even a guarantee of success; just look at the Mets the last two years. The Blue Jays are spending over $300 million and are below .500. The Rangers and Giants finished sub-.500 as tax teams in 2024, as did Boston in 2022 and San Diego in 2021. Money can mask a lot of issues, but it has never been a guarantee of success. You need to spend some sort of money to win a World Series, but said money doesn’t get you into the dance by yourself.
You don’t need to appreciate this consistency in October. As I mentioned earlier, the streak is meaningless when the team is playing for a World Series, but as we work through September and wait for the real test to begin, just think about that sentence for a second. No franchise in professional sports gets to just treat the postseason as an inevitability, but for a team that hasn’t seen actual bad baseball in a long, long time, it’s seen as normal.
I mean, hey, if it was this easy to win this many games for this many years, why is this the only franchise to do it? Twice!
