The New Year is a time of reflection and renewal, of looking back and looking forward. It is also a time for personal growth and change. We hopefully use the lessons we learned in the previous year to
guide us on a better, more fulfilling path in the newest trip around the sun.
It is only recently that I began to truly appreciate and embrace New Year’s resolutions. This is probably because of the unreasonable, effectively unfulfillable expectations I had set for myself in previous Januaries, my inevitable failure to meet or maintain said resolutions only conspiring to incrementally lower my self-esteem. The last two New Year’s, I switched things up and set myself smaller, concrete and manageable goals — often ones that could be reached in the first month of the year and without undue effort — and the result has been profound. I’ve effectively gamed a double esteem boost, first for accomplishing the given task and then for not failing my resolution as I had in so many previous years.
This sounds like a bit too much shameless self-aggrandizement, so I’ll bring it back around to the Yankees. When coming up with New Year’s resolutions we’d like to see the Yankees pursue, it’s tempting to set a lofty bar like asking them to sign Kyle Tucker and/or one of the top remaining free agent starting pitchers. Or perhaps they could swing over to the trade market and assemble a blockbuster for a difference maker like a Ketel Marte or Freddy Peralta.
However, this is exactly the aforementioned trap I would fall into, creating unlikely expectations that are almost guaranteed to leave us in disappointment. Yankees’ ownership and the front office have told us repeatedly with their words and actions not to expect needle-moving pursuits this winter. That at best they’re happy to remain as they were in 2025 rather than try to improve themselves. They’ve publicly reiterated their stubborn insistence that they do think that they were good enough in 2025 after tying the Blue Jays for an AL-best 94 wins.
This is where I would like to draw a line in the sand. Not making a blockbuster addition doesn’t have to end in rolling it back. There is a lot of middle ground between those two outcomes. Making Cody Bellinger the number one target and relying on a repeat from Trent Grisham after both posted somewhat outlier seasons and are now a year older feels like setting up for disappointment. Aaron Judge has only so many 10-win seasons left in his bat. Gerrit Cole is 35 and coming off Tommy John surgery while Carlos Rodón will also miss the season’s start as he recovers from his own elbow procedure.
There are very real holes at third and in the rotation. Tatsuya Imai and Munetaka Murakami signed combined deals worth less than $90 million guaranteed, and while both have red flags of varying size, the pair felt like exactly the type of creative, win-win market opportunity — if they’re good, they’re cheap and if they don’t pan out, neither deal is onerous in terms of total value or length — that could boost the team’s chances. We’ve since learned that the Yankees never had serious interest in either player.
Hal Steinbrenner has also admitted that the reason the Yankees were swept aside by the Jays in the ALDS was because Toronto was the superior team:
They definitely played better than us, they slugged better than us, they hit the ball and put it in play better than us, and they pitched better than us, and that’s why they won.
You would hope this would spur the Yankees on to improve themselves and rise to an equal footing as the team that eliminated them. It also appears to fly a bit in the face of the playoff crapshoot mindset, since he is seeming to suggest that the better team should win in a playoff series. Rather than rest on their laurels, the Blue Jays have been proactive this offseason, inking Dylan Cease to a $210 million mega deal, bolster the pitching staff further with the additions of Cody Ponce and Tyler Rogers, and remaining engaged on the top position players including Tucker and Bo Bichette. As Andrew Mearns reminded me, we see even defending champions try to improve themselves all the time — the 1998 Yankees improved the rotation by trading David Wells for Roger Clemens while the Dodgers signed Blake Snell to boost their title defense.
Look, as much as we would like to see ownership add a nine-figure contract every winter, there are very real financial considerations affecting business. The sting of revenue lost to COVID is still being felt and the yearly bond payments on the Yankee Stadium remain significant, the Yankees footing a significantly higher portion of the new stadium bill than many teams who have built stadiums in the years since. The continued reporting on Steinbrenner’s desire to depress payroll below last year’s $319 million figure is likely overblown, and the Yankees are pretty unique in having to walk the tightrope of contending every year and therefore not getting to reap the benefits of high draft picks and trades of MLB talent to accumulate the next core of prospects.
However, at the end of the day I am not going to cry poor for the most valuable franchise in the sport. I think as sports fans, one of the core sort of ideal beliefs is that we want the team we support to try to get better each year and there doesn’t appear to be that drive this winter. We want an organization that prioritizes passion over pragmatism, courage over contentment. Unfortunately, this winter ownership appears happy to remain in sedentary comfort.
