Matt Blake was perhaps the Yankees’ highest-profile free agent this year. Consistently considered one of the best pitching coaches in baseball, his tenure since 2020 has seen the development of a star in Cam Schlittler, solid major-league starters like Will Warren and Clarke Schmidt, and perennially delivered a nails bullpen that is markedly cheaper than some of the big-money, volatile closers the club has featured since Mariano Rivera retired.
Blake is great and all reports are that he’s coming back
on a new deal to continue his work on Aaron Boone’s staff. Boone himself will manage through the final year of his deal; indeed, as of now, the entire coaching staff* will be in the dugout for whatever the 2027 season looks like. And this makes me ponder.
*Contracts are up on bench coach Brad Ausmus and catching instructor Tanner Swanson, but there are no announcements yet on their departures, though Ausmus is interviewing for jobs in Houston.
I was taken aback by how sternly Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman laid the season at the feet of the players in their offseason Zoom conference. Praise was passed down from Hal to Cashman and further to Boone, with the company line that the players were responsible for what ended up being a pretty disappointing campaign. Perhaps that conference more than any other single event best sums up Cashman’s iron rule over the organization — he and those he selects can do no wrong, and can only be failed by the mercenaries wearing pinstripes.
Don’t overlook Hal’s personal interests as an owner, headed into labor trouble. Steinbrenner confirmed how much of a priority a salary cap is for ownership in the very same presser, and any opportunity to blame players instead of The Yankee Organization is one more lock added to the vault that ownership is trying to put even more money into. Cashman is less directly incentivized to see a salary cap in the league but he’s very incentivized not to publicly cross the only man in the organization that can actually punish him.
There are actual good cases to let some of the coaching staff go though. The Yankees scored 739 runs last year, on the back of a 101 wRC+. That’s 110 runs and 17 points of wRC+ worse than in 2025, and while Aaron Judge only played in half the season, the absence of Judge alone doesn’t explain near teamwide regression:
There are logical answers for some of these — it was always unlikely, even without a broken rib, that Aaron Judge would have another 200 wRC+ season, and José Caballero is just not a 135 true talent. The top-to-bottom decimation of offense still has to be systemic, Ben Rice was the only hitter to take any kind of step forward and we spent all of 2025 screaming that his underlying metrics would yield a better 2026. Everyone else either stalled or got worse.
And there is not a single question about James Rowson apparently coming back as hitting coach. Despite not having scored on the contact play since 1947, Luis Rojas will be back at third base. There has not been a murmur about any changes in coaching, and we’re getting too close to the expiry of the CBA to go through the normal hiring process.
The club was adamant that they were not “running it back” in 2026, despite more or less returning the same roster that saw two guys take steps forward and everyone else step back. It’s difficult to imagine, given the free agency market and labor uncertainty, the team making a big splash in the winter, so while they may not be “running it back” in 2027, we probably see a lot of the same faces on the roster. We’ll also see the same faces directing the action on the field.
