And We’re Off…

“That escalated in a hurry.” – Ron Burgundy

For a while it seemed, from the outside anyway, there was a philosophical divide of some sort among the higher ups within the Yankee organization. To be fair, none of us really knows what goes on behind closed doors, but when the team hired Brian Sabean and Omar Minaya as “advisers” this past January, eyebrows were rightly raised. National media like Sports Illustrated stated the hires brought “balance” to the front office, and Yankees’ state TV Jack Curry called the hirings “savvy” because you need both – “both” meaning analytics and scouting. (Which raises the question of whether Jack knows what analytics are, but that’s for another day…)

Put a pin in that, we’ll come back to Sabean and Minaya in a minute.

I think we can all agree now that all members of the Yankees brass are not on the same page. (He wrote, in and understanding manner…)

As you know, 2023 did not go well for the Yankees. To be clear, the Yankees were essentially as good as the Arizona Diamondbacks who came within three wins of a World Series victory, so 2023 wasn’t the abject disaster many characterized it as – but it certainly was FAR from good.

Tuesday, Hal Steinbrenner, who often acts as if he was just shot by a tranquilizer dart, stated between yawns that the Yankees’ 2023 season was “unacceptable”, “awful”, and “accomplished nothing”. Certainly, there is no ambiguity there.

Hal then went on to channel his inner George with “my baseball people told me” and said that Yanks’ manager Aaron Boone told him that bunting has “…become a bigger part of the game again. He feels it’s important, so we’re going to start right up again…”

Reminder: Atlanta had the fewest sacrifice bunts in MLB in 2023 and scored the most runs. Texas had zero sacrifice bunts in the World Series while Arizona had five – Texas won four of five games.

Therefore, either Aaron Boone is an idiot, or Aaron Boone never said that. I believe the latter.

A few minutes later, it was Yanks’ GM Brian Cashman’s turn. Cashman, if you read Jon Pessah’s phenomenal “The Game” really only has his job because he has the ability to stay in the Steinbrenner family’s good graces better than any of his predecessors could, showed that skill may have eroded.

“We didn’t lose 80 games because we didn’t bunt enough. That’s not why we lost in ’23 – it’s not. It’s not a big key issue…” Cashman responded.

That came after declaring the Yankees are “pretty fuc&!ng good” and calling “bullsh!t” (literally) on the writers around him who’ve written that the Yankees are too driven by analytics. Too long of a topic to cover here, but in Cashman’s defense, at least one writer present – Joel Sherman – has written articles not based in facts, to put it mildly, criticizing Cashman.

Cashman finished by referring to former Yankee farmhand Ben Rutta as “bitter boy”. Ruta, who when with the Yankees’ organization statistically improved after the Yankees switched organizational hitting philosophies, part of which were instructor changes and part of which was using HitFX technology, then went on to do worse with a different organization, somehow gained traction by criticizing the Yankees’ approach.

Ruta criticized the organization for over relying on analytics and ignoring fundamentals. I was part of a Twitter exchange with Ruta in which he explained that an example of ignoring fundamentals was not teaching hitters to ground the ball to the right side with a runner on second base – which, in the year 2023, we all know is NOT “good fundamentals”.

 What does all this mean?

For starters, and I say this as a long-time critic of Cashman’s: Cashman was 100% correct in everything he said. Bunting has nothing to do with the Yankees wins and losses, many media criticisms of him have been devoid of facts, the Yankees have been pretty good for a long time, and the media gave a factually incorrect idiot with a cross to bear a big platform. (If you want to talk about some relevant information about the state of the Yankees that Cashman is ignoring, I’m with you, but we’ll do that another time.)

It also means there certainly is friction in the Yankees front office, and this is the first time it’s happened with Cashman, which begs the question of what happens with him if matters go south in 2024?

Most oddly perhaps, it makes one wonder where are Minaya and Sabean in all of this and more importantly, why isn’t the media asking where are Minaya and Sabean in all of this? How much input do they have, to whom exactly do they report, whose side do they land on here are all important questions that aren’t being asked, which is very odd considering such a big deal was made about their hiring.

Regardless, we fans went from having little to talk about, to feeling like we were back in the Bronx Zoo of the 70’s and 80’s rather quickly. All we need now is a prominent player to call the owner fat, and for Boone to get into a barroom brawl with Carlos Rodon in the wee hours of the morning.

Did I miss something? Let me know. Leave a comment below, or yell at me @mybaseballpage1 on Twitter and/or the “My Baseball Page” on Facebook.