Ultimately, the Yankees were unserious, ruthless losers

The subject is foolishness. Men chop with twigs of cork and cowhide. Who smells a little less often? Whose missteps won’t lead them to more pitfalls?

Ultimately, everyone gets caught on the diamond. Even all-time gods are aired more often than not. The winner is the loser who thwarts enough failures. That’s baseball, Suzyn. A monument that gathered in fear. A perfect joke.

One team goes home satisfied. Many others lose. Few lose like this, at this stage, with this cast.

The New York Yankees fell apart. In October the print is never particularly fine. No ring fittings if you can’t stay stable. Regardless of the opponent. Regardless of the moment. Regardless of the odds. The Bombers of 2024 could reach many heights, but were never quite able to live up to that end of the bargain.

Remove the static electricity. Forget the names and the mythos and the long-inherited anger they provoke. Reduce them, beyond artifice, beyond expectation. Their flaws were right on their pinstripes. You could see them all summer long.

Consistently maddening baserunning decision after baserunning decision. An improved but top-heavy lineup, too prone to extended slumps, too challenged by top-level pitching. They scored the third most runs per game in all of baseball and left the most runners on base. They had Aaron Judge at his absolute peak and Juan Soto at his most “generational” – the two best hitters in the AL by almost every metric; before the game, they had Alex Verdugo and Anthony Volpe, two of the worst eight among all qualifying hitters. Their bullpen lacked true swing-and-miss arms, the latest flaw to surface for a team that spent years trending toward market exploitation at the expense of overall balance. No lead was ever safe, no out routine, no run assured. In a year of unprecedented regular-season parity, the Yankees were the rare team with the talent and personnel to land a no. 1 seed while managing to leave runs on the board every other night.

Even the change of seasons did not change these patterns. It may even have masked them. In the ALDS against the Kansas City Royals from 86-76, New York held KC to twelve runs in four games, but only managed to score more than four once. The brevity of their ALCS matchup against the Cleveland Guardians belied a similar trend: tight games against inferior opponent, often late innings. The Yankees, even in victory, were sloppy. (See: their Game 3 loss to Cleveland, when they managed to pull off a historic comeback in the most brutal ways possible.) Judge, their offensive fulcrum, slumped for the vast majority of both series as the team struggled to find men in scoring position. and continued to make defensive blunders at the most inopportune times. They passed the tests they were given, yes, and lost a total of two games during the Fall Classic. But when you dig into the details of each outing, the outcomes hardly seem to come with flying colors.

Now move the subject to absurdity. Repeating the same debacles over and over again, while expecting different results. What is the proof of Einstein’s loop? Is it a swear that they would eventually pull up their pants when they left Chavez Ravine? Is it dutifully watching them fail time and time again to hide those grossly screwed Dockers at all times, leads and bets?

How about bringing in a starter with a bum elbow who hasn’t pitched in five weeks to close out a two-man game? Or take you out of the game before the rally even started because the converted starter had already thrown a total of 19 pitches? Does it seem like dealing with a series of high-impact defensive tests, like relaxed February afternoons in Florida or Arizona, even after six months of criticism of such tendencies?

It might be absurd that 43 men were left on base in the largest five-game stretch since the Great Recession; Going 9-for-45 at the plate with runners in scoring position? Do you have twice as many errors in the series as your opponent had groundout double plays? Ruin two matches with in-game winning chances of at least 89 percent? No, that’s something different. Something accessible. Something nasty. Sort of like the Judge, who followed up the best regular season ever for right-handers by staying on the biggest stage again and again.

We analyze collective failure. No one in pinstripes avoided getting their hands dirty. Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who was reportedly “expected to return” to the team just hours after the 2025 loss, continued his pattern of late-game mistakes and laxity on the practice field. Yankees GM and executive vice president Brian Cashman may have raised his Q rating following the offseason de Soto trade, but in the eyes of an opponent, the fingerprints of the modern Yankees braintrust are all over this loss. It is unclear how loud the criticism of coaching and roster construction, top-to-bottom ideology and strategic alignment will be in the coming weeks.checks notes) famous Yankees freedom fighter Ralph Nader’s recent description of management as “ruthless losers” – but the dream that turned into debacle took place primarily on the field.

The Steinbrenner family wouldn’t exactly be coming out of their own pockets if they concluded that if the basic tenets of the team were scrapped, Soto re-signed, a bat was added and internal progression was assured, they might get another chance to correct the mistakes in this series to correct. After a twelve-year stint between pennants, the Yankees were swept out of the World Series in 1976, then claimed back-to-back titles over the Dodgers in ’77 and ’78. But modern baseball is much shakier than its Golden Age predecessor. Nowadays windows close as quickly as they open. There’s a better-positioned colossus that just took their lunch money, while Sinatra sings in the background. That’s hard to argue with. The thorny truth is that the good in sports is just as fleeting as the bad. Signal-stealing intervention or not, it took the bombers fifteen years to return to these heights. If they aren’t willing to beat the rest of the league financially or aren’t skilled enough to improve their roster in other ways, there’s no reason to think they’ll be back in any less time.

The only solid thing was this opportunity. Under pressure, they had no choice but to show who they were: a team unable to avoid the weight of their own options. A team capable of stealing a road opener and throwing it away in a matter of minutes; of building a 5-0 lead in a home elimination game and setting it on fire thanks to three Little League errors in less than 15 minutes. The type of team that wastes the biggest postseason burst of power since Babe Ruth got his shot because their 32-year-old captain can’t catch a routine fly ball. A team that throws away a crowning World Series performance by the best player of his era because they fail to cover first base on a dribbling grounder. A team built to attack a team of four Hall of Famers – who made a billion dollars this offseason – and then fold at the slightest sign of resistance, at every moment of consequence, in every game .

Amazing, maddening, incredible, flawed and stupid. Your New York Yankees of 2024: a team talented enough to get there, but damn sure not serious enough to win it.