Throw this whole era in the trash
It makes the 2015-19 heat and 2013-17 ravens eras seem fun by comparison. Every single year of Aaron Judge’s career has been defined by the Yankees at an organizational level refusing to go all in and truly go for a title and immediately getting burned as a result, only to do the same thing the very next season and then for the front office and owner to take no responsibility for any of it afterwards. Not a single stretch of any team I follow has been this depressing, and that includes my hockey team that hasn’t even won a single division title in my lifetime. Every last one of the past 8 years has ended in a way that leaves nothing but a taste of bitterness, resentment, and anger. 2013-16 wasn’t this bad.
2017: Hal doesn’t want to pay Justin Verlander so he gets to Houston and beats them twice in a 7 game ALCS. Directly cost them the pennant. Then Cashman fires the manager who led the most fun Yankee season since 2009 and replaces him with someone entirely unfit for the job.
2018: Cashman prospect hugs so the pirates trade Gerrit Cole to Houston and he gets burned by trading for Sonny Gray and JA Happ
2019: After passing on Harper for Happ, Adam Ottavino, and Aaron Hicks, all 3 are terrible or hardly available all season. Cole, Verlander, Machado, and Harper easily swings the pennant for the Yankees and probably the World Series too.
2020: hard to judge this year all circumstances considered
2021: Cashman lets Tanaka walk and replaces him with a bunch of pitchers who are coming off major injuries. They miss the division title because they don’t think having capable defenders at catcher, shortstop, 1st base, left field, or centerfield is important. Cashman trades for guys like Odor, Gallo, and Heaney, all of whom turn out to be far worse than the players they replaced and then cost them home field advantage vs Boston in the wild card game. Neglect of the pitching staff leaves them sending Cole on 1 good leg into that start when everyone had seen him laboring for a month and knew he needed to be sitting, but he was the last relatively healthy body remaining in the rotation. DJ doesn’t even make it to the playoffs (a good GM would’ve seen the red flags and let him walk after 2020). Moving Torres to shortstop ruined him for basically 2 years.
2022: Josh Donaldson and IKF who they picked over any of the shortstops are horrible all year and IKF is directly involved in the sequence that ends their season in game 4 vs Houston. The starter they trade for instead of Castillo doesn’t even make it to the playoffs. I don’t need to explain Gallo and Hicks, do I?
2023: After years of neglecting the roster around Judge and Cole the whole team falls apart. Judge and Torres are the only hitters to post an above average ops and Cole is the only starter to post an ERA under 4.25 which leads to their worst season since 1990.
2024: We all saw Stroman, Verdugo, Rizzo, DJ, Cabrera, and Ben Rice this past season. That shyt cost them the World Series where if they’d spent money on Snell and Bellinger instead of those guys we’d probably have seen a parade through lower Manhattan this past November.
They should have won the World Series 3-5 times since 2017. Instead they barely won 3 division titles and barely pulled off 1 pennant and then embarrassed themselves in the enduring World Series
