Aaron Judge just put together what should have been remembered as a legendary run through the ALDS.
Emphatically shutting up everyone who questioned his clutch gene in recent Octobers, Judge went 9-for-15 at the dish in the plate appearances in which Toronto didn’t intentionally walk him, including that instant classic of a game-tying three-run home run off the foul pole in Game 3.
Nevertheless, Judge’s inevitable march to the Hall of Fame continues without a World Series ring, as the Hal Steinbrenner-owned, Brian Cashman-assembled and Aaron Boone-managed Yankees squandered yet another year of Judge’s prime by simply not caring about winning like they used to.
Here are some cold, hard cash facts to chew on as the Yankees shift into offseason mode.
From 1999-2013, the Yankees ranked No. 1 in payroll for 15 consecutive years, per The Baseball Cube. Usually, it was by a laughable margin. Their 2005 payroll of $208M wasn’t far off from equaling the combined total of the second-most (Boston Red Sox at $123.5M) and third-most (New York Mets at $101.3M) aggressive spenders.
George Steinbrenner repeatedly laughed in the face of the competitive balance (luxury) tax.
Since 2013, however, the Yankees have assembled the largest payroll just once in 12 years, doing so in 2020. That one-off year came two seasons after they ranked seventh in spending in 2018, behind even the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Angels. Seventh!
This goes well beyond the fact that others, such as the Mets and Dodgers, have stepped up their spending.
The Yankees have become content with being “good enough to contend” while turning a profit, which comes in stark contrast to the decades in which they were obsessed with being the best, trying/spending to win it all every year.
In the final season of that 15-year run of No. 1 payrolls, they were at $229M. That represented 7.2 percent of the MLB-wide payroll ($3.2B) and almost 10 percent of their Forbes valuation of $2.3B in 2013. Multiple years during that decade-and-a-half run they were responsible for eight percent of all league payroll.
Fast-forward to 2025 and the Yankees had an Opening Day payroll of $287.5M. That’s down to 5.6 percent of league-wide payroll ($5.1B) and just 3.5 percent of their Forbes valuation of $8.2B.
In other words, they’ve increased spending by 25 percent since 2013, but league-wide payroll has gone up almost 60 percent during that time and the franchise’s value has gone up over 250 percent.
If Steinbrenner the Younger cared about rings as much as his father did, the Yankees’ payroll would be well north of $400M, probably pushing $700M.
And I’ll tell you one thing for sure: They wouldn’t have gotten outbid by the freaking Mets for Juan Soto last winter.
They wouldn’t have settled for a well-past-his-prime first baseman in Paul Goldschmidt for an umpteenth consecutive season, while Pete Alonso just sat there as a free agent for months.
When Gerrit Cole went down for the count in spring training, George Steinbrenner would have gone out and demanded someone who could actually help them win, as opposed to shrugging shoulders and hoping for the best with a 38-year-old Carlos Carrasco.
With each passing year, it becomes increasingly clear that this is no longer the Evil Empire it once was.
Heck, look no further than the incredible job security for the Yankees manager.
When the Yankees failed to win the World Series even once in 16 tries from 1979-1995, they churned through 11 different managers, plus several cycles of hiring and firing Billy Martin. Buck Showalter was the only one to survive three full seasons, and even he was let go after four years with a .539 winning percentage.
When “The Boss” was in his prime, managers existed almost for the express purpose of becoming the sacrificial lamb when times got tough.
Joe Girardi sputtered through eight championship-less seasons (2010-17), even missing the playoffs three times before they finally shifted gears to Boone.
Incredibly, the general consensus seems to be that Boone will return in 2026 for a ninth season, because he’s good enough, because the players like him and because they extended him through 2027 back in February.
Cashman’s probably going to be back, too, despite what is now a 25-year stretch with just the one ring in 2009.
Heads would have rolled long ago and multiple times over if George Steinbrenner were still alive and calling the shots. And then he would have gone out this winter and signed Kyle Tucker and/or Munetaka Murakami for a few hundred million to ensure they do better next year.
But the current era Yankees will probably more or less just run it back again with mostly the same players, manager and GM to waste another year of one of the best sluggers to ever walk the earth.
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