Yankees Fans Are Smarter Than Ownership Thinks
The main crux for why Hal and Hank haven’t sold off players during the year isn’t because they are simply trying to stay true to the “Yankee way” of never giving up on a season. It’s not because they feel the Yankees fan deserves the best.
They actually do this because they are deathly afraid of being in charge of a wasted season and witnessing an empty Yankee Stadium in August and September.
The shame of it all is that Yankee Stadium is already empty with all of these high-priced, over-the-hill leftovers from other teams.
Fans are sick and tired of the same old issues.
The Yankees fanbase is smart and would welcome a complete rebuild with open arms. If anybody thinks for one moment a Yankees fan would rather witness Mark Teixeira and Chase Headley looking old on a .500 team as opposed to an Aaron Judge and Jorge Mateo showing us a glimpse of the future on a 20-games below .500 team, you are simply uniformed. That’s not to say each of those guys are ready, it’s just an example as two of the very few possibilities the Yankees currently have in the farm.
The fan of this organization would love to see youth parading itself around the diamond and in the outfield. Their eyes would be wide open as opposed to halfway shut, and it will all be thanks to that warm and fuzzy feeling that it’s all going to a good cause: the future of the franchise.
Instead, what the fans have received is a half-way attempt to turn over the roster while holding onto big-ticket items.
It simply doesn’t work.
What Sandy Alderson and the New York Mets did the last half decade works. What the Houston Astros did for so many seasons works. Through pain comes pleasure.
Would the Yankees ever dip down to those lows? Of course not. Still, a clean selling period and turning over to youth is priority.
Priority No. 1, though, is for the Yankees to look at themselves in the mirror and understand exactly what they are: a team heading nowhere in 2016. A team in desperate need to sell off parts and acquire younger assets.
2015 was a good start to this process. Instead of acquiring talent during the trade deadline, the organization stood firm in keeping its prospects. Hopefully they understood that ridiculous power production coming from Teixeira and A-Rod was an anomaly, not a regularity.
If they don’t continue this mindset this season, they never will. And therefore, they’ll never have a chance at another 1990s-like dynasty that was built on youth while George was suspended.
We’ll know the moment the decide to either sell off one of their movable parts or not. If Aroldis Chapman is still a Yankee come August, we’ll then know the Yankees haven’t changed one bit.
The identity crisis would still be ongoing.
