The Yankees entered the 2023 season with championship aspirations. After all, they had just won 99 games, the AL East, and reached the ALCS the year prior. New York also brought back Aaron Judge and signed Carlos Rodon to big-money deals. But everything has crashed and burned. Hal Steinbrenner said he wanted answers, and it appears he’s actually serious about that.
A couple of weeks ago, a report from the Associated Press shared the following quote from Steinbrenner:
We’re going to take a very deep dive into everything we’re doing. We’re looking to bring in possibly an outside company to really take a look at the analytics side of what we do. Baseball operations in general. We’re going to have some very frank conversations with each other. This year was obviously unacceptable.
According to NJ.com’s Bob Klapisch, Hal Steinbrenner has gone ahead with finding an outside company to evaluate the Yankees and determine what the heck happened this year:
The good news is that Steinbrenner has hired that yet-unnamed third party for a full audit.
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We obviously don’t know who this company is yet — and who knows if we ever will — but this is progress. He wasn’t just saying nonsense! I guess things have gotten bad enough that Hal has decided there’s no choice but to try and find some answers.
But when it comes to the top of the food chain — i.e. general manager Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone — change doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. At least at this moment. As we’ve seen across town with the Mets, though, significant changes can happen within the front office without the most public-facing dudes losing their respective jobs.
After beating the Milwaukee Brewers on Sunday, New York went to Boston and took three of four from the Red Sox. Heading into a weekend series against the Pirates, the Bombers are 74-73 and tied with Boston for last place in the AL East.
Even if the Yankees avoid their first last-place finish since 1990, this year has been a complete disappointment. We’ll see if this objective third-party evaluation will help bring some significant change in the Bronx. It’d be a pleasant surprise after initially hearing reports that nothing big would change if there was no October baseball at Yankee Stadium this year.
You can reach Matt Musico at matt.musico@xlmedia.com. You can follow him on Twitter: @mmusico8.
