Keidel: Can We Still Call This Season A Success If Yankees Miss Playoffs?
By Jason Keidel
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When asked about the heavy expectations that come with coaching the club with the most Super Bowl wins in NFL history, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin always says, "The standard is the standard."
So what does that say about the team that invented the standard?
The New York Yankees, the greatest team in our oldest team sport, have a history that is too epic and obvious to recount. Add George Steinbrenner & Sons to the archives and you have a weighty, sweaty set of expectations in the locker room every season.
But, as we well know, the Yankees were in a rare moment of rebuild, an odd bottleneck of years when we don't forward their mail to October. Gone were the sloppy free agent splurges that yielded results for a few years then formed a financial anvil around the team's neck for the final three or four years.
The Yanks went young. And it worked. Gary Sanchez was a sensation last year, and Aaron Judge quickly morphed into the face of baseball this year, his linebacker frame and equally monstrous fly balls took the sport by storm.
And there were results in the standings. When you're 38-23 on June 12, four games ahead of the hated Boston Red Sox, it's more than a fast start, leaving your imagination to soar.
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But whether you blame youth, attrition or both, the Yanks are in a sprawling slump. They've lost their last two, seven of their last 10, and since their glittering mark on June 12, they've tumbled to a 9-21 record, plunging from first to third place in the AL East.
While it's a bit premature to read the Bombers their last rites for 2017, it does beg a salient question: Is the season still a success if the Yankees don't make the playoffs?
By the ancient standard, the answer is clearly no. But these are also different times. The Yanks didn't just flip their roster or inject some youth serum into their lineup. They've overhauled their identity.
Don't you get a year or two pass for a reboot of those contours? Must the Yankees win 95 games every year in order to justify your fandom? Certainly, they charge first-place prices at that opulent bank vault of a ballpark. But if we can look past the offensive pricing and the velvet-rope mentality of the new stadium, their new look came by way of an essential, old-school approach.
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Teams, like the Cubs and Red Sox, were lapping the Yanks, despite not having their checkbook or yearly revenue. As were the Dodgers and Astros. Maybe no team can turn its populous into that of New York City's, but when the Yankees hatch financial gold mines like the YES Network, the rest of the sport will eventually catch up and carbon-copy the business model.
So regional cable networks sprout like weeds around the nation, and thus the rest of MLB was no longer a giant farm system for the Yankees. Meaning, the Yanks were either going to give obscene contracts to discarded, aging stars or turn this tanker around, which takes time.
Are you, the Yankees fan, down with that? Can you live with 85-77 this year, knowing that next year should be better? Or are you still that "Got Rings" T-shirt guy who needs to double-down on a corporate coda that stopped working?
Sure, when you pay top dollar, you expect top returns. Heck, some of us still don't think the Yanks needed a new stadium. But it's here, and although it may have taken a while for the Steinbrenners to let Brian Cashman do something other than lug suitcases of cash to newly minted free agents, the beleaguered Yankees GM has done a good thing here.
It should not have taken Michael Pineda's injury for the team or the town to realize they need more pitching. This dream sequence of a season had to snap to reality eventually. We were all pleasantly startled by their sublime start to 2017. But the current club and its sagging record is what most of us thought they'd be.
After all, Judge can't hit, field, and pitch. Wait until Clint Frazier finds his legs and Gleyber Torres reaches the big leagues. The Yanks will have a laughably good lineup of young studs.
Might they peel some off for pitching? Or do they give this one more year? Patience is a counter-intuitive thing for the Yankees fan. But ride with them through this June swoon that could touch August and see where this goes.
These are short-term doldrums that will yield long-term riches. Even if we don't know how that works.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
