It’s Time To Rebuild the Bombers

Suffice it to say, the 2023 season has not gone the way either the New York Yankees or their fans had hoped. The team’s current nine-game losing streak is their longest in 41 years. And while the team’s 60-65 record isn’t on the same grim level as those of the Athletics or Royals, it’s still awful by the franchise’s typical standards. New York has teetered on the edge of .500 a few times recently, including being outscored in three of four seasons from 2013 to 2016, but you have to go back to 1992 to find the last time they crossed that negative line. Rather than tear everything down to the foundation when things go wrong, the Yankees tend to be a team that reloads and tries again next time. But can they do that this offseason?

The Yankees have had some bad breaks this season, but blaming everything on that would be a mistake. I’m not going to wax poetic about why this season has been so miserable — other writers have already laid out the club’s tale of woe — but we still need to review the basics to get a good view of where things truly stand. The pitching bears quite a lot of the blame. In detailing how the preseason PECOTA projections for the Yankees diverged from what has actually happened, Patrick Dubuque didn’t mince words at Baseball Prospectus:

Two of the Yankees’ seven starters have met expectations so far, and it’s their two worst ones. Injuries have pressed those sixth and seventh (and eighth) starters into service, even more so than our depth chart team anticipated. But when you imagine a collapse like the Yankees have had, you assume that it’s injuries. You envision Aaron Judge’s plate appearances replaced by Billy McKinney’s, like the world’s most unprepared Broadway understudy. While Brito and Randy Vásquez haven’t bailed the team out, they also didn’t make the hole. And at this point, it’s more hole than boat.

For the Wall Street Journal, Lindsey Adler talked about how the team’s plan to develop around homegrown talent has given way to a lineup and staff stocked with aging veterans rather than young stars:

Years later, the 2023 mess represents the failure of the Baby Bombers to find success at the major-league level. Only Judge, Torres, and Severino remain on the team today. Bird is out of baseball, Andújar and Frazier are in the minor leagues, and Sánchez has taken his low-average, high-slugging shtick to San Diego.

No team strikes gold on every prospect, but with that group the Yankees had the potential to have a robust core—two outfielders, a catcher, a shortstop, a second baseman, a first baseman, and an ace—under team control for many years to come.

While it would be fun to be able to say, “Ha, ZiPS saw this coming the whole time, puny mortals!” I don’t get to have that satisfaction. ZiPS had the Yankees with a median projection of 89 wins coming into the season, tied with the Toronto Blue Jays in first place in the AL East. (At this point, to hit that 89-win record, the Yankees would have to win about three-quarters of their remaining games, which, while possible, is an extremely tall order.) Even if you liked the Yankees coming into the season, the fact is that there was always substantial downside to be found in the roster. Looking at the history of the Yankees’ ZiPS projections, you can see the ebbs and flows of the team’s fortunes over the last 20 years:

The fact that a 99-win 2022 season only produced enough performance-based goodness to juice the team’s projections from 88 to 89 wins should have been a red flag about the team’s downside. I talked about this briefly in my final preseason standings post:

The Yankees were the most volatile team in the standings when I ran these projections back in February and the uncertainty of the team’s rotation has just magnified that result. We shouldn’t necessarily panic about Luis Severino and Carlos Rodón at this stage, but their injuries are adding yet more mysterious fog of war to the mix. Combine a rotation with a lot of variance with the fact that there’s a lot of value tied up in a single player, Aaron Judge, and the Yankees are the division’s X factor.

The Yankees have become reliant on larger parts of their win total coming from a shrinking percentage of their roster, which leaves a lot tied up with the fate of a few players. The Angels can tell you about the inherent risks of that, though the Yankees have historically done a much better job filling out their rosters with complementary players than their haloed compatriots out west. The 2022 season demonstrated how good the Yankees’ core was when things went their way more often than not; the 2023 team is a very similar roster showing the opposite scenario. Just as 99 wins was a realistic possibility, so was a 79-win season.

So, what’s next? While you’d have to be seriously deluded to confuse this team’s spending habits with those of the Rays, George Steinbrenner is gone and Hal Steinbrenner appears to have a different appetite for patching holes with piles of cash. We estimate the Yankees’ luxury tax payroll as approaching $300 million this year, and they already have close to $200 million committed for next season. When you consider that that $200 million does not include salaries for arbitration-eligible players such as Gleyber Torres, Nestor Cortes, Clay Holmes, or Jonathan Loáisiga (the Yanks spent nearly $50 million on salaries for arbitration-eligible players in 2023), they may not have enough room under their self-imposed payroll limits to quickly retool as they have in the past.

Indeed, I think the Yankees should probably be looking ahead two or more years, rather than focusing on 2024. We’re perhaps already seeing the beginnings of an increased nod toward the long haul rather than the short one. Everson Pereira and Oswald Peraza were just called up, and I doubt the team would be doing that right now if they didn’t intend to give them serious looks and full-time play. Austin Wells has been solid at Triple-A, and when the minor league season ends, it’s going to be hard not to give him a look in the majors as well. All three may play critical roles on the next good Yankees team, that team just might not take the field next season.

I ran some very, very, very (keep saying “very” for another 15 minutes) preliminary projections for the 2024 season. These projections assemble teams based only on the players who are currently under club control; think of them as “baseline” projections, the place where every team begins the 2023-24 offseason. The Yankees do not start off in a dominating position:

Despite the Yankees only having one imminent free agent they might miss (Harrison Bader), the state of the team is such that simply standing in place and hoping everything that went wrong this season will go better next year may very well be a losing proposition. Even if the rest of the AL East also stood pat, the Yanks still wouldn’t be in a dominating position. On the offensive side of the equation, only five players under contract project at 1.5 WAR or more in 2024:

By comparison, the Red Sox have seven, the Orioles and Rays have eight, and the Blue Jays have an absurd 13, enough that they won’t have enough playing time for everyone. (When the Yankees have a core strong enough to challenge for the AL East in a couple of years, those upstart Orioles will already be starting to say goodbye to some of their young talent. I’ll complain about that another day, though.) Even Aaron Judge has a reduced outlook compared to before the 2023 season. He’s still viewed as one of of the scariest hitters in baseball, but ZiPS projects him well below the output of his historic 2022 season. Injuries and the continued march of time will do that.

Nearly a quarter of the team’s guaranteed money for 2024 is tied up in two players who aren’t on the above list: Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo.

Stanton is no longer a young superstar, a prime-age superstar, an aging superstar, or even a regular star. His last 3-WAR season was in 2018, and he’s only had a single two-win season since (and it’s not likely to happen this year either). Stanton turns 35 soon after next year’s World Series, and the odds of the team ever getting the player they hoped for when they traded for him are growing increasingly long. ZiPS now thinks it’s more likely than not that Stanton will fall short of 500 homers in the end.

Now, Rizzo’s concussion and its after-effects (not to mention continuing to play through post-concussion symptoms) add greater uncertainty to his projection than is typical, but he’s also a player in the twilight of his career, so it’s hard to really be enthused about his likely 2024 contributions.

On the pitching side, only three starters currently project above the 1.5 WAR mark:

Even if you like Domingo Germán, once you account for injury risks, the Yankees probably need to add two good starting pitchers this offseason if they want to compete in 2024. ZiPS remains skeptical of Clarke Schmidt (and even more so of Jhony Brito), Randy Vásquez wasn’t even getting Triple-A hitters out, Luis Gil’s coming off Tommy John surgery, and next season may be too quick for Will Warren.

The relievers, at least, project somewhat better, but that’s not enough in itself to return the Yankees to the top of the division:

Reloading quickly and effectively looks like a really tough challenge for the Yankees. The team is arguably in worse shape than at any point in recent memory, perhaps going back to the CBS-era Yankees, which only non-Yankees fans wish to remember. In 1993, Baseball America ranked the Yankees farm system as the fourth-best in baseball. In our most recent farm system rankings, we have the team at no. 25. The Yankees have had the same approach for a very long time. Perhaps they’d be well served by a laser focus on the future, rather than what’s immediately coming.