The Yankees, as you may have heard, have fallen below .500. It’s the latest they’ve been below .500 in a season since Derek Jeter still had rookie eligibility.
In a vacuum, this wouldn’t be the most disappointing thing. The AL East is especially good this year, Aaron Judge has been hurt, and while things are bleak the Yankees still aren’t completely, entirely out of the playoff race. But this is not a vacuum, and things look the worst they’ve looked in the Bronx for a long time. Of the team’s four players under massive, long-term contracts, Judge and Gerrit Cole still look understandable, but Giancarlo Stanton and Carlos Rodón are injury nightmares, and Stanton hasn’t produced this year even when healthy. The roster is old, and a lot of money is committed for a long time, and the farm system is not too highly regarded right now. Anthony Volpe is having a solid rookie year, but a strong defensive shortstop with a below-average bat is not enough to stem the tide, not when the franchise which was once the paragon powerhouse hasn’t made a World Series in a Little Leaguer’s lifetime.
Some of this, of course, is the expectation game. It has gotten harder to dominate baseball since the Yankees did it in the 90s, and it wasn’t as easy then as the team made it look. Making the playoffs nearly every season is a blessing, but it’s also a curse, making it harder to ever rebuild. Some of this is also short-term memory. The Yankees nearly won 100 games last year, and while they weren’t competitive in the ALCS, a four-game swoon in baseball is most often an oddity, even when it comes at the worst possible time.
But, things do not look good. The bullpen and the back end of the rotation have fallen off cliffs, and it’s hard to get back up. Harrison Bader has been the team’s fourth-most productive player. FanGraphs’s Depth Charts system currently projects the rest of season roster as the 12th-best in baseball, between the Twins and the Brewers. The Yankees are paying their players only $9M less in total than those two teams combined.
This is the real problem for Brian Cashman, and it’s one the Cubs ran into in the late Theo Epstein years as well. Sometimes, talent turns a corner, and it doesn’t turn the direction you want it to turn. Cashman, like Epstein, is clearly a smart baseball guy. He’s the kind of front office decisionmaker any resourced team would be lucky to have. Epstein, too, did not get fired, nor should he have gotten fired, nor was his departure all that significant of a pivot in the franchise’s organizational approach, with Jed Hoyer his longtime disciple. But there’s a school of thought which wants change when things aren’t optimal, and things aren’t optimal in the Bronx right now. Baseball’s greatest franchise is not currently baseball’s greatest franchise. I wouldn’t do it. But after 25 years of Cashman, it’s believable the Yankees might move on. The fact it’s even believable says so much.
The Wander Franco Investigation
It was announced on Wednesday that a special legal division in the Dominican Republic will be handling the Wander Franco investigation. It’s in the province of Peravia, home to Franco’s home city of Baní. We don’t know more than that, and we don’t know how much Major League Baseball will defer to the legal investigation and how exactly MLB will run its own concurrent investigation, but that’s the latest.
Tough Matchups for the Cubs
It’s a weird series this weekend for the Cubs, because the Royals are bad but they’ve got some concerning names. Cole Ragans has been pitching well. Brady Singer is surging. Only the matchup against Jordan Lyles on Sunday feels advantageous for hitters, but that’s just one game. Add in that Bobby Witt Jr. would be an MVP candidate in a non-Ohtani world and it’s a little bit scary for Chicago’s National League team. The depth question tilts in the Cubs’ favor, but they can’t slip up.
How Good a Coach Is David Braun?
David Braun was the defensive coordinator at North Dakota State for four seasons, a stretch which saw the team win two national championships, lose one title game, and get eliminated by the eventual champs in the Covid season while their star quarterback sat out and prepared for the draft. Now, Braun is Northwestern’s head coach for a year, in an unconventional entry to the nation’s second-best league.
North Dakota State is an interesting beast, and its former head coaches who’ve departed, Craig Bohl and Chris Klieman, are an interesting pair. Bohl has been at Wyoming now for nine seasons, but he’s only 52–56, a number not too different from the Cowboys’ 48–61 record over the nine seasons preceding his Laramie arrival. Klieman, on the other hand, had Kansas State right around the top of the Big 12 in his fourth year, and things look solid again this fall.
Part of what’s hard with North Dakota State is that it’s hard to know to whom the credit belongs. Was it Bohl who built this? How differently would we remember Bohl had Klieman’s 69–6 stint and four titles not followed? Klieman was an assistant for all three of Bohl’s championships. Does that matter?
Braun is inheriting a brutal roster at a brutal place to try to coach football (this is not a reference to the school’s stance on hazing—that Northwestern is a tough place to win has absolutely nothing to do with hazing). The Wildcats have only two games on the schedule they should be expected to win, and that might be disrespectful to UTEP. But the mystique of NDSU makes Braun a curiosity. Can he do anything with this team? If he doesn’t, does it mean anything at all?
Andonovski Resigns
It’s too bad the USWNT question became such a culture war flashpoint, and on a related note, it’s too bad that criticizing USWNT players was already taboo in certain circles. Of course these players are not un-American, of course this is a team in which we should take pride, of course these are players we should respect. But just as respect doesn’t mean calling them communists or whatever words have been thrown around by jackasses trying to make a buck off of one angry market of media consumers, respect doesn’t mean infantilizing these players like the New York Times-reading social caste tends to do. This is a serious team, and it should be treated seriously. If Carli Lloyd was talking about a men’s team in any sport, her comments would not have provoked much backlash, if any.
In the midst of all of this, head coach Vlatko Andonovski is moving on. His resignation was announced yesterday. It was a tough situation to inherit. As it goes with the Yankees, it’s hard to succeed when the baseline expectation is a world championship. You can never exceed expectations. You can only meet them. Still, Andonovski did not meet expectations, or come anywhere close. The Olympics were a failure. The World Cup was a failure. And the worst part was how much the U.S. always looked like the more talented and athletically gifted team. When a team like that fails, coaching is the first place to look. No, the USWNT did not look mentally prepared this last month. That’s something a coach shouldn’t allow to happen.
