Crash and Burn

BY KEVIN KERNAN

The Yankees season came crashing down last year in the fifth game of the World Series. This year they could not even make it to the fifth game of the ALDS.

And yet they will lie to your face and tell you they made progress in 2025.

This year, they had to face real competition in the ALDS, the Toronto Blue Jays, not some AL Central tomato can. This year they crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, the first team knocked out of the four division series.

As a result, once again, the Yankees head home with no World Series title. Their last championship came in 2009; this year they couldn’t even make it back to the ALCS so no AL pennant.

The final blow came Wednesday night when the Blue Jays beat the Yankees 5-2 at Yankee Stadium to win the ALDS, three games to one. They finished the Yankees off in their own building.

They talk about the ghosts at Yankee Stadium. There are ghosts alright.

The ghosts, though, are the ghosts of the past 16 seasons. The Yankees run out the same Nerdy game plan every year under general manager Brian Cashman and activated on a day-to-day basis by manager Aaron Boone – and every year they fall short in pretty much the same fashion and offer up the same empty words after the final loss.

[Boone] was handpicked by Cashman over some much more qualified candidates and here the Yankees are again, singing the same old sad song, while Yankees fans continue to pay championship money in so many ways for a non-championship club.

On Wednesday night, Boone said the Yankees were “a really good team,’’ and “the awful part of this is the journey that you go on … and all you go through and for it to abruptly end is always difficult … it hurts.’’

Well, do something to change it.

Don’t run out the same game plan year after year.

Boone went on to say something about “ignite the fire’’ for next year, but by that point I turned him off. Enough. Spare me.

The bottom line is that Boone, for whatever reason, has not produced. He was handpicked by Cashman over some much more qualified candidates and here the Yankees are again, singing the same old sad song, while Yankees fans continue to pay championship money in so many ways for a non-championship club.

How bad was it? The Yankees were outscored, 34-19 in the four games.

This is not a college statistics course, this is baseball – and the Yankees continue to lose baseball games on the biggest stage and lose them in silly ways: a big error, a big strikeout – many strikeouts – the failure of putting the ball in play in key moments, the playing of players who should not be playing just so Cashman can prove his point, and that’s how shortstop Anthony Volpe managed to have one of the worst postseasons in history. More on that later.

The saddest part of all this for Yankee fans is that the Yankees wasted one of the most incredible years in baseball history by Aaron Judge, who valiantly tried to keep them alive for one more day. You can’t blame this one on Judge, who hit .331 with 53 home runs and 114 RBIs this season – numbers that truly matter.

Real numbers, not some made up in a science lab expected numbers.

It was Judge’s majestic three-run off the foul pole in Game 3 on Tuesday night, a magical moment that helped lift the Yankees to their only win of the series. Riding that momentum and having Cam Schlittler on the mound the Yankees believed they would take Game 4 and take the series back to the Rogers Centre. Especially since the Blue Jays were out of starting pitchers.

But now that Judgian Magic Moment is just a footnote to another Lost Season because of all the Yankees shortcomings – thanks to Cashman & Co. It is similar to Carlton Fisk’s Game 6 home run down the line in the 1975 World Series. The Red Sox lost Game 7 to the Reds.

You can be sure though that Yankees management and the season ticket office will drum up the Judge highlight in many ways this winter in an effort to get you to come back one more time.

Yankee fans are moth to the flame.

Just put the ball in play. Clean up your fundamentals. Get your best players on the field. Don’t worry about beards, worry about playing solid baseball.

The Yankees’ postseason passport back to Canada was canceled by – of all things – an eight-man bullpen game by the Blue Jays on yet another night the Yankees could not come up with big hits. Toronto’s Nathan Lukes, who spent 10 years in the minors, drove in two runs in the seventh with a two-out single and defensive replacement Myles Straw knocked in a vital insurance run in the eighth. Lukes’ hit was only possible because of a critical error by second baseman Jazz Chisolm Jr. who boldly proclaimed in September the Yankees were the best team in the American League and they were looking to step on the necks of opponents.

Jazz stepped in his own words, if you catch my drift.

As for Myles Straw’s golf swing of a hit in the eighth, the exit velocity of that base hit was 64 miles per hour. Show an exit velocity of 64 mph to the Yankees Nerds and they would all start laughing. The joke, though, is on them.

In his postgame wrap-up on Fox, ex-Yankee Alex Rodriguez said something that we used to talk about all the time, the value of contact saying he was “so tired’’ of hearing how home runs win games. He said the home run is for show, but it is batting average, contact, good defense and base-running that win titles.

This from someone who hit 696 home runs.

A-Rod believes the roster construction for the Yankees is the biggest problem, something I’ve been saying for years. “It is one of the worst roster constructions I have ever seen,’’ Rodriguez noted.

In the Blue Jays clubhouse the champagne flowed as the Jays mocked the Yankees with the playing of “New York, New York,’’ and Vlad Guerrero Jr. did the David Ortiz schtick of “Theeeee Yankees Lose!’’

To the victors and the $500 million man belong the spoils.

The Yankees’ Home Run or Bust philosophy (10 Ks, only six hits) proved to be fool’s gold as the Yankees went 1-for-6 with runners in scoring position and left 10 men on base – eight of those came in the last four innings. And while we are naming names, let’s not forget that Cashman’s right-hand man, assistant GM Michael Fishman – the keeper of the analytic flame – is a key component of this yearly dance of baseball death.

Amazing to me that with a good number of baseball people in the Yankees organization they continue to follow this non-baseball path of destruction.

Spend all the money in the world but if you don’t put the ball in play and play solid defense in the biggest moments you are destined to fail.

But don’t worry, owner Hal Steinbrenner is ready to hire another sports intelligence agency to audit what went wrong, just like he did a few years ago.

Let me help right now.

Here is the difference between the Yankees and the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays played baseball. The Yankees didn’t. Yes, it’s that simple.

The Blue Jays put the ball in play, contact was their friend, they played better defense than the Yankees as well. They ran the bases better and they had their superstar Vlad Guerrero Jr. who could stand tall with the Yankees superstar Aaron Judge.

Sure, the Yankees reloaded in the offseason, taking all their Juan Soto money to different areas of the team, but the result was the same.

The Yankees braintrust, plain and simple, does not value putting the ball in play. In the postseason, every year, that is the name of the game.

Three of the four starting pitchers for the Yankees flunked out this series.

This was no fluke, even Boone admitted after the final Yankee out – so fitting, a Cody Bellinger strikeout by closer Jeff Hoffman – the Blue Jays were the better team. The Blue Jays finished 20 games behind the Yankees in last place in the division in 2024 but now are way ahead of the Yankees. Yes, the two teams tied with 94 wins in the regular season, but counting the two embarrassing defeats in the first two games of this series, the Yankees were 1-8 at the Rogers Centre.

The saddest performance for the Yankees was by Volpe, something addressed in this space many times. Volpe struck out three times, giving him 14 Ks over his last 19 at-bats. He finally was pinch-hit for by Jasson Dominguez, who was put in the witness protection program by Cashman and Boone. Dominguez doubled to lead off the ninth and scored the Yankees second run on a Judge double. That was the Martian’s only at-bat of the series. The Yankees front office is Lost in Space – their own analytics space.

Volpe, over his last 11 plate appearances, noted by Katie Sharp, had 0 hits, 0 walks, and nine strikeouts. The only player in Yankee history to do that, by the way.

Sharp also dropped this factoid. Players in MLB history to have a single postseason with a .500 batting average, .575 on-base percentage, a .675 slugging percentage over 25 plate appearances? Aaron Judge this year and Manny Ramirez in 2008. That’s it.

Vlad Guerrero Jr. hit .529 with three home runs in this series. Two superstars who did their thing, but here is the difference. Ernie Clement hit an astounding .643 for the Blue Jays. For those of us who have been watching baseball since 1960 it is no surprise that some little-known player came out of nowhere to excel in a postseason series. It happens but try to explain that to the Nerds in charge or the Nerds in the media.

The Yankees are really good at crushing bad pitches and bad teams, creating an illusion that they are a great team. Yet every year they crash and burn in the same way.