For the entirety of the summer and a mercifully thin slice of fall, something reeked in the Bronx, and it wasn’t the fumes coming off I-95. I took in this odor firsthand, at great financial expense, and for very little reason other than tribal allegiance to the rough beast of my Core Four–obsessed childhood. Now that baseball’s marathon of a regular season is officially over, though, it’s time to come clean (or at least attempt a good scrubbing): The 2023 New York Yankees were simply ass. I didn’t know it in April, I had a feeling in May, I was certain by June, and still I came back to Yankee Stadium in July, August, and even September. There is little pride in this statement. (Again, them boys were butt.)They could not hit. They had one starting pitcher and one position player worth a dime. They brandished a style that consistently made those who paid to watch it suddenly and overwhelmingly sad. At the final game I attended this season, during the Yankees’ second-to-last home stand, I saw a beer vendor who, in the middle of hawking his wares off the first-base line, preemptively dismissed the team’s latest ill-fated attempt at a rally by serenading second baseman Gleyber Torres as a “fucking bum”—and this was before the infielder had even dipped a toe in the batter’s box.
The atmosphere was toxic. It was not good. We Yankee fans wanted a winner. We always want a winner. These expectations are, as the game’s poet laureate Roger Angell once wrote, “admirable but a trifle inhuman.” That there is a team for front-runners to root for when they desire a world without failure is essentially the Bronx Bombers’ sales pitch, their tempting black book. This team does not bottom out (even in this “disaster” of a season, they went 82-80, their 31st straight year without a losing record). It’s what they exist to transcend and now, also, the mark of their descent: They’re not supposed to fall this low.
