Sad News: New York Yankees Yankees Key Player Announces Resignation and Departure Club Today

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.