From top to bottom of organization, Yankees' demise has been many years in the making

After a 6-2 loss to the Red Sox in the 2021 American League wild-card game, Aaron Boone uttered a line he likely wished he had back.

“The league’s closed the gap on us,” he said that night in early October.  “We have to get better. We have to get better in every aspect.”

No one took issue with the last two sentences.

But the “closed the gap” part prompted several text messages the morning after.

 “It seems like they’re stuck in this place where they think they should be treated like they were from 1996-2012,” one AL rival executive said then. “But the way they operate has totally changed and the results haven’t been there and they’re totally oblivious to it.”

With the 2023 season having careened into a ditch – the results, 60-61 entering Friday night, as bad as they’ve been this late in a season in decades – is the organization still unaware?

That question won’t begin to be answered until the offseason which, should things continue as is, will start Oct. 2, the day after the regular season ends in Kansas City.

Then it will be the responsibility of managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner to administer a full autopsy.

On a lost season, yes, but, more broadly and as important, top-to-bottom on his organization to examine how it got where it is.

Where is it?

On the outside looking in when it comes to the best-run franchises in the game.

And the Yankees’ fall in many ways is the product of an internal organizational rot that has been years in the making. It is the result of an analytics group, overseen by assistant GM Michael Fishman but ultimately empowered by GM Brian Cashman, that – with some exceptions – behind the scenes treat those with the temerity to question their methods and decisions with dismissiveness and/or contemptuousness.   

That includes scouts, coaches, former players and even, in some cases, active players – basically anyone viewed as not all-in when it comes to the group’s, in its eyes, unassailable methodology.    

This week’s series in Atlanta, one in which the Yankees were outscored 18-3 in a three-game sweep, was illustrative.

Atlanta, while well-steeped in analytics and data science – all 30 teams use those things to varying degrees – isn’t married to them.  

Look in the Atlanta dugout for one example. Manager Brian Snitker, an organizational lifer going back to the late 1970s, has a staff loaded with big-league playing and/or coaching experience — something too many in the Yankees’ analytics wing privately see as neither relevant nor advantageous.

But there must be something to it. Atlanta, besides having a diverse roster with young, athletics players, overall just plays the game of baseball better. It also develops players better, a good transition to the comments of Ben Ruta.

Ruta, a 30th-round pick of the Yankees in 2016 who was in their system into 2020, criticized the club and its reliance on analytics in player development, his remarks coming to light Wednesday on the “Foul Territory” podcast. Ruta was dismissed in some circles as a malcontent who never reached the big leagues.

The problem?

“He wasn’t wrong,” one club insider said upon hearing Ruta’s criticisms.  

Ruta also wasn’t presenting anything new.

Rival scouts assigned to the Yankees system for several years have described something amiss in player development and, it should be pointed out, more than a few of those evaluators have extensive backgrounds in analytics, lest they be disregarded as old-school dinosaurs.  

“The hitting philosophy in BP seems to be,” said one NL scout who has seen the system extensively the last decade, “swing for exit velocity, put as many balls in the air as you can and hope some of them go over the fence.”

To portray the analytics group as simply bad would not be fair. And it would not be close to accurate, though, as in any industry, some analysts are better than others. There have been successes – the Yankees generally have done well, for instance, when it comes to relievers, with Clay Holmes, Wandy Peralta and Ian Hamilton among some current examples.

But among the issues, and this has been a point of contention inside the organization for a while, is the department’s non-existent accountability for missteps.

As another club insider put it: “They’re never wrong. Never. It’s always someone else’s fault.”

It was reminiscent of a comment one member of an NL club’s analytics department told Newsday in 2022 of that phenomena (which is not unique to the Yankees):

“Welcome to the battle of scouts versus analysts that’s been happening since Moneyball. Scouts were often able to see their mistakes and grow, while the analysts hid behind computers and poked fun while they left no paper trail so they could always deflect blame.”

It will be up to Steinbrenner to sift through it all. And though howls from fans will be for a complete house-cleaning, that isn’t necessarily the answer, either.

But a reset is needed, mainly curbing the influence of a group that, starting years ago at the minor league complex in Tampa, was responsible for the Yankees New World Order t-shirts – “New World Order” acting as a with-us-or-against-us separator between those all-aboard with analytics and data science and those who dared raise questions.    

Those shirts are still seen occasionally and there’s room on the backs of them for another pithy phrase that could adequately synopsize a good portion of those with decision-making sway: arrogance without achievement.