It’s Only March, But the Yankees Are in Big Trouble

Gerrit Cole has reason to be a little despondent. Photo: Brandon Sloter/Getty Images

Because the Yankees made it to the World Series last October, it’s easy to forget that the team’s fans were close to a full revolt before the 2024 season began. Sure, they had just acquired Juan Soto’s services for a year. But in 2023, the Yankees had just gone 82-80, their worst record since 1992, and had missed the playoffs entirely. Manager Aaron Boone was heading into the final year of his contract; general manager Brian Cashman, who has astonishingly been with the team since 1986 (George Steinbrenner hired him as an intern after running into Cashman’s dad at a horse-racing track), had more than worn out his welcome; the Yankees hadn’t been to the World Series since their current starting shortstop was 8 years old. The natives were restless, and the villagers had their torches and pitchforks at the ready. Pick your metaphor: Fans were on the verge of hysteria.

Then the Yankees went out and reached the World Series thanks largely to an all-world season from Aaron Judge, an almost-as-good year from Soto, and a surprisingly healthy rotation led by Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, and Rookie of the Year Luis Gil. Even with everything going just about perfectly, the team won only 94 games — that’s as many as they won the year they (essentially) fired Joe Torre. They were fortunate to run into two middling American League Central teams in the postseason, but they did make it to the World Series. Yes, they lost to the Dodgers in not-all-that-competitive fashion, but this was still an achievement. Yankees fans did not descend on the Bronx with those pitchforks.

Now, though, they just might.

The Yankees are still two weeks away from their first game of the 2025 season on Thursday, March 27. And while it’s obviously very early, thus far they are experiencing exactly the opposite dynamic as last year: Everything is going wrong. Gil, the vaunted rookie breakthrough, will miss three months with a lat strain. Slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who was the ALCS MVP last season, has not swung a bat in more than a month because of elbow pain and may still need surgery at some point. Infielder DJ LeMahieu is hurt for the fifth straight year. And last weekend brought the nightmare of all nightmares: Ace Gerrit Cole, the Cy Young winner, the man making more money per season to pitch than anyone ever, reported elbow pain after a subpar Thursday-night spring-training start, receiving a worrying MRI, and is now having Tommy John surgery, which will force him to miss the rest of this season and probably most of the next. Other than Judge, there is no more important player to the Yankees than Cole, and now he’s gone. As is Soto. As is Gil. As is Stanton. As is LeMahieu. Suddenly, the Yankees’ World Series run last year looks less like a return to glory for the empire and more like a dead-cat bounce before the collapse really begins.

This injury explosion may not be Boone’s or Cashman’s fault directly, though you could make an argument that they seeded this turn of events by retaining so many players in their 30s. It’s telling that after losing Soto, the Yankees spent some of the money they had earmarked for him on the sort of aging former stars who have perpetually gotten the team in trouble. Cody Bellinger (whom they received in a trade with the Cubs) and Paul Goldschmidt are former MVPs, but they are both many years removed from their prime; they don’t add up to half of what the Yankees lost in Soto. The Yankees brought in left-handed starter Max Fried but for an exorbitant price: $218 million for eight years of another guy in his 30s who has thrown more than 175 innings in his career exactly once. (And missed most of 2023 with injury problems and hit the injured list last year as well.) Their only other reliable starter is Rodón, notorious for being one of the most regularly injured pitchers in baseball. His track record is so spotty that his relative health in 2024 almost makes you more nervous for him in 2025, not less. The Yankees rotation, which was supposed to be a strength, is in tatters already. One more injury would be catastrophic.

But the Yankees lineup may be in even worse shape. It was already overly reliant on Judge last year, but with Soto (and Stanton and LeMahieu) gone, he’s now essentially the entire offense. (The fifth-place hitter on this team is … Jazz Chisholm Jr.?) For all the fanfare about Bellinger and Goldschmidt, they were merely league-average hitters last year; now they’re the only lineup protection Judge has. And here is the third rail of all Yankees talk: There is no assurance that Judge will stay as healthy as he has been the past few seasons. He played 157 games in 2022 and 158 in 2023, his two MVP seasons, but otherwise his career has been littered with injuries — 112 games in 2018, 102 games in 2019, and 106 games in 2023, the last time the Yankees were as reliant on him as they are right now and, not coincidentally, the season in which they won only 82 games. Judge is a massive human being and will turn 33 next month, only two years younger than Stanton (his only real comparison by size), who has long since broken down. The Yankees have danced between the raindrops by avoiding Judge injuries the past few years. They are unlikely to remain so fortunate; it’s only a matter of time. If Judge gets hurt? Forget returning to the World Series. The Yankees would be lucky to avoid last place, a fate they have endured only twice in the past 100 years.

All of this was avoidable. The Yankees have organizational problems that go beyond their penchant for signing aging stars: Their farm system is eroding, owner Hal Steinbrenner is seemingly more concerned with getting under MLB’s luxury-tax line than winning that elusive 28th championship, and there’s just a certain inertia that comes with a general manager being in the job as long as Cashman has. When the Mets and Steve Cohen outbid them for Soto this offseason — someone outbidding the Yankees! For one of their own guys! What is the world coming to? — it was about more than just taking away one of their best players. It was about smelling blood in the water, seeing a once-proud dynasty teetering on the edge of a cliff. The Yankees look as vulnerable right now as they have since … well, last March. And it sure seems as if Cashman and Boone — and, potentially, Steinbrenner himself — won’t have a World Series appearance to bail them out this time. Any more bad news and this could get ugly fast, if it isn’t already. Isn’t spring training supposed to be the most hopeful time of the year?