Another October with the Same Yankees Script

I really thought this October was going to be different in Yankees land. 

The Yankees played great baseball over the final month of the season. 

They slayed a massive postseason dragon by taking out the Red Sox in the Wild Card series. 

They built a ton of momentum, had three reliable starting pitchers and felt like a team playing their best baseball at the right time. 

All of that sounded wonderful in theory, but the result in Yankee land was a pretty familiar one. 

It was yet another year in which the Yankees fell short of winning their elusive 28th World Series title. 

The Yankees lost in 4 games to the Toronto Blue Jays in the ALDS where it was pretty obvious that the better team won the series. 

The Yankees could not win north of the border the entire regular season and that story remained the same in October. 

Game 1 and 2 in Toronto were absolute blood baths. 

The Yankees couldn’t shut down Toronto’s powerful lineup and had no answers from an offensive perspective. 

The advantage the Yankees expected to have with their starting pitching was completely negated in this series. 

Max Fried and Carlos Rodon were aces for the team all season long and picked a bad time to have two awful starts. 

The much maligned Yankees bullpen didn’t help matters in both Game 1 and Game 4. 

In reality, storylines that plagued the Yankees throughout the regular season ended up being problematic in the postseason. 

Thankfully, it will not be another offseason discussing Aaron Judge and October struggles. 

The Yankee captain had the best postseason of his career. He hit .500 and delivered his signature October moment, tying Game 3 with a 3 run bomb with his team facing elimination. 

Sadly for Judge, his moment will just be a footnote on another Yankees season that fell short. 

It feels like I could be writing the same column year after year for this Yankees group. 

Too many strikeouts, not enough clutch hits, not good enough when it matters the most. 

Aaron Judge is one of the best baseball players I’ve ever seen. I hope that his career doesn’t follow the same path as Ted Williams, Don Mattingly, Dan Marino and Patrick Ewing – all time greats who never were able to climb the top of the mountain. 

Judge and the Yankees will be back next season for October Baseball. Let’s hope I’m not writing the exact same column 12 months from now…

You can listen to my podcast New York, New York on The Ringer Podcast Network every Sunday & Thursday evenings on Spotify/Apple Podcasts. You can watch me nightly on Honda Sports Nite at 11 PM on SNY.