Sal Licata watched the Yankees game his partner BT was at last night, and it was another reminder that no matter how high the team gets, they’re almost always going to do something to crash back down.
“I don't get the overreaction to the Yankees winning those five games in a row going into the trade deadline, like the seven weeks of bad baseball was erased – since then, they’ve been an average team,” Sal said. “They’ve leveled off to a .400 team the last 20 games or so, and they’ve played teams that aren’t very good. Cleveland is one of the better teams, and they aren’t that great either, but the Yankees were so sloppy throughout the course of the game. In extra innings, it feels like the home team should win almost every time with the new rules, and they didn’t.”
And that’s the problem: the best thing you can say about the Yankees right now is…
“Well, nobody else is that good either, and that’s something we’ve heard throughout the course of the season,” Sal said. “But that’s not a good enough excuse for anybody! Focus on what the Yankees are as a team, and Yankees fans, and the Yankees can pretend all they want – whether it’s Hal or Cashman or Boone, whoever – but the reality is that nothing about watching this Yankees team as a team screams to you that they can be the best team in baseball, other than ‘who is?’ The Yankees should be better than everyone else, and going into the postseason, are the Yankees going to fall short of those expectations?”
Confidence was high after 2017, and even after 2019, but since after the Wild Card clunker in ’21, the Houston sweep in ’22, and last year’s October off, it seems like falling short is all the Yankees ever do.
“We’ve gone over the history, but for the Yanks to get to that next level, they need to be better than everyone else,” Sal said. “The results may vary, and if the Yankees are definitively better and get beat, that’s unfortunate, but that is a different level – and they’re not that right now. They're one of a bunch of teams that are gonna be playoff teams that have a chance of winning a World Series, and that's not good enough for the yankees or their standards.”
Maybe that’s the key to success is not be primed for it? Either way, Sal’s biggest issue is that the Yankees themselves don’t seem to see the forest through the trees.
“I feel like the Yankees don’t even acknowledge it. Cashman was on with BT and I a couple weeks back and said we’ve put out pieces together and we’ll take our chances in the postseason…yeah, okay,” Sal said. “If the Yankees were really that good, they’d have been pulling away from the Orioles, but they’re not at that top level – and you should be, especially in a year where you trade for Juan Soto. Their record says the Yankees have the most wins in baseball, but I don't care what their record says – no team in baseball is on pace for 100 wins, so all the Yankees are is one of a bunch of teams that can win the World Series just because the odds are you're in the postseason, so you have a chance to win a World Series…not because they're built to be a World Series team. Big difference.”