David Lennon: Yankees having a captain works great for them, but it won't be happening with Mets
The Yankees’ Aaron Judge hits a two-run homer against the Tigers in the third inning during Spring Training at George M. Steinbrenner Field on Saturday in Tampa, Fla. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
TAMPA, Fla. — Ryan McMahon was acquired by the Yankees six days before last season’s July 31 trade deadline. Uprooted from the historically awful Rockies, the only team he’d played for during his eight-year career, McMahon wasn’t sure what to expect coming to the Bronx.
It didn’t take him very long to find out. He was familiar with Aaron Judge’s supernatural talent, obviously, but he soon discovered just how much No. 99 set the tone for the clubhouse, how he was the foundation for the 21st century version of baseball’s most storied franchise.
“Even if he wasn’t labeled the captain, you would know exactly who the captain of this team was,” McMahon told Newsday. “It’s just how he carries himself every single day. He’s probably one of the easier people to talk to in the room. Just having a guy like that, you can’t really put a number on how valuable that is. But it’s basically 100 out of 100. It’s extremely important, extremely valuable.”
Anyone wearing pinstripes, whether for weeks, months or years, would agree. And that’s because Judge was a natural fit — he had the captain’s DNA even before Hal Steinbrenner gave him the title along with a nine-year, $360 million contract in December 2022. Judge is the 16th captain in Yankees history, following Derek Jeter’s 10 1/2-year reign, and he takes that lineage — all the way back to Clark Griffith (1903-05) — very seriously.
“I definitely take it to heart,” Judge told Newsday before homering twice Saturday in the Yankees’ 20-3 victory over the Tigers at Steinbrenner Field. “But if I was named the captain or not named the captain, it’s not going to change what I do inside the clubhouse or on the field. I still have a responsibility — not only to this team but the fan base as well.
“It’s an honor I don’t take lightly and I’m truly humbled by it. But it never was going to affect how I went about my business.”
The subjects of baseball captaincy and clubhouse chemistry made headlines with New York’s other team this past week when Mets owner Steve Cohen publicly stated that his franchise would “never” have a captain during his tenure.
Cohen was answering a reporter’s question, but he couldn’t have timed the response any better. In one definitive stroke, the owner quashed the lingering speculation about Francisco Lindor getting the title — a narrative that apparently had become poisonous for an already fractured clubhouse.
“My view is, every year the team’s different,” Cohen said, “and let the team kind of figure it out in the locker room rather than having a designation.”
Cohen correctly pointed out that “having a captain in baseball doesn’t happen often” and “it’s actually unusual.” The numbers back him up. Judge and the Royals’ Salvador Perez are the only two captains (among 30 teams), so they are the rare exceptions rather than the rule in Major League Baseball.
That trend seems to support Cohen’s assertion that naming a captain has the potential to be more trouble than it’s worth. But while that appears to be the case for the 2025 Mets, who broke up their longtime core in the offseason and reset the roster, you can’t say Judge’s captaincy and the Yankees’ winning culture are not inextricably linked.
But which comes first? The winning or the culture? It’s baseball’s eternal question.
Despite their 16-year championship drought, what the Yankees have done season after season is find the right formula to create a clubhouse that can succeed over the course of a 162-game schedule, a journey that demands a degree of baseball brotherhood.
In recent years, general manager Brian Cashman has mostly avoided signing or trading for polarizing players who can disrupt clubhouse synergy. The Bronx Zoo delivered back-to-back World Series titles in the late 1970s, but that was a half-century ago, an era fueled by explosive egos. Now it’s about assembling a group that meshes well together for optimal performance. Having respected pillars in Judge and Gerrit Cole is an integral part of that support system.
“There’s no perfect clubhouse,” Cole told Newsday. “It’s always a work in progress. But with that said, the biggest validation that the leaders in here can get are from the guys that come in and give us feedback on our process relative to other team’s processes. And then the guys that leave, they still speak very highly of us.”
Cole, who began his Yankees career in 2020, is a big reason why. Despite missing all of last season rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he stuck around as a sounding board for the young arms elevated to replace him and helped with the staff as a whole. When he’s not on the mound himself, Cole is like having another pitching coach — or a pitching captain, for that matter.
He buys into the clubhouse factor as a difference-maker in the margins. Sometimes the right culture can tip the scales in a team’s favor, whether it’s navigating the inevitable turbulence or scraping for that winning run in the late innings.
“We have a lot of parity in this league,” Cole said. “There are so many things that you can do that contribute to winning. I mean, we just had the tightest World Series of all time, so you never know. There’s a quote from John Wooden that says, ‘When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.’ So you want to over-prepare, be anticipating what may challenge you. How do we get better here?
“We don’t know what things are going to affect us. But we do know that we want to apply a championship level to every aspect of the team and we don’t want any of that stuff to go unnoticed.”
The Mets blew up their clubhouse in an effort to fix it going forward, and Cohen wielded the fire extinguisher with last week’s no-captain proclamation. The Yankees chose the opposite approach by essentially running it back with last season’s roster, leaning into the cohesion of that group and again relying on Judge to be its 6-7 North Star.
“In this era of analytics, you can’t put a number on chemistry,” Judge said. “You can’t put a number on how a guy impacts the clubhouse, which ultimately might make somebody step up their game a little bit and equal a couple more wins. But you can’t put that on paper, so it’s tough to say. As a player, you know you want guys that you can trust, guys that are going to have your back, guys that will accept the challenge of playing here in New York.”
Judge mentioned re-signing Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt as two examples of maintaining the continuity of last year’s 94-win team. But there's also the resiliency of Carlos Rodon, who bounced back after a rough Bronx debut to become a stabilizing senior voice on the pitching staff.
Anyone can put on a Yankees uniform. But sometimes it takes a captain to make sure they’re living up to the pinstripes.
“We got an [advertising] patch on our jersey now, we’ve got facial hair,” Judge said. “But I think the standard of what it means to be a Yankee and how you go about your business day in and day out, that standard can never change.
“Great Yankees in front of me showed me the way, and then even talking to the guys that come back at Old-Timers' Day, just how strongly and passionate they feel about that. It’s my duty to make sure that level of expectation and excellence doesn’t fade.”
McMahon saw that in Judge with his own eyes shortly after showing up in the Bronx. Maybe a captain isn’t a good fit for every team, but when you have Judge in that role, it’s impossible to imagine the alternative.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
