Erik Boland: Yankees fans deserved better than what they got from club hierarchy
New York Yankees principal owner Hal Steinbrenner speaks during a news conference at Yankee Stadium on Dec. 21, 2022. Credit: Getty Images/TNS/Dustin Satloff
The 19th century art critic John Ruskin once disparaged a work by James McNeill Whistler in 1877, accusing the artist of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
In a roughly two-hour exercise in tone-deafness this past week, Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone did the verbal equivalent to Yankees fans.
Fifteen days after the Yankees' season ended with an ALDS loss to the Rays, the most public faces of an organization that hasn’t won a World Series since 2009 held highly anticipated news conferences late Wednesday morning.
Steinbrenner and Cashman, soon to sign a new contract that will take him into his 30th season as the club’s general manager, spent 54 minutes taking questions via Zoom from a conference room at the Yankees' spring training headquarters, Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. Boone, at Yankee Stadium, followed with a 44-minute session.
It did not take ChatGPT to condense the respective news conferences: Nothing to see here, folks.
There was a comedic quality, presumably unintended, to it all.
The trio should be used to these end-of-season post-mortems, held while other teams continue their World Series chases.
Yet the script remained predictable.
And tired.
It isn’t that Steinbrenner needed to throw red meat to the fan base by firing Boone and/or Cashman, even if both moves, or one of them, would have been overwhelmingly endorsed by fans.
There are, after all, strong baseball arguments for bringing both back.
But there should have been an attempt by the club hierarchy to acknowledge and understand — or, at the very least, pretend to understand — the anger of that fan base, spoiled as it may act at times, after yet another sooner-than-expected October exit.
There should have been more to the news conferences than the generally passionless patter disgorged by Steinbrenner, as well as by Cashman and Boone, in discussing what went wrong this season and why these October flameouts have so strongly resembled each other in manner.
There should have been more of a public expression of dissatisfaction by the three over a title drought that stands at 17 years, the second-longest in franchise history.
So what went wrong in 2026?
It wasn’t clubhouse culture demanding day-to-day accountability — something targeted by multiple former players, with Hall of Famer CC Sabathia among the most prominent of them.
That, Boone said, was a “strength.”
It wasn’t roster construction, Cashman’s area.
“Cash is great every season,” Steinbrenner said.
Boone?
“Not on the shoulders of Aaron Boone does the blame lie,” Steinbrenner said.
Instead, Steinbrenner said: “The bottom line is, the players didn’t live up to their end of the bargain in the playoffs.”
Though in some quarters this was treated as out of bounds, it wasn’t.
It is objectively true as, in the end, these things always come down to player performance.
Steinbrenner, and to a lesser extent Cashman and Boone, have said outright (or certainly implied) similar sentiments after multiple October setbacks.
But the blame-the-players approach serves other purposes.
The most obvious: It is a way for the organization to collectively absolve itself of feeling a real need for true introspection on everything it does.
Everything from how much fundamentals and playing the game well overall are stressed in the minor leagues to player evaluation to the always perilous balance of blending eyes-on-player scouting with all things analytics.
The latter is an undeniable necessity for any winning organization but one on which an overreliance can create — to name one potential issue — an unhealthy self-belief in “process” that can morph into an arrogance that engenders a speak-no-evil evaluation of it behind the scenes.
Steinbrenner doesn’t need to become what many fans want — his tempestuous, ready-fire-aim father, George — but if he’s going to use “unacceptable” to describe the season’s end, then spell out exactly why it was unacceptable.
And make it sound, to the fan base if to no one else, as if you mean it. Don’t say “unacceptable” with all the feeling of one of the old Triborough Bridge automaton toll collectors saying “have a nice day” after being paid tribute in dollar and coin.
Steinbrenner by far emoted the most passion in describing the offense’s inconsistency, at one point using “detrimental.”
That led many to conclude that highly-respected-in-the-game hitting coach James Rowson, whose contract expires at month’s end, is in trouble.
But consider: Since Kevin Long was fired after the 2014 season, the Yankees have employed, Rowson included, six hitting coaches. They’ve had two pitching coaches — Larry Rothschild and Matt Blake, who is about to sign a new contract — in that same time.
Could it be the organizational hitting philosophy needs an overhaul?
Questions. Questions.
In the end, Yankees fans deserved better.
They deserved better than their anger being dismissed as part of the “noise” — as Cashman characterized it, though he primarily was indicting the media — that comes with the intense coverage and fan interest that demand, perhaps at times unfairly and unreasonably, positive daily results.
They deserved better than another year of “All is well! Trust us!” messaging as the title drought slogs on, with not nearly as many yearly near-successes as the organization seems to have convinced itself of.
They deserved better than having more of the same flung in their face from a colorless verbal palette.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
