“There is a deep vibes disparity in New York baseball,” blared the headline of Max Rivlin-Nadler’s blog for Hell Gate two weeks ago. He wasn’t wrong. The Mets had just completed their upset of the top-seeded Phillies off superstar shortstop Francisco Lindor’s game winning grand-slam, the latest in a string of messianic revelations that the team has borne witness to since the team decided to place their faith in a purple McDonald’s mascot named Grimace, rebrand as the Gay Mets, and fall deeply, madly in love with one another. Their fans were ecstatic in a way I’ve never seen them before in my life.
Yankees fans, by contrast, were miserable. Rivlin-Nadler blamed the style and aesthetics of this particular team, who “play like they have just a few minutes to hand in this quarter's earnings report to middle management in the corporate sarcophagus that is Yankees Stadium,” and whose victories are “accurately likened to the passing of a kidney stone.” This is completely ridiculous. Our misery had nothing to do with the brand of baseball we play, nor our big-budget imperial corporate swagger (let’s remember the plucky upstart Mets have the largest payroll in the league this year, $8 million larger than ours). Certainly not the stadium we play in, which has the best crowd atmosphere of any outdoor sporting event on this continent.
No, at the start of the ALDS, Yankees fans were miserable because we were full of dread. The playoff ghosts that had terrorized us for the past seven years were coming back. We were staggering into their killing field, weak, wounded, and vulnerable in all the specific areas they had fed on in years past. Their predation seemed inevitable and imminent.
Well, nine thrilling games later, here we are. The Yankees are in the World Series for the first time since I was ten, after failing to make it this far the last eight times they made the playoffs. They won in both rounds convincingly, losing only one game in each, and against the formidable Los Angeles Dodgers, with their endless barrage of supernova MVP-caliber talent–Walker Buehler, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, and, oh yeah that’s right, Shohei Ohtani– they open the series with essentially coin-flip odds1 of winning the whole damn thing. Obviously, we fans feel a lot better, but it’s not because we’ve vanquished any of the ghosts. Instead, this team, so far, has managed something even more radical: learning to cope, survive, and even thrive in spite of them. What follows is a report on the ghosts, the pain points that have repeatedly haunted the Yankees over the past ten years, how they have continued to manifest during the 2024 playoffs, and how the team has thus far managed to avoid letting them annihilate them completely the way they normally do.
Closer Ghost:
It’s October 19th, 2019, Game 6 of the ALCS, and the Astros lead the series three games to two. It’s the bottom of the ninth, and we’ve made it that far only because DJ Lemahieu hit a game-tying two-run home run in the top of the inning. We were two outs away from elimination, but now we’ve been pulled back from the brink, we have all the momentum, anything is possible. Flamethrowing closer Aroldis Chapman comes out of the pen for the Yankees, and quickly retires the first two Astros hitters, then walks outfielder George Springer. Longtime readers will know what happens next. Jose Altuve comes to the plate, probably wearing a buzzer, watches the first three pitches, then waits on Chapman’s backdoor slider (unhittable if the hitter is geared up to fight off Chapman’s 100mph fastball), and crushes it. You know it’s gone even before the broadcast switches camera angles to watch the ball soar deep into the left field stands. The Astros stream onto the field. The last shot of the Yankees season is a close-up of Chapman, walking off the mound, an unnatural, but oddly serene smirk on his face. Yankee fans forgave Chapman for his off-field domestic abuse allegations, for his torturously slow ninth innings, his predilection for walks, and his occasional total meltdowns. But we never forgave this smirk. He would be our closer for the next two years, and would often be quite good, but fans hated him anyway. The following October, in 2020, he came into another tied elimination game in Game 5 of the ALDS. Again, after recording a few outs, he gave up a home run to the Rays’ Mike Brosseau, ending the Yankees season. This time, at least, Chapman didn’t smirk. In 2022, Wandy Peralta got a strike away from winning Game 3 of the ALDS before giving up a walk-off two-run single. He didn’t smirk either. But the energy was there. Too often in the Judge era, Yankees closers give up game-winning runs, because they are haunted by the ghost of the greatest closer to ever do it, and by the trauma of the one time he let them down.
II
When it comes to the dynastic late-nineties Yankees that won four championships in five years, and who continue to loom large in the collective psyche of the franchise almost thirty years later, Derek Jeter is unquestionably the most famous and celebrated superstar of that era. Mr. November, the Captain, the talismanic shortstop messiah leading the righteous gang of pinstriped gladiators to victory. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t the most dominant, clutch postseason player on the team. In fact, for all his heroics, his cumulative postseason cWPA (championship win probability added, i.e. how much each of his at-bats helped or hurt the team’s overall odds of winning the World Series) is close to zero, mostly due to lackluster performances in the aughts. The player who actually did the most to improve the team’s chance of winning the four rings, plus a fifth in 2009, had 1.79 cWPA. That’s right, closer Mariano Rivera was so good in the playoffs, and specifically so good in the moments that mattered most, that he alone was responsible for almost two whole championships.
Mo was the greatest closer of all-time. There will never be anyone like him. He had a few high-profile blowups, most notably the blown save in the bottom of the ninth of 2001’s World Series Game 7 (this is the one time he let them down that I referred to, and it single-handedly ended the Yankees’ dynastic run. They didn’t win another championship for nine years). But for the most part, he was automatic, and Yankees fans my age grew up believing that the ninth inning of a win was a formality, that the game was well and truly locked up as soon as the first chord of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” played through the stadium PA system.
I could write another ten-thousand word series on the way this legacy has haunted the team since his retirement in 2013. To be brief, the team has repeatedly poured insane amounts of money, even by Yankees standards, into the closer position. They’ve had flamethrowers like Chapman. They’ve had sinker-ballers like Zach Britton. They’ve had dudes like Dellin Betances with wipeout breaking stuff. They’ve even had Mariano impersonators like David Robertson, who faithfully learned to throw a cutter, and only a cutter, with surprisingly effective results. In fact in 2018, they went so overboard that they had all four of these guys at once, spending a combined $40 million, 22% of their total payroll. You’re not supposed to spend that much on your bullpen, and that’s not counting the five other relievers on their roster. All of these guys, and many others, were excellent at times. None of them felt automatic like Mo did. I imagine no one ever will.
But in the first half of the 2022 season, Clay Holmes came as close to feeling automatic as anyone before him in the post-Mo era. One of Brian Cashman’s finest Bargain Bin Bonanzas, The Yankees plucked Holmes from obscurity, one of the worst arms in the bullpen of the cellar-dwelling Pittsburgh Pirates in 2021, gave him the classic instruction “throw that one good pitch” (a sinker, in his case), and taught him to occasionally throw a “sweeper” slider that better complemented his sinker. At the start of 2022, Holmes was paid $1.1 million, about as little as a third-year player can make, but justifiable considering that he’d never had an ERA below 5. Three months later, he had accumulated 15 saves, had given up only two earned runs in 47 innings, struck out a third of the batters he faced, and was on his way to the All-Star game as the consensus-best reliever in the league.
Then, he completely imploded, started losing control of his sinker, giving up walks and runs, blowing saves regularly, and then injuring his shoulder. He made it back for October, but was deemed too unreliable to be used, so after enduring five straight playoffs with Chapman in the closer role, the 2022 Yankees staggered into the playoffs with no closer at all. His 2024 has had a similar arc; dominant beginning, then command problems emerge, leading to a gradual, and then all too sudden collapse. After blowing a league-leading 13 saves this year, Boone finally benched him again last month. The Yankees entered the playoffs with a different Bargain Bin Bonanza, a skinny, adolescent-looking, somehow 31-year old journeyman named Luke Weaver.
Weavedog has been absolutely electric. He faced fourteen batters in his three saves in the Royals series. He gave up only two hits, walked none, and struck out five. He got two more saves against the Guardians. His pitches have been simple, high fastballs, breaking balls in the dirt, but he executes them in the right sequence and with pinpoint accuracy. His demeanor on the mound is unnervingly calm, at least until the last out, when he loses control completely, flexes his arms, and roars. Then after the game, he resumes his blissed out, calm routine, answering bog standard questions in the eighth inning with long, circuitous answers in the style of stoner philosopher Mike Mcdaniel, coach of the Miami Dolphins. Two examples:
Q: Did you have the inkling that [Boone] might use you for more than three outs tonight?
A: [long pause] I’m gonna act like I know what that word means. I think it means like I had the idea it might happen. [grin, long pause]
Q: If you weren’t a pitcher what would you be?
A: Well… [long pause] the first thing that comes to mind is ‘underwater basket weaver’... but… hear me out… play on words, I was definitely a water kid…[long pause, I can’t quote this whole thing but it goes on for three minutes]
Stoner quotes aside, Weaver has been incredibly hot for the past six weeks. And Holmes has too. Freed from the burden of the ninth inning, he has regained his 2022 All-Star form, gotten big outs with runners on, and has also looked basically unhittable.
Not totally unhittable though. In Game 3 against the Guardians, Weaver was one strike away from closing out the bottom of the ninth and taking a 3-0 series lead, when he hung a slider in the middle of the plate. Jhonkensy Noel, the Guardians pinch hitter, smashed it deep to left, tying the game. In the next inning, Holmes threw another hanging breaking ball, and David Fry crushed it, also to left, also a no-doubter, to win the game. Neither Weaver nor Holmes smirked, but they didn’t have to. It had happened again to the Yankees. Another blown save in the postseason.
What makes this team feel different is that whereas previous postseason game-losing moon shots to left field dealt fatal blows, this time, the Yankees came back and won the next two, in part due to key contributions from both Holmes and Weaver. This team is as vulnerable to a closer collapse as any other Yankees playoff team, but so far, they’ve managed to coexist with the ghost, and win convincingly without vanquishing it.
Shortstop Ghost
III
Longtime readers will be familiar with this one. For new folks, I began this blog with a multipart, ten-thousand-word essay on Yankees’ haunted past with the shortstop position, which I dubbed the Jeterian throne. The trauma around Jeter’s inadequacies as a player and captain, along with the continual mistreatment of superior fielder and hitter Alex Rodriguez, the continual need for a talismanic young superstar to fill this position, the bizarre misfortunes that befell all who attempted to fill this void, from Gleyber Torres, to Isiah Kiner-Falefa. You should really read it all, some wild stuff happened to these guys.
I wrote that piece full of blind hope that Volpe would be the prince who was promised, the young homegrown hero who could fill this void, and since then, results have been decidedly mixed. In the field, he’s established himself as a good-to-elite defensive shortstop, often a joy to watch, always reliable for the straightforward plays, a little bit more stressful on the ones that test his lackluster arm. At the plate, his stats in the aggregate have been straight up bad (.243/.293/.364), though there have been occasional hot streaks.
The crux of this ghost is the fielding, though. Kiner-Falefa’s defense became so problematic in 2022 that after vociferously defending him for months, Boone finally subbed in rookies Oswaldo Cabrera and Oswald Peraza in back-to-back postseason elimination games. This season, the Yankees have had some of the very worst infield defense in the league, exacerbated by their bullpen of guys who throw sinkers that elicit weak ground balls.
In game one of the ALDS, with one out and a runner on first, Volpe slid on his knees to field a ground ball, rotated his body, and flung the ball into right field, far out of reach of second baseman Gleyber Torres, turning what could have been an easy out, or even an inning-ending double play, into second-and-third with one out and the top of the Royals lineup coming to bat. Both runners came in to score, giving the Royals a 5-4 lead. In another Yankees postseason, this would have been the start of a complete implosion. Instead, they took the lead back in the next inning, and Volpe hasn’t made an error since. Meanwhile, he’s having some of the best at-bats of his career, hitting .310 with a .459 on base percentage (he’s getting on base nearly half the time!) and a dramatic increase in bat speed.
IV
The leadoff spot in the lineup is another rich and painful void that Jeter left this team. While he batted second more frequently, Jeter led off almost 1000 times in his illustrious Yankee career, most notably in Game 4 of the 2000 World Series, when he silenced Shea Stadium by hitting the game’s first pitch into the left field stands (one wonders what the vibes disparity must have felt like then). But he wasn’t known for his homers. He was known for his singles, his ability to grind out long at-bats, to see pitches, to hustle down the first base line (at least early in his career), and of course, to go the other way with two strikes with his classic inside out swing. The Yankees haven’t known what to do in the leadoff spot in the playoffs since. Expensive flameout DJ Lemahieu hasn’t been healthy for any of their last three trips to the postseason, and in his place, manager Aaron Boone has fumbled around desperately for a suitable replacement without success. In 2021, Boone put Anthony Rizzo first, which he had not done once all year. Rizzo went 1-for-4 with a solo shot and two strikeouts, the opposite of the low-slugging, high on-base approach you want from a leadoff man, and the team lost, humiliatingly, decisively, to the Red Sox, who weren’t even particularly good that year. The next year, Boone tried leading off Judge, the ultimate power-hitter, before putting him further down after two games in which Judge hit 0-for-9 with seven strikeouts.
You’ll also remember from my Volpening Day series the sad saga of Gleyber Torres, the walking reminder of the big spending franchise’s brief and humiliating dalliance with the small-market strategy of tanking, who suffered a complete psychological and offensive collapse when moved the fifty feet across the diamond from second base to short, before finally throwing in the towel and returning to second in 2021, and immediately regaining form. Yankees fans have never quite forgiven him for this episode, though, and he hasn’t always done himself any favors. He’s prone to lengthy soul-crushing slumps. And he runs the bases the way a teenager might skateboard across a busy street against the light; with an infuriating and tragically ill-advised sense of immortality. He got thrown out at home in the first inning of ALCS Game 5, stifling an early rally and frustrating many members of my family. He’s not alone in this, the team keeps making incredibly frustrating baserunning mistakes.
Nevertheless, he’s been one of the best leadoff hitters ever. All he does is get on base. Specifically, he’s led off eight of the nine games with a walk or single. He’s taking tons of pitches, grinding out walks, and coming in clutch too, with five huge RBIs. We have an elite leadoff hitter and it feels amazing.
V
The Yankees have other ghosts, of course. They have the Gerrit-Cole-and-Aaron-Judge-suck-in-the-playoffs ghost (Cole has been fine, Judge less so, teammates have picked up the slack ably so far), the who-should-play-left-field ghost (Verdugo’s played good defense and had a few nice at bats in between the barrage of strikeouts), the what-if-we-tried-playing-this-player-in-a-position-he’s-never-played-before-for-the-first-time ghost (Jon Berti played first base admirably, unlike his predecessors leadoff-man Anthony Rizzo and reliever J.A Happ). The Yankees may never exorcise their ghosts, but for the first time since 2009, they might have found a way to live with them.
Or better yet, they may have found a way to use them to their advantage. In Game 2 of the ALCS, Aaron Judge finally hit his first home run of the playoffs, a towering two-run shot to center field, that hung in the air for hours and hours before drifting over the wall and into Monument Park. You could say this was because it was windy that night, or because Judge had finally timed his swing correctly on the fastball after being woefully behind for five games, or because the pitch was still slightly higher than he expected it, causing a higher arc than normal. But after the game, Judge had only one explanation for why the ball cleared the fence: “The ghosts were pulling out there to Monument Park, that’s for sure.” May they continue to pull. Four more wins. Let’s go Yanks.
Specifically, books give them a 46.3% to win, an eerily resonant probability.