The Yankees have proposed to make these adjustments to snap their 15-year World Series drought.

The Yankees have proposed to make these adjustments to snap their 15-year World Series drought.

There’s a good case to ignore the Yankees and allow the top club in the American League keep winning since they’ve had an amazing run of generally wise selections. However, they did cast significant uncertainty on the matter and give rise to theories—and even mockery—in the wake of what may have been the most puzzling choice of the season.
The early, careless purposeful walk to Red Sox phenom Rafael Devers remains mostly unaccountable, but three extremely intelligent individuals—Aaron Boone (USC), Gerrit Cole (UCLA), and Matt Blake (Holy Cross)—know better than to take credit for it. All of them attempted to explain themselves, but the only thing we know for sure is that they were able to outwit themselves.

Thus, we’ll set aside the fact that the Yankees acquired Jazz Chisholm and Juan Soto, two of the best trades of the winter, and instead focus on our recommendations for how they may return to the World Series. That’s where they should be every year, but they haven’t been since before the Core Four retired, isn’t that right?

1. The lineup includes Gleyber Torres and Swap Chisholm.
Three things prevent this from occurring.

Torres is on fire after five terrible months; he has hit in 15 of 16 games (.328). Furthermore, Boone clearly adores Torres. Boone is a strong believer, even though it took him seven years to be reminded to run hard—at least long enough for it to stick. How are we aware? The manager expresses gratitude verbally for all of his players, but the ones about Torres are the furthest from reality.

Furthermore, the left-handed hitter Chisholm splitting righties in the middle of the lineup is probably what the Yankees like. (If that is the main reason, as Boone once threatened, I would remedy it by also switching Aaron Judge and Soto.)

In any case, I contend that Chisholm is a stronger baserunner and faster player, making him a superior choice at leadoff. It is most definitely not appropriate for him to bat behind Giancarlo Stanton, who is a pure power hitter and needs to run at three-quarter pace to stay healthy.

With two home runs to win that strange Red Sox series, the best hitter in the game and likely AL MVP seems to be gaining another wind. However, he has participated in every game since June 20th, primarily as a center, which can exhaust any player.

Exhaustion must be the cause of Judge’s early-September slump, which included 16 straight games without a home run. That’s also probably the reason for his sporadic difficulties in October. (Not only has his postseason OPS of.772 been much below his career average of 1.007, but the last six series haven’t even been all that impressive.)

When their finest player is performing at his peak, the Yankees have the best chance of winning. I understand their want to win the AL East in order to stay out of the wild card round but they do have a three-game lead now, and other options.