Commentary

Yankees are the cool, rich kids again

We all know who the best player was in New York in 2017, in any sport.

It was the big kid, Aaron Judge, All Rise Judge, around whom the rising of the Yankees was built in October, the kind of October baseball that was once as regular around here as the tree lighting at Rockefeller Plaza, or New Year's Eve in Times Square.

And the best of it for me, the best moment, wasn't the Yankees coming back after they were down 0-3 in the wild-card game with the Twins before they ever came to bat; or the comeback against the Astros in Game 4, when the new Yankee Stadium finally sounded like the one across the street. No, the best of it was after Game 5, when the Yankees had gone ahead three games to two, and were as close to the World Series as they had been in eight years.

The best of it was walking out of the Stadium that night with Yankees fans flooding out of the place in this loud, exuberant wave, down the steps at Babe Ruth Plaza, everybody heading toward 161st Street and the parking lots and the subway station, yelling "Let's Go Yankees." It was about everything old being new again with the Yankees.

It all went wrong in Houston, of course. Justin Verlander shut the Yankees down. The Yankees couldn't hit him and they couldn't hit two guys named Morton and McCullers in Game 7, and they didn't go to the World Series. So the last best part of the Yankees season had come in the middle three games of the American League Championship Series.

Now they regroup, in such an expensive and showy and front-page way. They go get Giancarlo Stanton from the Miami Jeters, and pick up the kind of contract they once lavished on Alex Rodriguez, everybody's All-American. They are paying Stanton around $265 million over the next 10 years, and giving him a no-trade, and even an opt-out clause because, hey, you need to add sweeteners with a deal like Stanton's. They get the big guy from Miami and immediately are the big, bad Yankees again.

Now we will see whether the Yankees getting back into the big business of being the Yankees works out for them. You bet they made the big deal of the winter meetings. They got the big guy in Stanton, him and his 59 home runs, which is even more than Judge hit.

And you know how it goes around here, especially with the Yankee media: Every time they have ever made an expensive, showy play even close to Stanton, the rest of baseball is supposed to hide in the clubhouse, because that is how ferocious the Yankees are going to be. It was that way when they made the A-Rod trade in 2004.

Maybe they will be a home run powerhouse and beat the rest of the baseball world down. Maybe it will be as exciting as last October was, when the Yankees weren't just fun, they were a wonderful, New York sports surprise.

But maybe it won't.

A friend of mine, a lifelong Yankee fan I know, joked to me the other day that getting Stanton was like "the rich kid in his freshman year getting a Corvette." He is talking about a team that has now paid a whopping total of $341 million in luxury taxes over all the years since the tax came to baseball in 2002.

In all the years when the Yankees continued to make the playoffs, they were old and expensive. Now they are young and exciting and expensive with the addition of Stanton. Brian Cashman built an incredibly appealing baseball team last year, even if they didn't win it all in the end. Maybe they will be incredibly appealing next year.

But it was kind of wonderful in October, in a different way for Yankee fans. Truly it was a most un-Yankee-like October, when nobody felt entitled, and everyone seemed happy that the Yankees were back in play the way they were. They didn't feel as if an October like this one was owed to them, or some sort of baseball birthright. Maybe things will only get better in 2018, with a new home run hitter to go with the ones they already have, and a new manager in Aaron Boone.

The rich kids have a new Corvette. Now we get to see whether this year's cool kids are even cooler than last year's.

Sports on 12/27/2017

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