3 Yankees who should be fired after falling under .500
With another lifeless loss to the Braves, the Yankees are now below .500 for the 2023 season and some Yankees deserve to lose their job over it.
Whatever you would consider worse than a disaster — perhaps an unmitigated catastrophe might apply — that’s where we’re at with the New York Yankees in the 2023 season.
On Wednesday night, they dropped the second of a two-game series against the Atlanta Braves in embarrassingly flat fashion to get swept. More pressingly, though, that loss puts the Yankees at 60-61 on the season, falling below .500, further out of the wild card race, and even closer to the brink of blowing it all up.
Frankly, blowing at least some of it up is wholly necessary at the end of the 2023 season. Something — or many things — is broken with the New York Yankees right now. And if those changes include firing people within the organization, then we have a good idea of three places that Hal Steinbrenner and the decision-makers at large should start.
Yankees who should be fired, No. 3: Josh Donaldson
Currently on the 60-day IL while still feeling good enough to work out and jog on the field, former AL MVP Josh Donaldson has become emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the Yankees in the 2023 season.
For starters, the underperformance in the 33 games he played when healthy this season was staggering. He slashed just .142/.225/.434 with numbers that back up the eye test that he was either hitting home runs (10 on the season) or striking out (32 on the season, or just under once per game).
While the problems with the Yankees are numerous, it’s crucial to note that one of the biggest pitfalls the team has been hostage to is paying for past performance without looking into future projections. Donaldson was clearly on the decline since 2019 and his first season with the Yankees a year ago, but those signs were ignored and he was continually relied upon when healthy.
On top of that, the move to the 60-day IL from the initial 15-day assignment, seemingly a way to just keep him out of the lineup, highlights the dysfunction currently running rampant within the organization.
Some of that is not Donaldson’s fault. But at the end of the day, he’s a 37-year-old infielder who is a shell of the player he once was. And that has no place on a team trying to win a World Series, the expectation New York has set for itself over franchise history.