After roughly two weeks of radio silence, New York Yankees brass delivered their official postmortem on Wednesday, and owner Hal Steinbrenner made it very clear who he blames for the team tying its longest championship drought since winning its first World Series in 1923.
Steinbrenner spoke alongside general manager Brian Cashman during a joint Zoom news conference from the team’s spring training ballpark in Tampa, Florida, and manager Aaron Boone followed with a video news conference from Yankee Stadium.
With Boone and Cashman seemingly public enemies No. 1A and 1B among the Yankees fan base , making them available for the conferences all but confirmed Steinbrenner’s loyalty to both of them, and he confirmed that fact.
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“The bottom line is the players didn’t live up to their end of the bargain in the playoffs,” Steinbrenner said.
Steinbrenner said that he felt the 2026 Yankees were a “world championship caliber team,” yet for the second year in a row, they were eliminated by a division rival in the American League Division Series on their own home field.
Steinbrenner said Boone, who will return for his 10th season, “managed a good season” which included numerous injuries to several star players. However, the postseason proved practically impossible for the offense.
“I believe we absolutely had a team that was winning a championship. I was disappointed, quite frankly, with the offense throughout the course of the year as a whole,” Steinbrenner said. “That is certainly one part of the organization that I will be looking at from top to bottom … but this is twice now when the offense just hasn’t lived up to their end of the bargain and got the deal done.”
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Cashman himself later broke the news that he had agreed to an extension – his current contract expires later this year, and he became the team’s GM in 1998. When Cashman took over from Bob Watson in 1998, it was the 15th change at GM since George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in January 1973. Cashman has been the only GM under Hal Steinbrenner, who succeeded his father as controlling owner in November 2008.
“Well, look, Cash is great every season,” Steinbrenner said. “I think the roster he put together, the team that we rolled out of spring training with, was as good as any in baseball, in my opinion. We had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way, but the team was fantastic, and it was a world championship-caliber team.”
Boone finished his ninth season as manager and has one season left on a two-year contract extension agreed to in February 2025. The 53-year-old former third baseman has led New York to a 790-565 regular-season record and three first-place finishes in the AL East but a 27-30 postseason mark.
“At the end of the day, we haven’t won a championship with me at the helm,” he said. “Ultimately that’s what has to happen to satisfy certainly myself — that’s why I’m doing this — but to answer those questions ultimately.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.