With the calendar now fully flipped over from September to October and most teams’ locker rooms all packed up, we can start to look at the Yankees’ season as a whole and try to piece together a sense of where things went wrong. And boy, did things go wrong.
Consider the bullpen and their more-than-admirable performance while the rotation struggled. First of all, this year’s relief corps was both cheap and effective. At the start of 2023, the Yankees had just $6 million tied up in their bullpen options — that number put them at 25th in the big leagues with respect to bullpen payroll.