Yankees’ World Series failure started — and ended — with fundamental issues

A few years ago, Mookie Betts was playing balls off the wall in Dodgers spring training camp, a team official remembers. 

He was working on gathering, spinning and making one-hop throws to second base when he let out a giant “bleep” as one throw skittered off-line. Another outfielder participating saw it as no big deal, took one more ball and was done. Betts took about 25 more, the executive recalls, because for Betts “nothing is good enough.” 

When asked how often even during the season Betts practices balls off the wall, the official said, he “works on that [bleep] every day.” And then in a text message added, “Every day!!!” 

In the losing Yankee clubhouse early Thursday morning, Nestor Cortes, who knew nothing of this story, said, “Baseball comes down to execution, right? If you don’t execute and the other team does it better than you, then they’re obviously going to win. And that’s what we ran into in the series, where they execute a lot of plays. And I’ve said since Game 1 and 2, it felt like they did everything right. They have Mookie Betts in right field and every ball off the wall, he kept it to a single, and just stuff like that, it’s like you can’t capitalize on them and when we made [mistakes] they capitalized, so that’s massive.” 

The Dodgers won four World Series games with a .206 average, seven homers and 25 runs. The Yankees won one World Series game with a .212 average, nine homers and 24 runs. On a piece of paper — where too much of the Yankee front office continues to reside — this was an even World Series. On the field, the Yankees blundered away Games 1 and 5. 

By the end of Wednesday night, with the Dodgers being handed gift after gift to rally from a five-run deficit to win the clincher, 7-6, you could have convinced me the Emmy for best comedy of the fall season should go to the Yankees’ defense — on Fox. They played perhaps the worst fielding inning in World Series history in the fifth of Game 5, allowing five unearned runs to score with two outs. 

And this might all be the bad news in the good if the Yankees learned a lesson. But why this? Why now? The Yankees have been getting eliminated by non-AL Central teams annually in October because they just do not execute the routine well and when the level of competition goes up, those shortcomings in the A-B-Cs of the game are fully exposed. 

The Yankee response annually seems to be to chase more homers and more swing-and-miss stuff — which is valuable, of course. But when a foe like the Dodgers has that too, what is going to be the separator? If you were scoring at home, the Yankees hit three balls off the wall in the 120th World Series. As part of his 90-feet saving, series-long defensive tour de force, Betts held two to singles — one at each stadium. 

The Yankees talk a good game about what they work on. But there is a difference between checking items off a to-do list and taking ball after ball off an outfield wall with seriousness of purpose even when you are a Hall-of-Fame caliber player such as Betts. 

To do baseball well is to emphasize and practice the routine relentlessly with enthusiasm, concentration and pride. You are either demanding that from the top down — from Brian Cashman to Aaron Boone to the captain, Aaron Judge — or you are just going through the motions. When mistake after mistake continues to be made during the season and they are not corrected because you are talenting your way to 90-plus wins, it is seeing the tornado outside of town and not evacuating. The Dodgers are eventually blowing through your town. 

When you are in charge of something and see redundant mistakes, you are either fixing them or condoning them — there is no middle ground at this level. 

And if you think this is just fans or reporters, it is not. It is the World Series champions. 

What the Dodgers told their players in scouting meetings was the Yankees were talent over fundamentals. That if you run the bases with purpose and aggression, the Yankees will self-inflict harm as was exposed by Betts, Tommy Edman, Freddie Freeman, etc. That the value was very high to put the ball in play to make the Yankees execute. They mentioned that the Yankees were not just the majors’ worst baserunning team by every metric, but the difference was vast on the field between them and the Padres, who the Dodgers beat in the NL Division Series, but were impressive in this area. 

They were thrilled at how short Yankee leads were at first base to potentially be less of a threat on pivots at second, where Gavin Lux does not excel. They said their metrics had the Yankees as the worst positioned outfield. They were amazed how many times relay throws came skittering through the infield with no one taking charge and how often Jazz Chisholm Jr., for example, was out of place or just standing still when a play was in action. 

When it comes to player personnel, the Yanks likely will have one of two offseasons — re-sign Juan Soto and then probably try to plug inexpensively with, say, Jasson Dominguez in left field and Ben Rice at first, or they will not sign Soto and attempt to construct another high-end contender around Judge and Gerrit Cole. And my guess is even if they dismay their fans by not signing Soto, they probably will have a strong enough roster to win 90-plus games. 

But this really has to be about more than that. Aaron Boone is the grandson, son and brother of major leaguers and was one himself. This can’t really be acceptable to him — can it? His modus operandi can’t just be positivity. There has to be a greater accountability to cleaning up the messiness of the fundamentals. Cashman has to stress finding players who care about playing the game well — it can’t just always be best talent wins. 

Look, I get it. Every outraged Yankee fan wants both fired. We can waste a lot of words on something that Hal Steinbrenner isn’t going to do off a World Series appearance — no matter how forceful any case is. So can these guys create and demand something cleaner? Can Judge enforce it from within at a higher level? 

Or will we be watching America’s Funniest Baseball Videos again next October?