Why It's Still Hard to Fully Buy Into the 2026 New York Yankees

The Subway Series is going down in New York this weekend, and it has the unusual vibe of a shoe-vs-ant showdown in which the pressure is on the shoe.

The Mets are the ant, obviously. There's nothing tiny about their payroll, but strip that away—which injuries mostly have, to be fair—and what's really there is a last-place team that borders on unwatchable.

The Yankees are the shoe. They have MLB's fourth-best record at 27-17. Aaron Judge is chasing a fourth MVP. The pitching staff leads the American League in ERA. And per FanDuel, only the Los Angeles Dodgers have better odds of winning the World Series.

As a reminder that literally nobody needs, the Yankees won their 27th World Series title in 2009. There have been none since. As such, to show a Bleacher Creature those odds is akin to showing Superman the sun after 17 years in a Kryptonite prison.

Why, then, does it still feel like there's something off about the 2026 Yankees?

It's the Performance Against Good Teams

The Point: The Yankees are 1-8 against teams with .500 or better records.

As the Mets are eight games under .500, this won't change for the Yankees this weekend. Yet that record against winners remains jarring, no matter how hard manager Aaron Boone tries to spin it. And here's why:

1. The Yankees are last in MLB with a .567 OPS against .500 or better teams
2. Only 14 teams have posted a losing record against winning teams and gone on to win the World Series

Neither thing is a good omen, and the second one least of all. Boil it down to its essence, and it means it's hard to fake being a championship-caliber team.

It's the Unexpected Regressions

The Point: Jazz Chisholm Jr., Trent Grisham and Austin Wells have gone from hitting to not hitting.

There is a discussion to be had about how hyped youngsters like Anthony Volpe, Jasson Domínguez and (so far) Spencer Jones have failed to launch in the majors. But this year, at least, nobody was counting on them.

This is not true of Chisholm, Grisham and Wells, who have collectively averaged a 49-point dropoff in wOBA relative to 2025. If the three of them were a team, their offensive demise would be greater than even that of the Mets.

True, the Yankees lead the AL in scoring anyway. Even so, these guys (especially you, Jazz) are the center of gravity for the sense of disappointment that accompanies the offense.

It's the Totally Expected Injuries

The Point: Anyone could have seen Max Fried's elbow and Giancarlo Stanton's calf coming.

Welcome to basically the annual ritual of a Stanton injury sounding worse than expected. He's been out since April 24 with a strained calf, and the team is doing MRIs just to gauge healing. The Yankees might as well cross their fingers and hope the 36-year-old former MVP is there in October.

For his part, Fried isn't worried about the sore elbow that forced him out of his start on Wednesday after 3.0 innings. He probably doesn't speak for all Yankees fans, though. Or at least, not the ones who know of the 32-year-old's previous Tommy John surgery in 2014 and arm-related IL stints in 2023 and 2024.

If Fried goes down for an extended period, a rotation that currently ranks third in ERA will be subject to a wonky line of succession. A 33-year-old Carlos Rodón was shaky in his return from elbow surgery on Sunday. A 35-year-old Gerrit Cole is on a rehab assignment from Tommy John that has yielded a 5.62 ERA in five starts.

It's the Bullpen

The Point: The ERA is good, but nobody buys that.

Using ERA in any kind of conjunction with relief pitchers is always tricky, and the Yankees bullpen is the rule that proves, well, the rule.

Its 3.34 ERA is the sixth-best in MLB, yet the pen has been a net negative on the team's win probability. And that notion should scan with Yankees fans who have been subjected to this relief corps on a daily basis.

Camilo Doval is homer-prone. Fernando Cruz and Paul Blackburn are walk-prone. David Bednar is just plain baserunner-prone, running a 1.333 WHIP that looks out of place on a purported ace closer.

It's the Sense That We've Seen This Movie Before

The Point: The Yankees being good but not great has become shtick.

OK, fine. We'll hear arguments that picking apart the Yankees like this is a step too far. No baseball team has ever been perfect, right?

What the Yankees are is consistently good from year to year. Their 1993 season started a streak of winning campaigns that stands to become 34 years long in 2026. Only the Yankees of 1926-1964 have ever done better.

However, it's not as if even higher expectations are being forced upon this franchise. No MLB organization leans into its history harder than the Yankees, and the effect of that is an insistence that the aura of yesteryear is alive and deserving of your respect, damn it.

But even for a team with 27 of the darn things, going nearly two decades without winning one World Series is utterly self-sabotaging. That's how you lose the benefit of the doubt and just plain invite doubts, especially against an ever-present backdrop of refusing to go all-in on any given season.

After a trip to the World Series that ended in failure in 2024, the Yankees didn't make it as far in 2025. Between that and the very real fact that Judge and the rest of the established core are not getting younger, running it back was not the right call. Yet as much as they insist otherwise, that's what they did.

As they have been ever since they joined forces in 2018, Boone, owner Hal Steinbrenner and general manager Brian Cashman are all complicit in the persistent disconnect between the great expectations the Yankees sell and the lesser expectations they actually inspire. If Yankees fans' fingers are ultimately pointed at them at the end, that'll mark nine straight years with the exact same climax.

Until then, it's the usual song and dance of waiting for a Yankees team to prove it's really different from what everyone is used to.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.