Perspectives: The Thrill is Gone

by Paul Semendinger

December 21, 2025

***

B.B. King might have been singing about the way I feel about the Yankees.

The thrill is gone.  It's over.  Done.  

Right now there is no great joy for me in being a Yankees fan.  

The Yankees, a team that used to define greatness, and excellence, and winning, is nothing more than any old franchise now.

The Yankees have an uninspiring owner.  They have an out-of-date general manager.  And they're run on the field by a manager who is in over his head.  

The Yankees have done practically nothing this winter.  Yankees fans keep hoping that they'll do something big.  And maybe they will, but I don't believe it will happen. We hear rumors that the Yankees are in on this player or that player, but then we hear that they didn't even engage with that player. The Yankees aren't even making offers. Instead they are signing players like Paul Blackburn. They certainly aren't building a championship squad.

We have entered the era where the team seems very comfortable being complacent.  They seem fine taking a back seat to practically the rest of the league. Sure, they still might sign a player, maybe two, and announce that they're "all-in," but the days of believing that are long gone. The team's actions speak way louder than words.

As much as some might protest, the Yankees haven't been all-in for a long time.

***

Quick Aside - If the Yankees have been all-in and haven't been able to win a World Series since 2009, that might be an even worse reality. In that case, they would be stating, "We're all-in, but we do not know how to build a championship team."

Think about that for a moment. There are only two possible results here. Either the Yankees don't go all-in (as I have been saying since this site began) or they are going all-in and can't seem to figure out how to win. Those are both very bad results.

Either they're not trying to win or they can't figure out how to. It's one or the other.

Neither result speaks well for the team or the franchise or the leaders therein.

But, the fact that the same leaders are in the same positions year-after-year in spite of the lackluster results indicates, very clearly to me, that winning a World Series is not the team's priority. What other conclusion can be drawn?

The Yankees are content with the results they put up. If they didn't they would make changes to the leadership - the ones who are failing to produce the results that they promise the fans year-after-year.

***

The sad reality is that the fans seem to care more about the success (if success means winning World Series) of the Yankees than the team does. 

It never used to be that way.  The Yankees used to be different. They used to operate differently. Every decision seemed to be focused on creating the very best team possible - in every way. That's no longer the case. We are seeing that very clearly. We have been seeing this for a long time. It's so obvious and plain to see that no other rational conclusion can be drawn.

It has gotten to the point where I am bored by the free agent rumors and the proposed trades and all that, because that doesn't seem to be the Yankees way any longer. They have been showing this to us all, very clearly, all off-season.

It used to be fun to be a Yankees fan in December. The off-season used to be filled with big trades, big signings... big excitement.

No longer.

For this fan, the thrill right now is absolutely, and completely, gone.