SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Hal Steinbrenner acknowledged the Yankees’ season was “awful,” but offered little in the way of specific changes coming to help get the organization back on track.
Speaking with reporters Tuesday for the first time since the Yankees finished 82-80, their worst season since 1992, Steinbrenner defended the club’s analytics department, strength and conditioning staff, the front office’s decision making and manager Aaron Boone.
Steinbrenner still pledged “big changes,” but the only details he provided were hiring a new hitting coach — James Rowson is expected to be the choice after Sean Casey left for family reasons — and bringing on Zelus Analytics for a year-long evaluation of the Yankees’ own processes.
“There are changes that might be significant as far as we’re concerned or the players are concerned but might not seem too significant to [reporters] or the fans,” Steinbrenner said during a Zoom press conference. “But it’s all an effort to right this ship and be operating in the most efficient way and the most successful way that we can.”
Steinbrenner repeatedly declined to go into detail about what the Yankees discovered during their three days of organizational meetings last month in Tampa.
Pressed on what changes could be coming, Steinbrenner pointed to Boone believing that the Yankees were not teaching young players to bunt enough.
“So we’re gonna start right up again at the player development level with everything we were doing a few years ago,” Steinbrenner said.
While Aaron Judge said on the final day of the regular season that the Yankees may be valuing the wrong numbers and needed a better process to funnel data down to players, Steinbrenner went to bat for the analytics department.
“Look, analytics has taken a lot of heat — not justified, in my opinion,” Steinbrenner said. “But I think one of the misconceptions that’s out there, because I hear it from a lot of people, is that Boone makes every decision in the dugout during a game based on analytics. That’s just not true. Analytics gives Boone and the coaches a lot of information; so do the pro scouts. It’s up to Boone during the game, when he puts the lineup together and then everything after, what he wants to do with all that information.
“Honestly, if you ask the analysts, they’ll probably say too many times Boone makes a decision during the game that’s based on his experience, what he’s seeing, his intuition. Whether that’s accurate or not — I can assure you we don’t have an analyst standing behind Boone in the dugout telling him, ‘You need to pinch-hit here, you need to get this pitcher out of here, you need to steal a base.’ I know at least one other team that does have an analyst/coach in the dugout. I’m sure that manager’s hearing about numbers the whole game. But it’s not the case here, so I think people need to understand that.”
On Boone, who is returning for the final year of his contract (he also has a club option for 2025), Steinbrenner said he talked to players, former players (like Andy Pettitte and Nick Swisher) and Brian Cashman’s special advisors Omar Minaya and Brian Sabean, and the consensus was Boone should remain in his role.
“They all came to the same conclusion, which is Aaron is a good manager and should be our manager in 2024,” Steinbrenner said.