“I’m not talking about personnel, but I’m talking about a philosophy. There has to be a philosophy change,” Alex Rodriguez said.
“Cashman has to surround himself with people that know baseball, that understand baseball, that can value both sides of the ball,” he said of general manager Brian Cashman.
Rodriguez joined Derek Jeter and David “Big Papi” Ortiz on FOX’s HPE Postgame Show after the Tampa Bay Rays completed their ALDS sweep of the Yankees with a 4–3 win in the Bronx on Wednesday, October 7. Host Kevin Burkhardt asked the panel what comes next for New York.
“I think there’s two ways to look at it. First of all, the Rays are just really, really good, right?” Burkhardt said. “They were the best team in the American League all year long, and we’ll get to them in a second. But for the Yankees, this is tough, man.”
“They got a lot of questions to answer in the offseason and getting swept by your division rival and losing in the Bronx. That’s tough.”
A-Rod calls for a change in philosophy
“Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, look, they beat them like a drum,” Rodriguez said. “They beat them in spring training, they beat them during the season, and they swept them in October.”
“Something has to change. Something has to change.”
“You’ve won 27 titles one way,” he said. “I’m not saying anyone should lose their job, but make, make that clear.”
“And of the 9 positions, you don’t know who’s gonna play 5 positions. First base, second base, third base, center field, and right field because Judge is out.”
Rodriguez called that uncertainty “unthinkable in a game where your season is on the line.”
“And if something doesn’t change, you’re gonna have the same results. And we’ve been watching the same movie for over a decade and nothing changes.”
“They’ll use the excuse that Judge wasn’t there, but Judge had nothing to do with that first inning in game 2,” Rodriguez said. He called it “one of the craziest innings I’ve ever seen.”
Jeter on injuries and postseason mistakes
Jeter referred to Aaron Boone’s postgame interview.
“It’s tough to do those interviews after you lose,” Jeter said. “The first thing he said, he gave credit to the Tampa Bay Rays.”
“Tampa’s had the best team in the division. They’ve had the best team in the league up until this point, and they proved it once again. They played better than the Yankees all season. They played better than the Yankees in this particular series.”
“I think that’s the best way to answer it. I do not know what’s next,” Jeter said.
Jeter then discussed injuries to Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton.
“It’s always easy at this point of the year to point to injuries. OK. Aaron wasn’t playing. Stanton wasn’t there. He got a couple at bats.”
He cautioned against judging Giancarlo Stanton by those limited at-bats, then continued:
“But injuries are a part of it. Every team has to go through injuries, and you have to overcome injuries if you’re going to win. They didn’t play well.”
“And you know sometimes when you don’t play well in the postseason, everything is magnified and they start dissecting things that have happened. The regular season you can get away with it. Over 162 games you can have periods where you play poorly, periods when you play well. People tend to focus more on the times when you play well.”
“When you get into the postseason and you’re playing teams like the Tampa Rays, you cannot make mistakes because they’re gonna capitalize on them. You can make mistakes against the Boston Red Sox and still overcome those mistakes, but you can’t do it against Tampa. You know what I’m saying? And they got exposed a little bit, and that’s the reason why they’re going home.”
What Jeter would take from the late 1990s
Burkhardt asked:
“Forget about this year’s roster. What were some of the characteristics from the late 90s team that you would implement to a 2027 Yankees team?”
“Well, the game is completely different now,” Jeter said. “I mean, back in, back in those days, you had one particular lineup you threw out there every single day.”
“The game’s changed. You don’t see that anymore. You had starters that you knew were going to go out there every five days.”
Jeter called the eras “kind of hard to compare.”
“We were teams that focused on all the little things, you know, we would beat you with a home run, but we’d also beat you 2 to 1. You know, we’ve faced you guys a lot of times. We, we’d faced Pedro. We talked about it. We didn’t necessarily beat Pedro, but we beat the Red Sox. We’d wear them down.”
“There’s different ways of winning games when you’re not swinging the bats well, but we didn’t beat ourselves, and I think in this particular series there are a lot of games where the Yankees beat themselves.”
Burkhardt brought up the 1998 Yankees, who won 114 regular-season games without a 30-home-run hitter. Tino Martinez led that team with 28.
“I think I get this right because it’s been a while, but you won 114 games or something, and you didn’t have one member hit 30 home runs, but you were unbeatable,” Burkhardt said.
Big Papi on the Yankees’ culture
“Look, I never played for the Yankees, but I compete a lot against the Yankees, and there’s one thing that I can see missing coming from the Yankees and is the culture,” Ortiz said.
“There’s a lot of little things that in the long run they start catching up. And those things never happened when you guys were there.”
“They need to start paying attention to those little things,” Ortiz said.
Addressing Jeter, Ortiz added:
“You need to have that one player in a clubhouse that get those things put away. I know you used to do that. You used to do that.”
“That organization needs to go back into it because at the end of the day, yeah, the game has changed a lot. Yeah, there’s a lot of different things going on in the game, but the culture always gonna be the culture.”
“And they are far away from being where they used to be,” Ortiz said.
Rodriguez compares New York with Tampa Bay and Milwaukee
Rodriguez returned to the Rays and Brewers, using approximate payroll figures in his comparison.
“And Kevin, I don’t think there’s a coincidence that the best two teams in the American League and the National League, the Brewers and Tampa. I mean you have the Yankees at $330 million payroll and you have Tampa at $110 million right?”
“So there’s something to be had that they do everything well. They pitch, they defend, timely hitting, great character, little things, and yes, they’re last in home runs, but they’re first place.”
“So, so there’s something there and I think there’s a world where there’s a counter moneyball,” Rodriguez said.
“If you go against the market against the consensus and you get paid off, you land where the Brewers and the Rays are today.”
“The Rays and Brewers are similar in a lot of ways, right?” Burkhardt said. “They never beat themselves.”
“Give credit to Kevin Cash and that whole squad. They were predicted to finish last in the division this year. Well, they finished first.”
“They keep doing it, doing it year in and year out. It’s amazing, man, and they have superstars.”
Burkhardt called Junior Caminero “an absolute superstar” and added: “And you’re gonna get to see him in the LCS.”
Ortiz’s “Chilligan’s Island” send-off
At the start of the show, Burkhardt asked Ortiz about his recurring Yankees taunt: “Did you realize it would be a thing even a year later?”
“I kind of created a monster,” Ortiz said. “I kinda like it.”
The segment closed with Ortiz’s “Chilligan’s Island” comedy sketch, featuring Yankees figures composited into an offseason beach scene.
“Hey, look, man, every October I’m getting sick and tired of bringing these Yankees into my weekend with Papi,” Ortiz said.
“They always sad, you know what I mean? But it’s OK. I’m gonna make you happy right now in a minute. Let me show you what I’m gonna do.”
“It’s time to chill. It’s time to party. Have a little tequila.”
“Enjoy the offseason.”
Source: FOX Sports’ Yankees postgame panel segment (8:37). This report draws on the complete transcript of the edited broadcast segment. Quotations are selected excerpts.
