Mike Lupica: With Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, 2024 is truly World Series or bust for the Yankees

Nothing has changed with the Yankees and for the Yankees since they pulled off the trade for Juan Soto, as significant an acquisition for them as Shohei Ohtani was for the Dodgers: They didn’t make this trade to NOT make the World Series for the first time since 2009.

In all ways and in lights, this season really is World Series or bust for the Yankees, despite all the times since 2009 when it was plain silly of them to still act as if that was a realistic mission statement, as if somehow they were still Joe Torre’s Yankees.

There have been times this season when the Yankees have looked like the best team in baseball, without question. That doesn’t change because the Dodgers cuffed them around when they didn’t have Soto in the lineup and doesn’t change because they just finished a series against the Orioles – who sure aren’t afraid of the Yankees – that could easily have been two of three for the Yankees if Aaron Judge hadn’t left Wednesday night’s game after getting hit in the hand.

The Yankees have gotten a lot better since 82-80 last season, of course. They performed admirably without Gerrit Cole. Soto, No. 22, has been exactly who and what they thought they were getting. And, fittingly enough, Judge has been ’22 Aaron Judge and might have a shot at hitting 60 again if he doesn’t get hurt. On top of all that, Giancarlo Stanton hasn’t gotten hurt, at least not yet, and had 18 home runs coming into the weekend and nearly helped bring the Yankees all the way back in that one Orioles’ game they ended up losing in extra innings.

But there is no more of a win-now team in the sport than the Yankees, and that includes the Dodgers, even after all the money the Dodgers spent on Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto; and even without Mookie Betts, who suffered the broken hand that Judge did not this week.
Listen, Brian Cashman isn’t going to lose his job if the Yankees don’t win their first pennant in 15 years, just because it’s reached the point where Yankee fans believe Cashman’s job security could survive a nuclear attack. He won’t take the fall if Cashman still hasn’t remembered how to construct a championship team. But Aaron Boone will.

Cashman, without question, has so far done an admirable job putting Humpty Dumpty back together after last season’s fourth-place finish, and what nearly turned out to be the Yankees’ first non-winning season since before Joe Torre came to town. But Yankee fans know better than anyone how the team has shown early speed before since the last World Series, what tremendous frontrunners they have been before falling short, and sometimes considerably short, of the Canyon of Heroes.

That is part of the current reality of the Yankees, who they are and not who they used to be. Here is more of a reality check: Over half of the American League has been to the World Series since the last time the Yankees did win the 40th pennant in their grand history. It was back in 2003 when Aaron Boone homered the Yankees into their sixth World Series with Joe Torre as their manager. And even though Cashman was the general manager by then, the heart of that team — the Core Five that still included Bernie Williams — was already in place when he became the boss of baseball ops on 161st St. It isn’t unfair to point that out. It is just a baseball fact in the Bronx, same as the one that has the Yankees putting together one winning season after another with Cashman running the show.

But since ’03, the Yankees have been to the same number of World Series as the White Sox, and the Rockies, and the Diamondbacks, and the Mets. And if the Yankees don’t make it back this season, if they don’t at least win their 41st pennant, more Yankees history will have been made, and this will be the longest period since Babe Ruth got to town over a century ago that they haven’t managed to make an appearance in an event, your Fall Classic, they feel as if they invented.

Are they very much in the First Class cabin of the ’24 season? You bet. They were hit early by the injury to Cole, and they have been hit by other pitching injuries lately, the most important, at least for now, to Clarke Schmidt, who had turned into a real horse for them. But it is clear, and that means without overreacting to the way they looked against the Dodgers and Red Sox and now the Orioles, that there is still plenty of work for Cashman to do if he does want his team to play all the way through October and into the first week of November.