My life contains a glaring hypocrisy: I, a leftist champion of economic justice, am also a die-hard Yankees fan. When I’m not advocating for a fair playing field, I root for baseball’s richest team of smaller markets’ poached All-Stars. I’m egalitarian in the streets, plutocratic in the cleats.

 

Compounding my philosophical inconsistency, the New York Yankees might be sport’s most Republican-coded sports franchise. It’s not just their Goliath status from winning 27 World Series since their inception. The team’s ownership has always had an implicit and sometimes explicit right-leaning ethos. The players’ pinstripe uniform, an aesthetic popularized by 19^th century London bankers, exudes straight-laced professionalism in a game of leisure. The Yankees have had a long-standing rule banning facial hair. (Former Yankees captain Don Mattingly once tried forcing a trade by refusing a haircut.) A former CEO, Michael Burke, was an ex-CIA agent who attempted to organize a coup in Albania. In 1978, George Steinbrenner, the totalitarian hothead owner whose family still runs the team, was suspended for illegal donations to Richard Nixon’s campaign. Steinbrenner was ultimately pardoned by Ronald Reagan. The Yankees even gifted World Series rings to former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani—which Giuliani nearly had to auction off after he defamed 2020 election workers. Hell, the team held a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.

Being a Yankees fan is a Faustian bargain: because the big-market, renowned franchise has traditionally enjoyed a large financial advantage compared to other teams for buying talent, fans only consider the season a success if it ends winning a World Series. By this standard, every season this century but one has been a failure. Yankees fans have grown accustomed to a familiar pattern of incompetence. Entrenched, unaccountable leadership. Data-obsessed strategizing with disastrous results. Their one consistent success has been raising gobs of money, to the extent one wonders if winning is actually a second priority.

After ruminating yet another playoff blunder, I thought, Where else have I made this critique? What other group of aged, number-crunching bean counters has rewarded my conflicted support with institutionalized dysfunction? Then I realized perhaps my greatest frustration with the Yankees: despite embodying a Republican ethos, the team is run with all the flailing ineptitude of the Democratic Party.

There’s a singular rush every pre-teen baseball fan experiences watching their team near a World Series win. A buildup every time the pitcher sets, unwinds, hurls the ball to one final batter standing between your squad and glory. Exhilaration watching every strike, ball, contact just escaping play into the stands. I first experienced this in 1996. As the Yankees led the Braves 3-2 in the top of the ninth inning, I stood up with my neighbors in their living room, the five of us holding hands in front of the big box TV. The final swing, a pop-up near third base, was high enough to realize victory was seconds away. The ball fell into Charlie Hayes’ waiting glove. We screamed. We hugged. We jumped with glee, indifferent to the shaking of their curiously thin wooden floor. My lifetime Yankees devotion crystallized. A kid, I had every reason to assume championships by my renowned, dynastic team would be the norm. Their performance over my adult life has taught me how vaunted organizations can cause their own decline.

One season later, resigning general manager Bob Watson was replaced by his assistant, Brian Cashman. Cashman has been there ever since. At 27 years assembling the roster, he is the longest-hired GM in American professional sports. Yet, for a franchise once synonymous with a notoriously impatient, win-now credo, Cashman’s longevity comes despite meager championship success. The Yankees did win the first three World Series in his reign, from 1998 to 2000; however, that team already had in place its “Core Four,” homegrown talent whose development is widely credited to ex-Yankees executive Gene Michael. Those stars eventually faded, and the front office’s draft picks and free agent signings have missed more than they hit.

That Faustian bargain has rarely paid off: despite a top four payroll every year but one this century, the Yankees have won just a single World Series. (It’s worth noting this championship came following an offseason where they doled out big contracts to starters developed by small-market teams..) Incumbent manager Aaron Boone now shares the longest tenure for a Yankees manager without a World Series. (He will surpass the record in the upcoming 2026 season.) By comparison, the Red Sox have won four titles in that period.

By the Yankees’ unapologetically lofty standard, letdowns have become the norm.

An identical entrenched, unaccountable hierarchy also afflicts the Democrat Party. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the party’s gerontocratic faces, have both been in Congress since the 1980s. They are a combined 160 years old. Pelosi’s upcoming birthday will make her eight years older than the average American life expectancy. From 2003 to 2023, the third-ranking Democrat in the House position was traded between Rep. Steny Hoyer and Rep. Jim Clyburn, two Congressmen born before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. (The post went in 2023 to Katherine Clark, a comparable babyface at 59.) This session of Congress alone, three Democrats over 70 have passed away.

Like the Yankees brass, these senior Democrats have remained in power after defeat. The stunning, embarrassing debacle of Trump’s 2016 victory didn’t cost Pelosi her leadership position. Chuck “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose…” Schumer ascended in 2017 to Minority Leader, a title he has continued to hold after the Democrats’ second Trump defeat. Pelosi recently stepped down from the speakership, but still exerts tremendous authority—she is largely credited with forcing out Joe Biden, yet another ancient Democrat, from the 2024 race. Maintaining their perches has stopped the party from reckoning with how their majority rule led to Trump’s rise. Worse, it has silenced the younger, more progressive representatives better suited to speak to today’s challenges and the media landscape Trump has masterfully exploited. It boggles my mind, both following my baseball team and watching my supposedly allied party, to see the same leaders still in charge after repeated, disastrous campaigns.

It's not just incumbency that explains this common decline. Both the Democrats and their baseball equivalent operate from a top-down hierarchy that insulates their failed leaders.

Historically, baseball front offices and managers have had delineated roles. Team executives typically determine the club roster, like deciding whether to pursue major stars in the offseason or trade away talent for promising minor leaguers. A manager’s domain is usually in-game decisions—which players to start or how long to leave in the starting pitcher. Collaboration and turf wars exist, depending on the franchise (and often, the franchise owner’s megalomania), but the manager traditionally has a larger influence, or at least an independent voice, for game strategy. The benefit of this power division is clear: executives can focus on the squad’s overall direction, while the manager factors his clubhouse knowledge for in-game calls. A manager’s close relationship to players also brings an additional perspective that office executives might not consider.

The Yankees appear to have little such inside influence from manager Aaron Boone. The growing belief is that the team’s front office—the small braintrust of executives who call the shots—micromanages the game. “When Joe Torre and Lou Piniella were the managers, they had all the power. That has shifted up to the front offices,” former Yankee Alex Rodriguez postulated on sports radio after the team’s latest postseason exit. “I’m pretty sure Aaron’s not the one that’s calling every move they make throughout the game,” Hall-of-Famer Derek Jeter also claimed. The Yankees’ routine October defeats are coming from an unchallenged, unified authority.

The Democrats have similar mechanisms ensconcing the top from alternate voices. Leadership battles, where seniority has always played a major, if not dispositive, role are a proxy battle for the party platform. Here, the Democrats’ younger and generally more leftward voices have been routinely shut out. The Progressive Caucus was outmaneuvered when they asked Pelosi for committee assignments. Fundraising has become a prerequisite for party support, causing most candidates to rely on the corporate-friendly policies that will provide major financial backing. There’s also the blacklist of consulting firms who dare to work for a primary challenger. Whatever energy and ideological diversity “The Squad” may represent, they still made Pelosi Speaker without any public demands met. (Meanwhile, the archconservative Tea Party and Freedom Caucuses pushed out two Speakers, John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy, for insufficiently placating their base.) Deep divisions exist within the Democratic caucus, but the Democratic establishment keeps their influence intact with few policy shifts toward the party’s populist wing.

The two groups’ shared management style yields a common result. The old guard reigns. Another direction is obvious and needed, but neither organization seems interested in the fundamental realignment of priorities required. Failure becomes routine, acceptable, expected. I voted third party, and hoped the New York Giants could win a few NFL games in the fall.

The data dooming the Yankees’ October failures is their analytics department. All baseball teams are tight-lipped about how and how much they rely on sabermetrics, the advanced player evaluation data popularized in Moneyball. The Yankees are no exception, but what’s known suggests an outsized commitment to data. The franchise first hired an analyst, Michael Fishman, back in 2005. One report states that since then, the team has had at least 20 statistical analysts. This year, the Yankees analytics department redesigned the baseball bat itself, situating the thick part of the wood in the middle in hopes of better contact. One clubhouse analytics analyst was a former MIT-educated physicist. To them, fielding a good team actually is rocket science.

The Democratic Party has their own digital seer from which every decision must follow. The Harris campaign relied on Future Forward, a Super PAC the New York Times claimed, “is animated by the idea that a blend of data science, political science and testing can usher in a new era of rigor in advertising.” Dubbing this strategy the “‘Moneyball’ method,” the outlet described the group as, “testing thousands of messages, social media posts and ads in the 2024 race, ranking them in order of effectiveness and approving only those that resonate with voters.” The Super PAC’s $900 million largesse afforded it a nice sample size: “Future Forward has conducted nearly four million voter surveys since Ms. Harris entered the race — and more than 10 million since January.” Even if one grants that polling can gauge, even help persuade, some of the 155 million American voters, such a tremendous investment dissecting messages by the thousands demonstrates an astounding dedication to style over, say, substance.

According to the Times, “Officials say the ads that emerge are on average 35 percent more effective than those they reject.” It’s hard to imagine how to accurately quantify an ad’s effectiveness in winning votes, let alone 35 percent more effective, but Democratic deference to the statisticians goes on. (Of course, one could argue that their reliance on popular views is a ruse, as they ignore left-wing economic policies that poll especially high.)

David Shor, a pollster and Future Forward operative, also gifted the party “popularism.” Popularism, a strategy of highlighting well-polling policies while downplaying poor-polling views, is essentially used to highlight the best-rated views (so long as they don’t challenge the funders’ economic interests). Eschewing straightforward class warfare, Dems hunt infinite polls, approval ratings, demographic swings and county turnouts for the slogans to their agenda, or even that agenda itself.

This blind devotion to numbers would be palatable, if circuitous, if it resulted in victory. Unfortunately, both organizations’ efforts have been abysmal, patent failures.

When it comes to the Yankees, for all their spending, fielding has been a consistent liability, culminating in the 3-error, 5-unearned run meltdown in the fifth inning that ended their 2024 World Series. Their development pipeline is barren: baseball scouts rank the Yankees in the bottom-third of farm systems. Giancarlo Stanton is a phenomenal slugger, but he’s a $30 million designated hitter (DH) who sat out numerous times last season when an injured Aaron Judge was limited to the DH role. The once-untradeable prospect Jason Dominguez has been mediocre; while Anthony Volpe, another underperforming callup, had a 4-month stretch comparable to a 1940s one-armed player.

“One of the worst constructions of a roster I’ve ever seen,” Rodriguez noted after this past season concluded. “You have three left-handed catchers, you have five DHs, you have a first baseman in and out.” Does that sound like a team heeding advice by traditional scouts?

The Democrats also have bafflingly dismal returns on their unwavering stat-crunching. The party’s “poll-based” moderating in 2024 resulted in Trump winning the same 94 percent of Republican voters as he won in 2020, with even fewer voting Democrat this past election. Nominating another pro-business Democrat candidate in 2024 led, as it did in 2016, to Republican Congressional majorities. If anything, Trump’s improvement with traditional Democrat demographics suggests the campaign strategy cost the party its own voters. And now, even after Republicans’ deeply unpopular tax cut bill, economic inflation, job losses and truly ghoulish ICE abuses, the Democrat Party’s approval ratings are at a 30-year low. And this is to say nothing of the idea that leaders sometimes ought to shape, not follow, public opinion. In a two-party system, frustrated voters will inevitably give Democrats another chance. It will be in spite of this approach to politics, a misguided compass that will cost them their majority just as quickly.

Alas, both are committed to the numbers approach. There’s no shortage of billionaire-funded Democratic think tanks and multi-million dollar studies to find majority support on class-free messaging, mere months after burning a billion dollars on a campaign predicated on the identical poll-testing. For their part, the Yankees keep doubling down on their stat reliance. The team’s 2023 sabermetric model resulted in an 82-80 season that Cashman called “a disaster” (these are the Yankees, after all). Their response? They hired an analytics firm to audit their stat-gathering.

The Yankees and the Democrats share a doomed philosophy: Want to win? Look to the data! Data fails to win? Just get more data! Why are both so content with proven, enduring failure?

Disillusioned by both, I suspect neither’s chief goal is to win, but to raise gobs of money. After all, both can point to this as their chief success. Spending that money to win, it seems, becomes irrelevant.

The Yankees’ big spending goes back to buying Babe Ruth’s contract from the indebted Red Sox. George Steinbrenner’s 1973 purchase of the team, soon followed by baseball’s adoption of free agency, started a new era whereby the Yankees were seldom outbid for talent. In 1974, the team signed Catfish Hunter, the Cy Young award winner of the 3-peat World Series champion (and much less wealthy) Oakland Athletics. Two years later, the Yankees added Reggie Jackson, the former American League Most Valuable Player, from that same Oakland dynasty. (The A's had traded him to Baltimore the previous season rather than pay Jackson.) Even the introduction of a luxury tax, a surcharge on teams with excessive payrolls in 1997, couldn’t shut Steinbrenner’s wallet: from 1999 until 2014, the Yankees had the highest Opening Day payroll, often tens of millions more than the second-highest. When the Yankees outbid the rival Boston Red Sox for pitcher Jose Contreras, the one-upped Red Sox president Larry Lucchino dubbed the Yankees “the evil empire.” Another executive added: “You stop counting their payroll. After a while it doesn't matter.”

This philosophy—if you wish to call “spend the most” a philosophy—is no longer standard operating procedure in the Bronx. Gone are the days of 2008, when the team signed star players CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and AJ Burnett the same winter before winning their lone World Series in the last 25 years. Since team control moved from George Steinbrenner in 2011 to his son, Hal, the percentage of team revenue invested in players has plummeted. In 2004, the Yankees spent $276 million of their approximately $330 million revenue, approximately 84 percent on player salaries. In recent years, some estimates show the Yankees have spent as little as 30 percent of revenue on players. Salaries have increased almost yearly but not at commensurate to the rate of team revenue. Since 2014, the Dodgers have had the highest MLB payroll for seven different seasons, compared to the Yankees' one.

“The Dodgers have made the Yankees look like an A-ball outfit,” longtime sports radio host Mike Francesa decreed in his typically sublime bombast. “They have allowed the Dodgers to take what the Yankees used to do. The Yankees’ ‘We are bigger, we are better. We spend more. We shop at Tiffany’s. We buy the best. We are the best.’ That's how the Yankees acted… They don't act that way anymore.” It’s tempting to see this relative frugality as financially-driven: the less money spent on labor (i.e., a roster) the more money they net. Revenue once spent on the Giambis and the A-Rods instead stays with Yankees Global Enterprises, LLC and its investors. Whatever the merits of balanced spending, the franchise’s recent woes evidence a team more interested in profits than ostensibly its sole objective: winning.

Executives seem to have realized that fans will stick around—and open their wallets—for a squad that’s simply good enough to make the 7-team American League playoffs. As a result, despite ever-increasing revenue, the front office is happy to increase the team’s valuation rather than invest in star players.

The Democrat Party’s cash focus is more flagrant. Unlike a business, Democrats are happy to spend every cent they raise. In fact, they seem happiest raising the money. Different reports claim members of Congress spend four hours daily or 30 hours weekly on “call time,” asking for donations. A recent Democrat document revealed the six- and seven-figure “dues” party members are expected to raise. Those who raise the most tend to serve on powerful committee assignments. All this money goes to the aforementioned consultants, often in between stints with corporate and political clients.

Superior fundraising doesn’t mean electoral success. If it did, Trump would have lost to both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Soliciting huge checks isn’t merely independent from winning votes—it sacrifices popular ideas that turn out our dissatisfied electorate. Wealthy donors’ narrow interests have begotten familiar Democrat dysfunction: in lieu of strong alternatives to the right’s market gospel, they are a party of nibbling reforms, left to play defense on their less popular social policies. Democrats’ deference to the gilded patrons of their consultant class only makes them useful foils to Trump’s fake populism.

It’s cynical and incorrect to say this is the only way to win. Numerous polls have Bernie Sanders as America’s most popular sitting politician, and Zohran Mamdani energized 100,000 volunteers to knock millions of doors, as progressives fueled by small contributions. Rejecting corporate donors not only distances candidates from America’s widespread corruption stench, it presents opportunities for community outreach and constituent services. The Democratic Party could embrace this, but they instead literally sell access—and, let’s be clear, policy—to Super PAC bundlers. The preferences of billionaires are irreconcilable with grassroots energy and working-class interests. It’s clear what side party leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have chosen.

The Yankees’ transformed modus operandi has also hamstrung their chances at victory. Fans now see what was once unimaginable—being outspent. Most ignominiously, last year they lost generational slugger Juan Soto, acquired in a trade the previous season, to the crosstown rival Mets. This looks like a sea change in Yankees history: Steve Cohen, new owner of the long-suffering Metropolitans, has inherited Steinbrenner’s mantle (the status, not the player) as New York’s unrivaled spender. The Yankees are far from poor, but often cede talent to the Los Angeles Dodgers or New York Mets.

“Now they're satisfied when they make the playoffs,” Francesa also mused about the Yankees. “Why? They're satisfied because their stadium is full, and their signage is up, and the sponsors are buying the signage, and the luxury boxes are rented. That is how they judge the season. And they need the team to make the playoffs for any of that to happen. But there's only so much they're willing to spend now.” 

Both the Yankees and Democrats seem designed to fail. They share a philosophical inertia borne out of money, groupthink and sinecures. And I, wanting a habitable planet, a PAC-free democracy, a robust social safety net and a few more memories of October parades, feel resigned that these parties I once admired are too disconnected and complacent to achieve their stated goals.

In some ways, the Yankees’ decline saddens me more. Understanding the world through power and self-interest is part of growing up, but I’ve never fully lost the joy and excitement of my childhood self rooting for my baseball team. I’m glad I haven’t. Attaching virtue and kinship to a sports team is naïve, but it’s often our first time seeing the world with righteousness and idealism. It’s similarly immature to revere America’s political class, but they should and could earn our goodwill. Let’s always demand a world worth cheering, whether in our relief acts or our relief pitchers.