Entering the season, the Yankees were the favorites to win the American League.
At 33-32, nine games behind the Tampa Bay Rays in the division, and with their offense sputtering for the majority of the season (their rotation has struggled in the last week), fans have been calling for major shakeup on the roster.
That could be coming, but in a postseason push, rather than a rebuild, according to Yankees GM Brian Cashman.
“We’re fully engaged into the buying mode in terms of attempting to improving in what we’ve got,” Cashman told reporters on Tuesday.
Cashman said he is open to “all ideas” and has been in touch with plenty of teams to discuss what’s available.
“It’s all measured about what’s available, and whatever’s available is better than what we have,” he said, “and if so, we’ll try to see if we can try to make something happen there.
“And I am also open to anything and everything that I don’t think of as I enter the conversation. So if somebody presents something that is radical — we’re in a spot we didn’t expect to be in, and I’m open to all ideas to improve the situation yesterday.”
The Yankees went into a slight rebuild at the 2016 trade deadline, trading Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Carlos Beltran as they hovered around .500 for most of the first half of the season.
The rebuild was more of a retooling, as they were a game away from the World Series the following year.
But rebuilding, or retooling, doesn’t seem to be on Cashman’s mind.
“I feel like we’ve got a long stretch still ahead of us in the season, and that’s encouraging, but it’s discouraging that we’ve created a pole position that’s more difficult to run the race,” Cashman said. “We have a longer stretch of games, but we’ve created a sprint with those longer stretch of games of necessity, because every game is that much more magnified for us maybe then for us because of where we sit right now.