Yankees can be proud: They captured 'The Process' World Series again!
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman during a news conference on Oct. 16, 2025, at Yankee Stadium. Credit: Ed Murray
During a casual, wide-ranging conversation in early June, a rival executive eventually settled on this topic: The number of “really super-smart” people in Major League Baseball front offices is not commensurate with the number of teams actually run well.
The executive, probably a decade short of being described as a “baseball lifer” but far from a baseball newbie, does not come at the sport from an anti-analytics world. Far from it. He is a true believer in balancing the analytics-heavy nature of today’s game with a heavy dose of boots-on-the-ground pro (and amateur) scouting.
“Finding that balance is hard, but it really isn’t the biggest problem [in the game],” he said. “The problem now is it seems more teams want to win ‘The Process’ World Series than the actual World Series.”
The phrase — from the 76ers' catchy “Trust the Process” — has comfortably nestled its way into pretty much every front office.
Usually, it’s “the process” or “our process.”
Sometimes it sounds fine.
Hear it from the Dodgers and the process sounds far more trustworthy, given that it's coming from those running the two-time defending World Series champions.
It also rings as something other than meaningless verbiage when — using three far-lower-on-the-payroll-scale clubs — the Rays, Guardians or Brewers say it.
But most times, referencing “the process” sounds ludicrous.
It's ludicrous when it comes from front-office people — and/or field managers — with teams such as the Pirates, Mets, Rockies, Twins, Red Sox, Marlins and Angels.
And the Yankees, too.
Like all of the teams listed above — a list not close to comprehensive — the Yankees appear more head-over-heels about their “process” than the wins and losses said process produces.
“I'm proud of our people and proud of our process,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said during a tension-filled meeting with reporters in November 2023 at the annual GM meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Cashman — the Yankees' GM since 1998 and with the organization since 1986, when he was an intern — said those words after an 82-80 season in 2023 in which his team missed the playoffs.
The far bigger headlines from that hour-plus back-and-forth, of course, was Cashman saying multiple times: “We’re pretty [expletive] good.”
The phrase, in many circles, unfairly portrayed Cashman as saying it in an overall evaluation of a playoff-less team. Unfairly because what he was saying — and this is among the major reasons his employees are steadfastly loyal to him — was something along the lines of: “I have incredibly smart and talented baseball people under me.”
That was true then and remains true.
And if Cashman, and manager Aaron Boone for that matter, want to repeat it whenever they meet the media for the 2026 postmortem, which is likely to occur within the next week or so, they should.
What the pair should steer clear of is mention of “process.”
Because even as the Yankees continue to hold their process up as some kind of gold standard, it isn’t viewed that way in the industry.
“You have to ask at some point,” a National League talent evaluator said, “why you keep losing the same way every year to these kinds of teams.”
Meaning good teams, sometimes exceptional teams. The kind the Yankees aspire to be, and think of themselves as, but ones in October they don’t beat.
This year it was the AL East champion Rays. Last year it was the AL East champion Blue Jays.
To their credit, the Yankees successfully navigated a weak AL in 2024, beating the annual AL Central sacrifices of that postseason, the Royals and Guardians, to reach the World Series for the only time in Boone’s tenure.
And then they got steamrolled by the Dodgers, some of whom mocked them afterward.
Boone’s tenure started with a four-game loss to the Red Sox in the 2018 ALDS followed by a six-game loss to the Astros in the 2019 ALCS.
The Yankees were taken out in five games by the Rays in the 2020 ALDS, beaten by the Red Sox in the one-game wild-card round in 2021 and swept by the Astros in the 2022 ALCS. Then they fell short of reaching the postseason in 2023.
The laments after each series were the same: A Yankees team entering the season with trophy-raising expectations fell short of winning the World Series because it didn’t get “enough big hits,” didn’t get a bounce or two or had some “key” injuries. A potential series-changing ball didn’t carry quite far enough (Cody Bellinger’s bases-loaded 405-foot drive in Game 2 this year). They were either outplayed or outpitched by just “a little bit.”
It is not fair to say that managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, simply because he doesn’t act like his championship-or-failure father, George, doesn’t badly want to win World Series title No. 28. And more.
He does.
But over the years, the subtle message has trickled down throughout the organization and into the clubhouse that Steinbrenner, a self-described “numbers guy,” sees a season as successful if the club, always with one of the highest payrolls in the game, wins its usual 90-plus games, draws eyeballs on the YES Network and regularly packs Yankee Stadium.
If the club’s “process” yields that, all is OK.
Or OK enough with the addition of yet another self-awarded Process World Series.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
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