On Tuesday, October 5th, the New York Yankees season came to a disappointing end after being defeated by the Boston Red Sox with a score of  2-6. This marks the 12th season straight in which the Yankees have not made it to the World Series. This usually wouldn’t be a problem for most teams, yet by Yankee standards falling short should never be an option.

The Yankees, year in and year out, have been one of the highest spending teams in the MLB, paying most of their player’s extraordinary amounts of money, including Luis Severino, Gerrit Cole, and Aroldis Chapman. What all of these players have in common besides being paid exuberant amounts of money is that they also tend to disappear when the games matter. As some may say, Aroldis Chapman is well known to be a “choker” due to multiple moments in which he has given up game-winning or game-tying home runs in some of the most important games. This includes Jose Altuve’s walk-off homerun against Chapman in 2019, and in 2016 with his time as a Cub gave up a game-tying home run to Rajai Davis in the 2016 World Series. Fortunately, Chapman never came into the game on Tuesday since the Yankees never got the chance to use a closer, all thanks to both Gerrit Cole and Luis Severino’s awful outings. Gerrit Cole specifically had one of the most disappointing performances of all time in the game of baseball. If you do the math correctly, Gerrit Cole was paid almost 100 Million dollars per strikeout that he got in a win-or-go-home game. For someone being paid as much as he is, he should not be able to do three innings of work in which he gives up three runs, all of which came off home runs. He performed dreadfully and never stood a chance against the Red Sox the way that he pitched Tuesday night. And after being taken out of the game in the second inning, Luis Severino comes out and does the same thing, the only difference being that he was being paid 40 million dollars for every strikeout he got, which was one.

The Yankees have wasted billions of dollars on unsuccessful seasons for 12 years now. Year in and year out, they disappoint everyone, not only Yankees fans, but MLB fans in general with their expectations and sad realities coming into every season. They are a walking choke job and have done nothing to prove that they can be more than that. There’s nothing else they can do at this point but spend more money on players who will likely underperform when it matters the most. Next season they have to prove to everyone that spending all that money is justified and come out as legitimate championship contenders instead of a fringe playoff team apt to disappoint yet again.