The Yankees weren’t aggressive at the deadline, and it’s costing them

The Toronto Blue Jays will never lose again. The year will be 2283, and your descendants will work on an asteroid farm. On this farm, they will have a shared pthyin-screen for the workers to watch on their break. Every five minutes, there will be a news bulletin telling everyone that the Blue Jays won. There will be polite applause, and everyone will go back to work. The applause is because the Blue Jays are the legal guardians of everyone on the asteroid farm, as well as everyone on Earth Third. They own everything. They are the singularity. And they will never lose again.

The Yankees traded for Dustin Ackley. He’s hurt now.

We used to feel this way about the New York Yankees not that long ago, remember. They won the AL East nine straight seasons, and they’ve won 90 games or more in 15 different seasons since the Blue Jays last did it. They had postseason residency. The selection committee considered them an afterthought. They were always in. They were unstoppable in the regular season, and occasionally in the postseason. When they wanted Alex Rodriguez before he was weird, they got Alex Rodriguez before he was weird.

It’s a brave new world, now that the Blue Jays will never, ever lose again, which means it’s time to look at the Yankees critically. They were in first place at the trade deadline, and their only acquisition was Ackley, who was 0-for-3 before going on the disabled list. They weren’t being arrogant; they were being pragmatic. They had the division lead. They didn’t want to blow up the farm system. What, like the Blue Jays were going to catch up in two weeks? They took the sensible, logical course.

Should they have done more?

I suppose that technically, they still have a shot at first place. Without doing any research, I suppose it’s possible that a team has made up a half-game deficit in the last six weeks of the regular season. But consider the three following points about the Yankees:

Now, none of those are damning on their own. BA lists are just aggregation of industry consensus, not spoilers for the future of baseball. Teams have lineups over 30 all the time without crumbling into dust the very next year. And sometimes, the pitchers with injury concerns come back and pitch for a long, long time without any substantial problems.

All of them together, though, make me all sweaty. Doesn’t that read like a team that should be worried about a closing window? If there was a team in baseball that should have been running around at the deadline like they were holding currency from a dissolving country, it was the Yankees.

It’s not like they didn’t have the prospects to get David Price, Cole Hamels or Johnny Cueto. They probably had the prospects to get two of them if they were extra panicky. For whatever reason, though, they were anything but panicky. They acted like every regular in their lineup was Carlos Correa’s age and only going to get better.

And that’s the Yankees Way. They don’t think in terms of windows. They’re forever confident that they’ll be in a pennant race. They’re a drunk, macho dude holding a steady hand over a candle at a party, and you’re impressed even as you’re rolling your eyes. The Yankees spend millions and millions and millions on players like Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Masahiro Tanaka, and that’s part of the Yankees Way. They’re aggressive with international amateurs, and that’s another part of it.

But another huge part of it is to make sure there are always a couple of young players as tentpoles for the entire roster, then figure out the rest on the fly. The Yankees Way is basically a sentence: Turn a prospect into gold every few years, spend what you’ve got, and everything else will fall into place.

Aaron Judge and Luis Severino are those tentpoles right now. The Yankees clearly aren’t interested in moving them, and Severino is already pitching about as well as anyone the Yankees could have acquired. Holding on to their best prospects isn’t a new strategy for the Yankees, either. If the Yankees have traded away anyone in their top-10 over the last decade, the player coming back was under 30 and under team control for a couple more years. Jesus Montero out, Michael Pineda in. Austin Jackson and Ian Kennedy out, Curtis Granderson in.

Other than that, the Yankees don’t do rentals, and they rarely do huge, standard prospect-for-veteran deals. It’s easy to think of the Yankees as an unfeeling, remorseless machine that consumes good players from around the league, but they don’t do the standard big-market-bully trades very often. They’re steadier than that.

The Yankees’ window has been closing for 10 or 15 years, remember. They’re Indiana Jones with the world’s slowest boulder chasing them, and they keep reaching back for something they forgot. Whoops, forgot my fedora. Whoops, forgot my car keys. Whoops, forgot my laundry slip. “You know, Jorge Posada can’t catch forever,” was something to concern-troll them about in 2004, when they also had a lineup of over-30 dudes. Over a decade later, we’re still doing the same damned thing.

They’re always over 30. But they usually have one guy, one young player that they didn’t trade for short-term help, bolstering the lineup or rotation. After the Jeter-Posada-Williams-Pettitte core, it was Robinson Cano. After that was Brett Gardner. The Yankees held on to Dellin Betances like he was a family heirloom, and everyone made fun of them for it when he was broken, but the chuckles died down quickly. Now it’s Judge, Severino and Greg Bird’s turn. Maybe all of them will blossom and all turn into Nick Johnson-shaped disappointments, but the Yankees will keep being steady and resourceful.

The Blue Jays might actually lose again, you know. And an intern checked on it for me -- apparently a ton of teams have come back from half-game deficits with six weeks left. Who knew? While the Blue Jays are baseball’s sexy team right now, there’s still a lot of time for the Yankees to look smart with their steady, predictable strategy. They might even start on Friday, when the two open a three-game series.

If it were me, I would have panicked and acquired every last player I could have at the deadline, but if I were running the Yankees, they would also probably be closing in on their 15th-straight third-place finish. They probably have a better handle on what they’re doing.

While it looks like the Yankees miscalculated at the deadline from here, letting a more aggressive team take over the East, they’re not interested in snap judgments. They’re interested in building a huge, lumbering monolith that will always be around, always contending, even when everyone in the lineup eats dinner at 4 p.m. and has anecdotes about meeting FDR. They don’t care about windows. And they don’t panic.

That’s the Yankees way, and it’s worked for the last couple of decades. We should probably wait until it doesn’t work in the post-Jeter era before talking about what they should have done differently.