Is it time for Cashman to go?

I had been a long-time supporter of Cashman until the series of trades he made at the deadline in 2021-22 to desperately try to squeeze a title out of the Judge-Stanton Yankees' team that rose up in late 2016-early 2017 backfired almost entirely. Even the Rizzo trade, which looked good for a year or two, might now backfire as Kevin Alcantara is near to being major league ready.

After 25 years of Cashman running the show, I now feel that it's time for a new vision and a new direction for the organization (what I feel doesn't matter, of course. Cashman will run things as long as he has Hal's confidence).

But your own example, the 2023 Rangers, undercuts the point you're trying to make. The Rangers did go 14-8 down the stretch, but that hid the fact that they had a long stretch of sub-.500 play before that. In the 2nd half of the season, they were barely over .500 at 41-40. Double that, and you have the Yankees record for the season, 82-80. So for the 2nd half of the season, the Rangers were no better than the Yankees were the whole season. They scored 398 runs their last 81 games, allowed 390, for a +8 runs differential. They earned that one game over record for the 2nd half on merit.

The Rangers won the title; they are the champions. But the best team in MLB last year was the Braves; they had the best record and the best run differential, +231 runs. Up and down the roster, they have stars or near stars at almost every position on the field (including the obvious MVP in Acuna, who had a brilliant, historic season, a second viable MVP selection in Matt Olsen, and third valid down-ballot candidate in Austin Riley), three outstanding starting pitchers and an elite bullpen when Iglesias is healthy.

None of that kept them from getting bounced from the playoffs in their first series, by the Phillies team...that then lost to the Diamondbacks team in the next series...that then lost to the Rangers for the title.

So as the particular point of whether the playoffs are a crapshoot...yes, of course they are. Cashman almost never says or does anything original, so his statement that the playoffs are a crapshoot is just another example of this: Billy Beane, Moneyball GM of the A's said it long before, back in the early 2000s when his strong Moneyball teams headed by the Giambi, Tejada, Chavez and the Zito-Mulder-Hudson rotation, that averaged 98 wins for four straight seasons, and won over 100 games twice, got kicked out of the playoffs in their first series four straight years. (They even lost one of those series to the Twins, whose post-season futility since 1991 is legendary.)

The playoffs ARE a crapshoot; that much is indisputable. Elite teams win it all more often that teams that just eke in, that much is true. But if you need any more convincing that inferior teams sometimes win it all, even teams that have no rotation to speak of, but whose pitchers suddenly get hot enough and perform well enough to win a title, I give you the 2006 Cardinals, and their "elite" rotation of exactly one good starting pitcher: Chris Carpenter. The remainder of the Cards' starting pitching that year was Jason Marquis and his 14 wins with a 6.02 ERA, Jeff Suppan, the injured and very subpar Mark Mulder, and of all people, the very same Jeff Weaver who the Yanks traded Ted Lilly for.

Lilly outpitched Weaver decisively after that trade, and Cashman was mercilessly criticized in the aftermath, and Lilly was in the rotation on one of those A's teams I mentioned above and for a few years after....but Weaver has a ring and Lilly doesn't. And Weaver pitched very well for the Cards in five postseason starts that year. In fact, he was the 2nd best starter for the Cards in the postseason, after Carpenter.

Both things can be true at the same time: the playoffs ARE a crapshoot, and that Cashman is using that idea to cover for his very real failures to finish the construction of the Judge-Stanton teams into a title. Ironic, as well, for if he had finished off that team and won a title anywhere along the line, he would've rebuilt a team on the fly into a title-winner without going the complete multi-year total tear-down non-competitive dumps that such teams as the Astros, Cubs, Rangers, Phillies, Royals, and to a lesser extent, the Giants did before winning their first titles in the last 15 years. It would have been an amazing accomplishment. It would have cemented his legacy as a GM. The fans would finally have had to acknowledge that he built a title on his own merit.

But he couldn't pull it off, and now a majority of the team's fans can't wait to see him go.