Erik Boland: Why Aaron Judge, Yankees were right to have clubhouse celebration after clinching playoff berth
Closer David Bednar celebrates the Yankees clinching a playoff berth after defeating the Minnesota Twins at Target Field on Monday in Minneapolis, Minn. Credit: Getty Images/David Berding
Champagne bottles popped and beer flowed copiously in the visitors’ clubhouse at Minnesota’s Target Field late Monday night.
The Yankees, by virtue of Toronto’s loss before their 8-3 victory over the Twins was secured, had officially clinched a playoff berth.
And almost as quickly as the well-shaken bubbly jetted from the bottle into the clubhouse ceiling, the debate seemingly began again: should the Yankees, winners of 27 World Series titles but none since 2009, really be celebrating so fervently a playoff berth?
What would George Steinbrenner – the original author of the “any season that ends without a championship is a failure” mantra – say?
What would the thoughts of Derek Jeter – who more than any of the Yankees’ late-90’s-early 2000s dynasty reflected Steinbrenner’s title-or-bust mentality – be?
All that’s missing is the plaintive cry: And what of the children?
Really, the debate is a silly one.
Does anyone really believe the current Yankees' desire to win the World Series is diminished even in the slightest because they sprayed and swigged cheap beer and champagne after clinching the franchise’s ninth playoff appearance in the last 10 seasons?
“What are we talking about here?” a somewhat bemused Aaron Judge said after Sunday’s victory over the Mets.
The Yankees captain was asked, in essence, if he felt a blowout celebration was warranted for the inevitable playoff berth to come.
“We’re here for a World Series. We’re here to win. It’s about getting into the postseason and giving ourselves a chance,” Judge said. “If you don’t get in, you can’t win a World Series, right? So you’ve got to celebrate that.”
Celebrate away. Just as the AL East-leading Rays did late last week when they clinched their playoff spot and countless other qualifying teams will in the coming days and weeks.
Baseball, as manager Aaron Boone said – and just about everyone in the game says – “is a game of failure.”
“When you have the opportunity to celebrate small successes, or big successes, we’ll try [to] do that,” Boone said on Sunday.
After the nearly six-month grind of the 162-game regular season – filled with unexpected injuries, slumps, travel delays, etc. – it’s difficult to see the harm in some playoff revelry (the Brewers, notably, went the low-key route after clinching their playoff berth, which certainly is their right).
Yes, 12 of the 30 teams now qualify for the playoffs – 12 since MLB added a third wild-card team in each league in 2022 – but that doesn’t mean doing so is easy, even in this year’s American League that, granted, is as weak as it has ever been.
Judge is as throw-back a player as the Yankees have in their clubhouse, a player who, with his team-first, win-first mentality, would have made him a fit in any era’s clubhouse.
And before the “he’s no Jeter” crowd chimes in on his response to the question about celebrating something other than a title – or AL pennant – this was also Judge in the stone silence of the visitor’s clubhouse inside Houston’s Minute Maid Park after the Yankees’ crushing six-game loss to the Astros in the 2019 ALCS:
“It’s a failure,” Judge said of a season in which the Yankees won 103 games and took the AL East crown for the first time since 2012. “No matter how many games we won in the regular season or anything else we did, the season’s a failure.”
Or Judge, after the Yankees had been eliminated from playoff contention toward the end of a forgettable 2023 season: “I’ll tell you guys every year, [if] I’m not standing here talking to you after a championship, it’s a failure. All the work you put in in the offseason in training, preparation, coming out here on a daily basis, rain or shine, to play a game, it’s about bringing a championship back. That’s why we play. That’s why I’m here.”
Judge, in his 10th full season in the majors, is more aware than anyone his Yankees legacy will ultimately be shaped by number of championships won. Or not won.
The 2023 season was especially grating for Judge, whose big toe injury earlier that year more or less torpedoed what would be an 82-80 campaign.
“That’s why I came back to New York with this group of guys was to build something and getting New York back to where it’s supposed to be,” Judge said toward the end of that ’23 season, the first of the nine-year, $360 million free-agent deal he signed the previous winter. “And when you don’t show up, and you don’t produce and get kicked out like this in the regular season, that’s a big failure right there.”
The Yankees did not sustain that kind of failure this year.
They’re in the playoffs. They get to take their shot.
That achievement isn’t worthy of the ultimate celebration.
But it’s not unworthy of celebration of some kind.
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.
