After a season that fell short of expectations, CC Sabathia critiques the New York Yankees’ roster build, saying the team needs more speed and contact.
After making a run to the World Series last year, the New York Yankees entered this season with high expectations. Despite losing Juan Soto to the crosstown Mets and ace Gerrit Cole to Tommy John surgery before the season even started, the Bronx Bombers were still expected to be a World Series contender after signing players like Max Fried and Paul Goldschmidt and trading for players like Devin Williams and Cody Bellinger to help round out the roster.
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But even after all those moves to help make up for the losses, former Yankees ace CC Sabathia wasn’t quite convinced of the construction.
“I don’t feel like we’ve really put a good roster together, where speed, power, contact, we’ve been kind of stagnant in that way,” Sabathia said on the latest episode of Network with Rich Kleiman. “We have Jazz Chisholm and Volpe, and that can now run the bases. But leading up to this year, we would need three base hits to get a run scored just because of all the DH kind of guys we had on the roster. So I would love to see them kind of address that, give us a little more speed and contact, because we have plenty of power.”
As New York enters the offseason, there’s much that needs to be addressed, including whether or not the team wants to bring back Aaron Boone, who has been the manager in December 2017. Ironically, Sabathia feels the team has been stuck in a limbo pattern since.
“I just feel like since 2017, we came so close in ’17 with a team that probably really shouldn’t have been in the ALCS,” he told Kleiman. “It was a young Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, that team was so young. And we kind of overperformed and got to the ALCS, I feel like we’ve been chasing that ever since then.”
Be sure to catch the full conversation between Sabathia and Kleiman at Boardroom’s YouTube channel here, as well as on Yahoo Sports’ Apple and Spotify pages.
