Michael Kay wants Aaron Judge to spell it out.
After Judge called on the Yankees to go “all in” following their ALDS sweep at the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays, Kay questioned what, exactly, that would look like for a team that already carried one of the biggest payrolls in baseball.
“What more could the Yankees be doing to go ‘all in’ on winning?” Judge asked reporters after the loss.
He added, “We’re the Yankees,” and said the club should “go all in and do what they need to do. If we’ve got holes, if it’s finding certain players or personnel, whatever we need, you got to go out there and get it.
“That’s why I signed back here to play with the Yankees, is to fight for a championship every single year and to go all in....and so I expect them to do the same.”
According to Spotrac, the Yankees had a total adjusted payroll of $308,336,780 this season, a figure topped only by the Mets and Dodgers.
From Kay’s point of view, that makes Judge’s criticism hard to square with reality.
“That’s the one that confuses me the most. What have they not done that would indicate that they’re all in?”
he said Monday on his radio show. “And if I owned the Yankees and I had a $330 million payroll, and my most important player, the face of my franchise, said that we’ve got to go all in, I would be on the phone with that player and go, what does that mean?
“Do you think I’m going to have a $480 million payroll like the Dodgers? … No other team, not even Steve Cohen’s Mets, would ever get to a $480 million payroll.
So when you’re saying all in, what does that mean? Who have the Yankees passed up on?
Who have they passed up on?
“I mean, they offered Juan Soto $50 million a year for 16 years. So they didn’t go cheap on that. That’s the one that really hurts.”
Kay also pointed to the Yankees’ pursuit of Dodgers stars Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani as further evidence that the organization had made aggressive moves, even if both players landed elsewhere.
“Rizzo and Judge are inseparable, they are very close...so when he criticized what’s going on with the Yankees,” Kay said, “you wonder how much of that came from Judge.”
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