The Yankees didn’t do anything Monday in Minnesota that anyone around baseball didn’t already expect. That’s exactly why the post-clincher champagne scene felt so overdone.
New York entered the season as the heavy favorite to win the pennant and get back to the World Series for the second time in three years. The summer has been solid, even good, but not nearly as overpowering as the oddsmakers thought it would be.
Injuries have piled up. The offense has disappeared for long stretches.
And, once again, the first-place Rays have looked smarter and tougher.
Still, this wasn’t some dramatic rescue mission. Nobody seriously thought the Yankees were missing the playoffs.
The American League has been weak enough, and the third wild card spot generous enough, to keep a club like this comfortably inside the bracket. That’s part of the problem commissioner Rob Manfred has created with a 12-team field: it turns strong, well-financed teams into October certainties and makes ordinary playoff berths feel bigger than they are.
So when the Yankees popped Dom Pérignon after sealing the spot, it read more like theater than triumph. Goggles, plastic over the lockers, champagne everywhere - the whole thing had the feel of a production, not a breakthrough. For a $300 million club, it was a celebration of the expected.
Aaron Judge did address his teammates in the clubhouse, and the moment would have landed better if the mood had been more restrained. “It begins now,” is how the captain’s ideal speech would’ve begun.
Because the real work is still ahead. The Yankees have the Red Sox in the Wild Card Series, and a likely Division Series meeting with Tampa Bay after that, with the Rays holding homefield advantage. If they get through that, then the champagne would make a lot more sense.
There’s a cleaner model for this kind of thing, and the Yankees have already seen it in town. The Knicks moved past the Hawks, 76ers and Cavaliers on their way to the NBA Finals without celebrating, then finally let loose after beating the Spurs in five games.
That was a real release, the kind that sweeps through a city. This wasn’t that.
New York fans will party with the Yankees whenever the time comes. It’s still their town, and the Yankees have been more important than the Mets since the 1980s.
But celebrating a playoff berth like this sends the wrong message. It makes a Wild Card spot look like an accomplishment in itself.
It isn’t. The Yankees have made the postseason 27 times since 1996.
The harder truth is that they couldn’t catch the Rays over the final 3.5 months, and Tampa Bay’s toughness earned the division champ a crucial first-round bye. That’s the backdrop for Aaron Boone now.
In the best version of this roster, the Yankees are better than the Rays. Judge would be healthy, with his rib healed and no issue with his right calf.
Friday should tell us more about that. Gerrit Cole would also be closer to his midsummer form, before the effects of Tommy John surgery started to show up.
But Cole has now allowed seven home runs in his last two starts, and it’s fair to wonder whether that’s a temporary dip or the sign of a pitcher who has already spent his best ammunition for 2026.
Boone and Brian Cashman have to be asking the same question about Judge, who left Wednesday night’s game against the Twins with the leg injury. Can he get all the way back to 100% before 2027? The rush to recover from the fractured rib may have simply run out of time.
The same concern hangs over Cole in a short series. Can the Yankees count on him there?
This is not one of those Yankees teams that belongs in the history books. It isn’t that kind of group. But even compromised, it still has enough talent to get through the first round.
That’s why the champagne shower on Monday kept nagging at the wrong instinct.
What exactly was being celebrated?
David Cone, now one of YES Network’s top analysts, gave the clearest answer. On the New York Post’s weekly podcast with Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman, Cone said the spraying was driven by the fact that “YES needs content.”
“We’re in the entertainment business.”
And that’s the whole point. It was made for the cameras. It was all spectacle.
The old Yankee standard would have frowned on it. And yes, everybody knows that.
There will be enough champagne if the Yankees keep advancing through the next four rounds - Wild Card, Division Series, League Championship Series and World Series. That’s when it would mean something. That’s when a parade in lower Manhattan would be worth every drop.
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