David Ortiz didn’t need a Yankees uniform to identify what he thinks is gone from the Bronx.
After New York was swept out of the ALDS by the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-3, on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium, Ortiz said the issue goes beyond one bad series. In his view, the missing piece is bigger than lineup construction or one rough night in the field.
“Look, I never played for the Yankees but I competed a lot against the Yankees,” Ortiz told Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Kevin Burkhardt on Fox. “And there’s one thing that I can see missing from the Yankees, and it’s the culture.
“There’s a lot of little things that in the long run, they start catching up. And those things never happened when you guys were there.
“They need to start paying attention to those little things because you need to have that one player in the clubhouse that gets those things put away.”
Ortiz then turned directly to Jeter and Rodriguez.
“I know you used to do that,” he said to Jeter.
“You used to do that,” he added, pointing to Rodriguez.
For Ortiz, who won three World Series titles in Boston, the Yankees are drifting from the standard that once defined them.
“That organization need to go back into it because at the end of the day, yeah the game has changed a lot, there’s a lot of different things going on with the game,” Ortiz said. “But the culture [is] always going to be the culture, and they are far away from being where they used to be culture-wise.”
Ortiz did not specifically call out the four errors the Yankees committed in Game 2, or Rodriguez’s observation that New York had questions at “five positions” in the series. But both of those points came up in the discussion.
Rodriguez also contrasted the Yankees’ payroll, which was north of $300 million, with Tampa Bay’s $110 million figure. His takeaway was that the Rays simply do the important things better.
“They do everything well,” he said. “They pitch, they defend, timely hitting, great character, little things. And yes, they’re last in home runs, but they’re [in] first place.
“So there’s something there. And I think there’s something there where there’s a counter money-ball..that if you go against the market, you go against the consensus, you land where the Rays and the Brewers are today.”
Those two teams are still alive. The Yankees are not, and they still haven’t won a title since 2009.
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