The New York Yankees’ Season Is Over And the Future Doesn’t Look Good

New York Yankees

Anthony Gruppuso-USA TODAY Sports

At approximately 12:13 a.m. EST, the New York Yankees‘ season ended with a 5-4 loss in extra-innings, after twice being a strike away of capturing the win in the ninth and 12th innings, before twice blowing the opportunity, suffering what could easily be described as the Yankees’ worst loss of the season.

It’s safe to say that the Yankees are no longer a playoff team, and might not have been for quite some time now, but if anything, it’s official. The Yankees are 11.5 game back in the AL East, seven games back of the second wild card, and are likely to miss the playoffs for only the second time since 1993.

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Even worse, the Yankees are only a game above .500, with the red-hot Detroit Tigers coming to the Bronx this weekend — Derek Jeter has never experienced a losing-season, and this could be the first.

For most teams, when they are deemed to be out of playoff contention, they start to look forward to next season, planning and preparing for another chance in a new year. But the problem is much bigger than just a one-year fix for the Yankees; they’re in major trouble for the next couple of years.

There’s nothing special about this year’s roster and the 2014 Yankees might only be worst, if not the same. If Robinson Cano leaves, the Yankees are a last place team. If he stays, then you have Jeter, who’s another year older, Mark Teixeira, with questions surrounding his wrist, another year of old Ichiro, no Mariano Rivera and then maybe Andy Pettitte and Hiroki Kuroda come back for another year.

Alex Rodriguez is likely to be suspended for the entire 2014 season, and for the time, there’s nobody in line to replace him long-term, which brings me to the Yankees’ farm system — it’s bad.

The Yankees have nothing to look forward to within the next few years — unless you’re a fan of pitching, because that pretty much is all the Yankees have that’s close to major league ready.

All those years of going after the big-money free-agents and trading away all the prospects in order to get back the big names have finally caught up to the Yankees. While reducing payroll is part of the plan, using players within the system isn’t going to help the plan in any way imaginable.

Start getting used to the fact that until 2015, at the earliest, the Yankees won’t be a playoff team. Start getting used to using a word that Yankees fans have rarely every used before – rebuilding.

The Yankees are filled with a bunch of old, aging veterans that don’t have a lot of fight left in them. And the younger players on the team, they don’t have a lot of talent in them. The Yankees are going nowhere, and they’re getting there pretty fast.

189 isn’t just the payroll number that the Yankees ownership will like the team to be under by 2014, it’s the number of losses that the Yankees might suffer from now until the end of next season. While the Yankees might be going nowhere, they are heading in a certain direction, and it’s not up.

Gavin Ewbank is a Yankees writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow @GavinEwbank2013 on Twitter for more Yankees talk.

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