Traditionally, there were two unbreakable tenets of the sport informally known as our national pastime.

There is no crying in baseball.

There is no rebuilding in the Bronx.

Though the Toronto Blue Jays just obliterated that first tenet, the New York Yankees are not about to rage against the second one.

Rebuild?

“I would recommend one if it was warranted,” Brian Cashman maintained Monday by phone.

But no, in the wake of an epic World Series that did not include his team, the Yankees’ general manager does not believe one is warranted.

“There’s no indication that is something that should be considered,” Cashman said. “We have a farm system that is producing. We have quality major leaguers winning MVPs and potentially getting Cy Young Award votes, and we have the best record in the American League (tied with Toronto at 94-68), and we have Gerrit Cole coming back, along with other guys. I don’t understand how a rebuild could even be considered.”

I don’t either. After Cashman interrupted the 2025 season by adding speed, athleticism, defense, base running, lineup flexibility and bullpen help to the club’s lethal home run power, I wrote that the Yankees had no excuse not to win the whole thing. They had all kinds of big pieces … until Toronto left them in a million little pieces in the Division Series.

TORONTO ON TOP 😤

The Blue Jays eliminate the Yankees and move on to the ALCS ‼️ pic.twitter.com/dxSZykCgke

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 9, 2025

The Yankees didn’t just fail to land a World Series rematch with a Dodgers team that had humiliated them on multiple levels in 2024. The Blue Jays outscored them by 15 runs over four games and stopped the Yanks from even reaching the ALCS.

“They dominated us in the regular season and the postseason,” Cashman said. They sure did. And if the Yankees had somehow advanced to the World Series for a second straight year, the Dodgers would have beaten them for a second straight year.

So what to do now that Aaron Boone is returning for a ninth season, right after his eighth and self-proclaimed best team face-planted in its pursuit of the franchise’s first championship since 2009? Cashman said he wanted to stay “vague” on the areas of weakness he wants to attack – why publicly identify those areas and lose leverage in trade and free-agent negotiations? But a plausible scenario has the Yankees signing Kyle Tucker – a better player than a very good outfielder himself, Cody Bellinger – and finding a contact hitter or two who can do a spot-on Ernie Clement impersonation when it matters most.

The Yankees had the third-most strikeouts in baseball (1,463), so they need additional swing-and-hit batters more than they need additional swing-and-miss pitchers. At the same time, they led the majors in home runs (274) at a time when October power equals October success. The Blue Jays and Dodgers combined for 52 homers in 35 postseason games.

“One thing we always fight is that we rely too much on the home run,” Cashman said. “But the team that out-homers the other team always moves on in the postseason, and that’s a fact. You also need contact. You need it all.”

In a different life, Cashman built teams that had it all. Great homegrown talent. Winning veterans and free agents acquired in perfectly timed deals. He was George Steinbrenner’s assistant GM for the 1996 title, the lower-case boss for the Joe Torre-Derek Jeter-Mariano Rivera three-peat from 1998 to 2000, and the Cash-man behind the 2009 free-agent spending spree that won the franchise’s last crown.

Of greatest consequence that offseason, the GM gave the affable CC Sabathia a seven-year, $161 million contract to fix a clubhouse culture compromised by the tension between Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. The same two Fox analysts who criticized Cashman last month after the Yankees’ elimination.

Despite earlier picking the Yanks to win it all, Rodriguez called the GM’s work “one of the worst constructions of a roster I’ve ever seen.” Cashman punched back with conviction, something he’s been doing to his critics for more than a quarter century.

But for the past 16 years, the critics have responded with an effective counterpunch: the failure to win that 28th World Series title. And Boone wasn’t the only significant Yankee figure who thought the 2025 team – without Cole and Juan Soto – was better than the 2024 team that won the American League pennant.

“I knew we had a championship-caliber contender, but it’s a prizefight,” Cashman said. “Your champion is going up against another champion, and you’re in a cage fight. It’s kill or be killed, survival of the fittest.”

The Yankees weren’t the fittest.

“We had a better record than the Dodgers did … but in the postseason we didn’t play to the best of our abilities,” Cashman said. “No matter what, every year we’ve got to find a way to make our team bigger, better and stronger than it was the year before.

“Our intent is to always try to win the World Series.”

It would be nice to win one before Aaron Judge is too old to enjoy it.

Judge turns 34 in April. He’s the favorite to win the AL MVP award for the third time in the last four years, and yet a safe bet says Judge would trade multiple individual honors for the one championship ring that would spare him a lifetime of reminders about never winning The Big One, as silly as that label is for a baseball star who has far less control over the outcome than does a quarterback or small forward.

In a different sport, Judge would make for a compelling talk-radio conversation around the possibility of persuading him to waive his no-trade clause. I mean, if Mikal Bridges was worth five first-round draft choices, what would Aaron Judge be worth?

But MLB allows only competitive balance picks to be traded. Even if Judge played along, the Yankees couldn’t trade him to the Minnesota Twins for the kind of Herschel Walker deal the Dallas Cowboys famously made with the Minnesota Vikings in 1989 for the Vikes’ next three first-round picks, next three second-round picks and a Dallas dynasty to be named later.

The Yankees always keep their cherished icons in pinstripes, even those in decline, from Don Mattingly to Jeter to Rivera to, eventually, Judge. The slugger finally grabbed an October by the throat, only to have a relatively reliable postseason presence during his struggles, Giancarlo Stanton, lose his way.

“But I think it all comes down to pitching in October,” Torre said.

And the Yankees’ pitching completely broke down.

“The other thing I noticed in the postseason,” Torre, four-time champ, said in a recent conversation with The Athletic, “is the importance of putting the ball in play. The Yankees led the world in home runs, but contact is so important. That’s where I have disagreements with some analytic people who talk about strikeouts being the same as groundouts. Sorry, they’re not (the same) with a man at second base and nobody out. A groundball is pretty successful there.”

Torre was asked if it was possible for today’s Yankees to replicate the team-centric program he ran during his five trips to the World Series from 1996 to 2001.

“People say good chemistry wins in the playoffs,” he said. “I actually think winning creates chemistry. I don’t think it’s the other way around.”

If winning is the egg before the chemistry chicken, well, the Yankees have ripped off 33 consecutive winning seasons, with five parades to show for it. That’s a remarkable run in a market where the primary basketball tenant hasn’t won a championship since 1973, the primary hockey tenant hasn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1994, and the two football tenants might throw their own ticker-tape bash if they can ever get to 6-11. Go tell a Jets fan who’s been waiting for a Super Bowl appearance since January 1969 that things have gone south in the Bronx.

In the end, the Yankees are a Broadway product at Broadway prices, making it next-to-impossible to ever conduct a legitimate rebuild. And besides, with three wild-card berths available these days, it’s too tempting for the Yanks to take their chances during a disappointing summer and hope they get hot in the tournament.

“I did do it once and we were very successful at rebuilding on the run,” Cashman said of his in-season 2016 selloffs that preceded the temporary rise of the Baby Bombers and the 2017 run to Game 7 of the ALCS.

“But that’s not where today’s roster sits.”

The Yankees have no choice but to stay the course and hope they run into a better outcome. They are always winning too many games to find their next stars at the top of the first round, and it should be noted that Judge, at pick No. 32 in 2013, goes down as an all-time draft choice.

Just as it should be noted that, at pick No. 30 in 2019, the Yankees couldn’t afford to draft Anthony Volpe over Gunnar Henderson.

They say the draft is just like the postseason – a crapshoot – though the Yankees weren’t saying that much when they were dominating October. They have several hurdles to overcome now, most notably Toronto’s blueprint and the Dodgers’ ability to attract talent from all over the world.

“We hope our strengths remain our strengths,” Cashman said, “and we’ll go to town to improve upon our weaknesses.”

It’s the only game the Yankees can play. From here to eternity.