NEW YORK – The end came not abruptly, but inevitably, another desultory loss that’s become customary for a New York Yankees team that just three months ago was peerless but now enters yet another winter unmoored and unsure of the future.
The devil was not in the details on a grim Sunday night at Yankee Stadium, when the Houston Astros completed their four-game sweep of the Yankees with a 6-5 rain-delayed victory that capped a third American League Championship Series conquest of the Bombers in six years.
The Astros are the undisputed kings of the AL, more often using the Yankees as their steppingstone since 2017, and now the Yankees’ pennant-less streak stretches 13 years, a span in which seven AL teams have reached the Fall Classic.
So begins months that will include a postmortem during which club officials will “take accountability.” There will be a laborious dissection of manager Aaron Boone’s maneuvering and a deliberation on his clubhouse viability. And there will be the unsettling notion of Aaron Judge: Free agent.
That process that should culminate with him receiving a contract that begins with a 3 followed by many zeros, providing a marquee attraction for the club’s TV network, a reason for suiteholders to show up, and perhaps even a C on the No. 99 jersey, as teammate Nestor Cortes suggested.
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Yet all the…
