Hour 1: Stop Rewarding Losing

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Michael Kay (0:34)

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Michael Kay (0:41)

And a good afternoon, everybody. This is indeed The Michael Kay Show. We thank you for joining us on this Friday. It is October 9th, 2026, me and you for two. Those are the rules of engagement. It's the fastest moving two hours in sports talk radio, and that's because of you, my great co-host and the membership number. The admission number is 1-800-919-3776, and making this an even more spectacular show is Friday, which means it's a free for all Friday, which means you can ask me anything you want. Anything you want. I am here to answer it all. 1-800-919-3776. Yes, it is a big football Friday. You know that, but we're going to talk about a lot more than just football, and we start off with some postmortem regarding the Yankees, more Yankee fallout. Fans are very, very angry right now. You could see it on anti-social media. You could see it obviously in the newspapers. You can feel it on this show and hear it on this show with the people that call in, and you do have to wonder at what point do fans move the needle? Because fans in sports, it's an interesting dichotomy because fans are the customer. So if fans are angry about a certain pizzeria, they don't like the pizza, what they do is they don't end up buying the pizza anywhere. They don't go there. The great thing about Yankee fans is they, and most fans of all teams, they love their team and they stay with their team through good and bad. But there seems to be a white hot dissatisfaction that's going on right now. And you do wonder when does it affect the decision making? Or does it ever affect the decision making? You know, the old cliché is if you do what the fans want you to do, you'll be sitting with the fans. Now, to an extent, that's true. But as I keep coming back to, fans are also the customer. They're not just this fungible thing that you can totally ignore because if you totally ignore them, then there could come a point where they start to ignore you and that affects the bottom line. Now, I don't know whether or not that's the point we're at right now. I think that anytime a team gets eliminated in any sport, their fan base is indeed angry and dissatisfied. After 17 years of not winning a championship on a franchise that has 27 championships far and away the most of any team in America, in any sport, 17 years is an awful long time. An awful long time. They've been there before. After 1978, the Yankees didn't win again until 1996 So that was a long haul. And people say, well, the barren times of the 80s. Well, that wasn't as barren as you think. Yankees had good teams all the time, incomplete teams, usually really good offensive teams that couldn't get the pitching that they needed. And there was no wild card in the 80s. Because if there was a wild card in the 80s, they would have probably made the playoffs every single year. And then who knows, would they have scratched out another championship? We'll never know because there wasn't a wild card. But right now, you see there's polls in the New York Post that overwhelmingly fans that participated in the poll want Boone gone, they want Cashman gone. How much of it gets to the ears of Hal Steinbrenner? And obviously, the Yankees have an incredibly astute media relations department. And anything that's said on radio or television or written online or written in newspapers, it is relayed and put on the desk of everybody that should be knowing that stuff. So I don't think it goes unnoticed whether Hal is here in New York or whether he's at home in Tampa. He's very well aware of what's going on. But what becomes the tipping point?

Because people say his father would not have allowed this to go on this long without a championship. Well, he did from 78 to 96 Now, in a couple of those years he was suspended, but he did. Now, he didn't let it go on per se without doing anything. He changed managers all the time, changed general managers all the time, brought players in and out. Now, you could say that change is good, but back then it wasn't good, right? It didn't come back and get them a championship. But I think that the chum that you sometimes throw to the masses is some kind of change that we're not satisfied with the way this is going. That's why this is a dangerous inflection point. For the Yankees, because if they don't do anything, then you are telling the fans, we're very satisfied with the way things are going. And maybe they are, because as I've said over and over again, every year they are certainly considered one of the favorites in baseball to go to the World Series. Every single year, doesn't happen, but every single year at the beginning, they build a team that the experts in Vegas thinks, you know what, they got a chance. And at the start of the postseason, Vegas had them as the favorite to go to the World Series out of the American League. Didn't happen. But again, we don't know exactly what curve everything is being graded on. Is it the chance to win a World Series? Is that enough? Now you should say it shouldn't be enough. Okay, and I hear what you're saying. But for other teams, it is enough. And has the paradigm shifted?