Hal Steinbrenner doesn’t think Yankees have defensive issues

The Yankees publicly are on the same page: Hal Steinbrenner, like Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone before him, said that issues with the club’s fundamentals did not hover over the team all season.

The 2024 Yankees were undone in a sloppy World Series with both baserunning mistakes and, most notably, three defensive miscues in the fifth inning of the deciding Game 5 against the Dodgers. Cashman and Boone have argued the Yankees played a poor series in an otherwise sound season, and Steinbrenner said the same.

“We did not play a clean World Series, I think we all know that,” Steinbrenner said Wednesday at the Owners Meetings in Midtown. “But those fundamentals got us to the World Series. Our play, for the most part, was solid during the course of the year. That’s why we won a pennant for the first time in 15 years.

“But no doubt in the World Series, they just played better than us, period.”

Several Dodgers players have said in post-series interviews that they were waiting for the Yankees to make mistakes. Injured reliever Joe Kelly was the loudest, saying the Dodgers were “saying every single game: ‘Just let them throw the ball into the infield, they can’t make a play.’ ”

The Yankees were rated as the worst baserunning team in baseball by FanGraphs. Several advanced analytics ranked them in the middle or slightly above average defensively, but they certainly had a poor series and a poor Game 5.