The broad outline you already know. The Yankees went 94-68 for the second straight year, tied the Blue Jays for the best record in the American League, and settled for the Wild Card route because Toronto owned the head to head tiebreaker. They beat the Red Sox in a three game Wild Card Series, then lost the ALDS to the Jays 3-1 and watched Toronto celebrate an ALCS berth on the Yankee Stadium infield.
On paper, it looks like a strong season that ended a little too soon. Living through it day to day, it felt a lot wilder than that. There were weeks where the Yankees looked like a superteam and weeks where they could not buy a run.
When I look back now, five turning points jump out. These were the days and stretches where the story of the 2025 Yankees really swung, whether we realized it in real time or not.
Turning Point 1: Gerrit Cole’s Elbow Changes Everything
Before a single pitch of the regular season, the entire shape of 2025 changed with one announcement. In mid March, the Yankees confirmed that Gerrit Cole would undergo Tommy John surgery on his right elbow and miss the entire season.
I remember seeing the alert on my phone and just staring at it for a second. This was supposed to be the year of the Cole and Max Fried duo, the two headed monster at the top of the rotation that made every five game series feel like a coin flip at worst. Suddenly, the Cy Young winner was gone until at least mid 2026.
In the moment, I tried to talk myself into the silver lining. The Yankees had just signed Fried to that massive eight year deal. Carlos Rodón was still here. Luis Gil, Clarke Schmidt and a wave of young arms were in the pipeline. Maybe this was the season the depth showed up.
Looking back, this was the first big turn of the year. Fried really did pitch like an ace and the rotation was good enough to help the team to a plus 164 run differential, but Cole’s absence hung over everything. Every time a series got tight, I found myself thinking about how different it would feel if the Yankees could just line him up for Game 1 and Game 5.
This was the moment the Yankees went from “complete juggernaut on paper” to “great team with a very loud question mark.”
Turning Point 2: Thirty Scoreless Innings In June
The second turning point felt less like a moment and more like a slow motion car wreck.
In mid June, the offense simply stopped. The Yankees were shut out three straight games, watched their scoreless streak reach 29 innings, then 30, and dropped six straight games during a miserable home stand that included back to back punchless efforts against the Angels. Jazz Chisholm Jr. finally ended the drought with a home run down the right field line, but the Yankees still lost 3-2.
As a fan, it was surreal. This was a lineup that would finish the season leading all of baseball in runs scored, sitting on 849 total of them, and for four days they could not push anyone across home plate. You could hear it in Michael Kay’s voice on the broadcasts and in the way the Stadium crowds reacted to every weak grounder. It felt like we had jumped back to one of those dead bat stretches from the early 2020s.
In the moment, it was easy to write off as a weird blip in a long season. Looking back, this was the first alarm bell that something about this great offense was still fragile. The Yankees would finish first in runs and home runs, but June reminded us that when the power goes quiet and pitchers refuse to give in, this group can struggle to manufacture anything.
This stretch also kicked off what Hal Steinbrenner later described as a “six to seven week” slump where the Yankees played sloppy, uninspired baseball and saw a comfortable spot at the top of the division evaporate. You could argue the division was lost right here, not in the first week of October.
Turning Point 3: Red Sox Embarrassment In Late August
If June was the silent panic, late August was the full blown crisis.
By the time the Yankees rolled into that four game series against Boston in the Bronx, the slump had already been a storyline for weeks. The Red Sox then took that storyline, lit it on fire, and held it up in front of the whole baseball world.
Boston beat the Yankees eight straight times in 2025, including three blowouts in that August series. They outscored New York 19-4 in the first three games of the set, had a chance to sweep four in Yankee Stadium for the first time since 1939, and pushed the season series to a brutal 1-8 from the Yankees’ perspective before New York finally salvaged a game behind Trent Grisham and Jazz going deep.
I remember that week most for the feeling. The offense looked flat. The defense looked shaky. Aaron Boone’s seat felt like it was on fire every night. My Yankees group chats were in full meltdown mode.
In hindsight, this was the stretch that turned frustration into full blown doubt. It was one thing to struggle for a couple of weeks. It was another to get completely owned by Boston while the division lead slipped and the Blue Jays quietly kept banking wins.
When Hal referenced that six to seven week slump after the season, this is what he was talking about. This was the low point of the year, and it is hard not to see it as a major reason the Yankees ended up tied with Toronto instead of comfortably ahead of them.
Turning Point 4: Jazz, The Final Sprint, And A Tied Division
The fourth turning point is the part of the movie where the hero gets up off the mat and starts swinging again.
After the Boston embarrassment, the Yankees did not fold. They slowly found their footing, then erupted late. Starting in late September, they ripped off eight straight wins to close the regular season and finish 94-68, exactly matching their 2024 record and drawing even with the Blue Jays in the standings.
I think about that last week a lot. The team that had looked unwatchable at times in June and August suddenly played like the group we all thought we would see in March. The lineup was relentless. The pitching stabilized. Every night felt like a must win and the Yankees played with that urgent, locked in energy that had been missing in the middle of the year.
Right in the middle of that push, Jazz Chisholm Jr. launched his 30th homer of the season and joined the 30-30 club, becoming only the third Yankee ever to do it. It felt like a symbol of the bigger story. The front office’s bet on more athleticism and more dynamic bats was paying off. Jazz looked like a real star in the Bronx, not just a fun experiment.
In real time, that closing kick felt like proof that the Yankees were something more than a mirage. They had seen their worst and still climbed back to the top of the league. With the way they finished, it was easy to convince yourself that they were rolling into October as dangerous as anyone.
The cruel part, of course, is that the math did not care about momentum. The Blue Jays had the head to head tiebreaker, so Toronto got the bye and the division title and the Yankees got a Wild Card date with Boston. The eight game win streak was both a turning point and a reminder that the earlier slump had real consequences.
Turning Point 5: A Wild Card High And An ALDS Crash
The final turning point is really a combo of two October nights that sit about as far apart emotionally as you can get.
First came the high. In the deciding Game 3 of the Wild Card Series, rookie right hander Cam Schlittler took the ball against the Red Sox and delivered one of the best postseason debuts any Yankee starter has ever had. Eight scoreless innings, 12 strikeouts, no walks, and a 4-0 win that sent Boston home and pushed the Yankees into the Division Series.
As a fan, this was pure joy. A young pitcher mowing down the Red Sox in October at Yankee Stadium, the crowd losing its mind, the ghosts all firmly on our side for a night. It felt like a turning of the page, the kind of performance that makes you believe a run is brewing.
Then Toronto happened.
The Blue Jays pummeled Yankees pitching in Games 1 and 2, scoring 23 runs in the first two games of the ALDS and turning both nights into long, loud reminders that this staff is still a couple of arms short of where it needs to be. The Yankees clawed back in Game 3 behind Aaron Judge’s heroics to win 9-6 and avoid a sweep, but Game 4 at the Stadium was a 5-2 loss where eight Toronto pitchers tag teamed the lineup and closed the book on the series.
Across four games, the Jays outscored the Yankees 34-19 and advanced to the ALCS for the first time since 2016. The Yankees were done in the Division Series again.
In real time, it felt like whiplash. One night I was riding the high of Schlittler carving up Boston and thinking this might be the start of something special. A week later, I was watching Blue Jays players celebrating on the infield and wondering how many times we are going to live this same script with slightly different details.
From a turning point perspective, this is the moment where the season’s contradictions all crashed into each other. The high ceiling was real. So were the flaws that kept the Yankees from reaching it when it mattered most.
What These Turning Points Told Me About The 2025 Yankees
When I put these five moments side by side, a pretty clear picture of the 2025 Yankees emerges.
This was a very good team that got hit hard by a major injury, rode wild swings in performance, and ultimately ended up in the exact same place as the year before, just by a different route.
Cole’s surgery showed how fragile the whole operation still is at the top of the rotation. The June scoreless streak and August disaster against Boston exposed how dependent the offense remains on power and how quickly things can spiral when the lineup presses. The September surge and Jazz’s 30-30 season proved that the talent level is absolutely high enough to be a legitimate contender. Schlittler’s Wild Card masterpiece and the collapse against Toronto in the ALDS hammered home that the gap between “very good” and “built for October” is still there.
To me, these turning points say the 2025 season was neither a pure step forward nor a total mirage. It was a loud, messy, complicated year where the Yankees made some real progress, left some old problems unsolved, and ran into a divisional rival that was simply better configured for the kind of baseball you have to play in October.
The next step has to be turning those lessons into action. That means adding real pitching depth so a couple of bad starts do not send everything into chaos. It means continuing to lean into athleticism and contact at the bottom of the lineup instead of just hoping the stars can slug their way through every crisis. It means treating defense and base running as part of the core identity, not bonus features.
Most of all, it means trying to make sure that the big turning points of 2026 tilt toward the Yankees instead of away from them.
