So, my month at the Stadium is over.

What can I tell you? It didn’t work out quite the way I had anticipated it when I accepted the commission at the beginning of the season.

Then the Yankees looked like one of the strongest, if not the strongest team in Major League Baseball. I would have ranked them alongside the Atlanta Braves as the strongest team in the majors

I would have confidently argued for those two teams to have a real good chance of facing each other in the World Series. Obviously, the playoffs are always a gamble, but the New York team didn’t even get to that stage…

How did it go so wrong?

Well, I figure that the top and the bottom of it is injuries. Obviously there were some important players who massively underperformed – stand up now Giancarlo Stanton and Carlos Rodon amongst others. But mostly it was the injuries, whatever Mr Steinbrenner and Mr Cashman might have us believe.

And really there is nothing you can do about the number of injuries the Yankees had to bear other than wait for the players to recover.

During this month of September, with most players now available, the Yankees have gone 17-10. If they had performed like this every 27 games, they would have come home with over a hundred wins on their record at the end of the season. That would have made them division winners – and all talk of a “disaster” of a season would have been silenced. Obviously, this is all conjecture, and the playoffs would still have been a lottery.

Also obviously, The Yankees performance in September was much better on the road than at the Stadium. It is difficult to perform when you feel your fanbase are against you, your manager and your general manager – whatever you feel yourself.

Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole excelled in the September home games. The young guns (Austin Wells, Everson Pereira, Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez – and those who had arrived earlier like Anthony Volpe, Oswald Peraza, Estevan Florial etc) had a very mixed time of it.

The massive amount of injuries meant that they had makeweight players appearing in-and-out of position. It wasn’t good. We would like to think that we wouldn’t have to see Giancarlo Stanton back again – and perhaps Carlos Rodon and Frankie Montas.

A restocked outfield is necessary, and some new faces in the rotation too.

These things may or not happen, but the Yankees showed courage in cutting players like Aaron Hicks and Josh Donaldson. More of that courage will be required if the Yankees brass are to deliver what these sometimes unreasonable fans require.

We’ll see what happens. And I hope to be back next season to give you an account of it all.