Yankees experiencing worst losing streak in 28 years

Even if they do not always win the World Series -- or even reach it -- the New York Yankees almost always give their fans a competitive team. 

A winning record and a playoff appearance is the absolute bare minimum expectation, and sometimes even that is not enough to satisfy one of the most intense and demanding fan bases in professional sports. 

That is why the 2023 season has turned into such a nightmare, and it only keeps getting worse. The Yankees aren't even giving their fans the bare minimum. 

Not only are the Yankees four games under .500 after being swept by their arch-rival Boston Red Sox on Sunday and potentially headed toward their first losing season since 1992, Sunday's loss also extended their current losing streak to eight games.

That is a streak the Yankees have not experienced in nearly 30 years.

You have to go all the way back to August of 1995 to find the last time the Yankees lost eight games in a row.

As bad as that stretch was, the Yankees were still able to make the playoffs that season and were one year away from winning the World Series. The 1995 season was a launching pad for the Core Four era of Yankees baseball where Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada would help the team reach six World Series (and win four of them) over the next decade.

This season will not be a similar launching pad. 

The Yankees do not have the type of young, up-and-coming talent that the 1995 team did, and won't even have a playoff berth to show for it. This is a bad team on the decline that is short on impact players outside of Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole. It has aging players with big contracts that are no longer productive (Anthony Rizzo, Giancarlo Stanton), and is almost entirely dependent on Judge being fully healthy and being able to carry the team. 

It is a team that is in dire need of re-tooling, from the roster to the front office responsible for building it. If things do not dramatically turn around over the next month-and-a-half, it might be a ground-up rebuild for the Yankees.