How the 99 Burger explains this Yankees season

The Yankees have lost their way, just like the 99 Burger they serve.

I’m in left field, section 223, and it’s an hour before the 1 p.m. start of the 99th game of the New York Yankees’ season in the South Bronx. It has been alternately sweltering and pouring in the city over the past month, two types of shitty weather that suggest the grim and apocalyptic future the sun and sea level have in store for this coastal island. Today it’s the former, 87 degree heat with 55% humidity in a mercilessly cloudless sky. These sorts of fatalistic, angry, and unproductive thoughts are oddly appropriate as I stand in a long line, in the otherwise empty stadium of this last place AL East team, waiting, along with many others, for the privilege of spending $20 on a concession stand cheeseburger.

I have made this journey, and suffer this line, seeking not “just” a burger I could get anywhere in this vast city of burgers, but answers, a metaphor in sandwich form.

Just last week, this Yankees team became the first since 1990 to find themselves in last place in their division this late in the season. The team is not terrible, just above .500 (about the mark they’ve played at over their last 200 games), which would be good for first in the AL Central and second or third in several other divisions, but they play in the most competitive division in baseball, and they’re the Yankees. I will be complaining about this franchise quite a bit in this piece, so I’d like to make something clear at the outset: I am not expecting, nor asking for any rubbernecking reader to feel sorry for the plight of the 2023 Yankees fan. They’re not just the most successful professional sports franchise of all the “major” leagues in American history, they’ve been wildly successful in my lifetime, the first decade plus of which I spent rooting for Don Mattingly and a bunch of scrubs, convinced the team would never return to greatness, then elated when I was proven wrong.

No, what matters is how the specific, cynical manner in which the Yankees have begun to degrade their roots, their history, their team philosophy, and their fans, closely mirrors the manner in which everything in this country, and everything on Earth, is getting incrementally worse, and intentionally made worse by a few either dumb or evil or both very wealthy people, for no reason besides adding to their pile of wealth that couldn’t have been spent in many lifetimes before they began this process. And how this decline has found its perfect physical manifestation in a very bad cheeseburger.

The 99 Burger was introduced at the beginning of this Yankees season, the brain child of Legacy Hospitality Group Executive Chef and General Manager Matt Gibson. The burger is advertised as the chef’s homage to In-N-Out, but bears little to no resemblance: Two all beef quarter pound smashed patties lidded with American cheese and secret sauce on a brioche bun. The hook, and why the burger is such an annoying chore to secure, is they initially only sold 99 of them at every Yankees game.

The burger is named after Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge, the improbable late blooming folk-hero Californian giant who broke the single season record for most American League home runs last year. Judge is something of an outlier in recent Yankees history. He is one of the few young talents that traversed the farm system without being touted as some sort of savior, here to conjure the ghosts of Bernie, Jorge, Derek, Mariano, Donny, etc. And the only Yankees player in recent memory that secured the bloated, massive version of an MLB max contract the team has been loath to give out under this second generation Steinbrenner regime. What makes the burger remarkable is its complete and total failure, on a granular level, by the ingredient, and how each of these ingredients can stand in as ways of understanding how in the 14 years since the Yankees won their last championship, the team has lost its way.

Artificial Scarcity

The 99 Burger was christened after Aaron Judge’s number 99. Chef Gibson took the number as a cue, and decided to cap the number of burgers sold every game at 99, which is why I rushed to get to the game early Saturday to make sure I could secure one for this piece. The concept trades on New York’s history of famous, limited burgers. At Raoul’s for instance, the great bistro in Soho sells an au poivre burger, one of the best on Earth by my estimation, but they only sell 12 a day, which are typically assigned to those in the know, who are waiting outside to reserve one when the restaurant opens. Or the Luger burger, sold at the over century old Peter Luger steakhouse in Williamsburg, only at lunch, for a fraction of what a steak will cost you.

There are a number of reasons why restaurants limit the amount of burgers they sell. In America, if you make a good burger, people will order it. So for a restaurant like Peter Luger, or Raoul’s, they had to decide if they wanted to be a dedicated burger restaurant, and in both cases, they did not. You can only charge so much for a burger, and at a nice bistro, or a steakhouse, having a full-time burger on the menu isn’t just a strain on the kitchen, but will seriously reduce the overall price point of an average guest, who will spend $20 on a burger instead of $120 on a steak. But the burger serves as a business driver, it gets customers in for a lunch service, or an early dinner rush. The point is there is a tangible logic behind why you’d limit burger sales in a restaurant.

There is no reason why this logic would extend to a kiosk in a baseball stadium. There is a staff dedicated to working the griddle for the entirety of the game. At the 99 Burger kiosk, they only sell a single item. When pressed for why the number of burgers was limited, chef Gibson lamely suggested it was an effort to “keep it coming fresh”, which means nothing. A more believable alternative is it’s an act of pure marketing, a gimmick making the burger hard to get your hands on gins up artificial demand, and provides a readymade angle for people who make Tiktoks about the food on offer at a Yankees game. It also serves as motivation to get people in the stadium earlier, where they’ll presumably spend more money.

The New York Yankees are the most valuable franchise in baseball, with an estimated value of 7.1 billion dollars, up 18 percent from just last year, and worth 2.3 billion more than the second most valuable Los Angeles Dodgers. It’s a distinction the team has held since the MLB first began releasing the list evaluating each league franchise in 1998. In the aughts, the team was regularly spending nearly 100 million dollars more than their closest competition, more than the bottom five payrolls in the league put together. And over the past 10 years, the team has had the top one or two payrolls twice (to be fair, with the massive Judge contract and the addition of pitcher Carlos Rodon, the Yankees committed 500 million going into this season). Results varied during this period of George Steinbrenner’s mandate to win at, literally, all costs, but a fan could argue it was an expenditure commensurate with the team’s insane value.

This piece does a good job detailing and charting specifically how the team spending has stagnated, and the gap between the Yankees payroll and the rest of the league has narrowed (while profits skyrocketed). Exorbitant spending is no guarantee for success, but it’s been strange watching the Yankees take themselves out of the running for a number of big ticket, young franchise-changing talents who have come on the market over the past five years in the name of fiscal discipline.

To their credit, the Yankees no longer hold themselves to the 99 burger limit. As it was explained to me by the cashier at the stand, it’s now 199 burgers, or the bottom of the fifth, whichever comes first. In this, the Yankees remain consistent with their approach to business in the Hal Steinbrenner era, leaving no opportunity to maximize profits unexplored.

Cheese

The slices of American cheese that top both patties on the 99 Burger come courtesy of New School American Cheese, a company started by chef Eric Greenspan in 2022 with the stated goal of creating a better quality, artisanal American cheese. Prior to opening the business, Chef Greenspan traded on decades in the trenches of fine dining, becoming the culinary director of a company called Virtual Dining Concepts, that specializes in launching celebrity and “IP” driven “virtual brands” in dark (or ghost) kitchens, such as Pardon My Cheesesteak (a cheesesteak company founded by Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take Podcast) and MrBeast Burger.

The conceit of the cheese is purity and quality of ingredient, purportedly barrel aged cheddar emulsified with butter and cream with preservatives kept to a minimum. In execution, the slices of cheese that top the burgers are over thick with an awkward melt, it’s gooey and pasty, the sensation of eating a burger that has been cooked in several layers of salty and sour plastic wrap. The cheese sticks to the roof of your mouth like peanut butter. The 99 Burger essentially outsmarts itself, eschewing an elemental and classic burger component and swapping it out for something that sounds impressive, but actually sucks.

Brian Cashman is in his 25th year as general manager of the Yankees. He inherited a core of talent from former GM Gene Michael. Michael developed and shielded a dynasty from George Steinbrenner, who was briefly suspended from baseball in the early ‘90s after he was caught compiling an oppo file on Dave Winfield, which gave Michael the autonomy to build the team that would win four championships in five years. Cashman can claim four rings and two additional World Series appearances with a track record of sustained success across decades, and as a result is seen as untouchable within the organization.

His manager for the past six years has been Aaron Boone, the antidote to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Art Howe in Moneyball. The manager, who had never managed baseball at any level before winning the job of running the Yankees, is seen as a sycophant, beholden to the front office and making consistently befuddling batting order and bullpen decisions, supplanting the “common sense” “instincts” of managerial experience with what many critics, perhaps unfairly believe are calls dictated by situational probabilities handed down from the front office.

One criticism that can’t be as easily ignored is Cashman’s frequent reliance on expensive talent with spotty injury histories. While the Yankees continue to spend at what is close to the league max, the product put on the field from game to game is consistently below that level because the roster is frequently riddled with injuries. Last year the team was the 11th worst in terms of injury issues, 46.8 million in payroll was spent on 1,563 missed games. This is an issue of luck, but also design.

Critics take issue with common sense use of the team’s tremendous resources as well as strategy decisions like when Boone started a battery of Deivi Garcia and JA Happ against the Rays in 2020 instead of Masahiro Tanaka, keeping 37 year old Josh Donaldson over 31 year old Gio Urshela, extending Aaron Hicks for seven years and 70 million dollars, among many examples. Taken as a whole, there is a pattern of many questionable zags that haven’t paid off, that Brian Cashman isn’t held accountable for due to institutional calcification.

Beef

The 99 Burger is composed of two four ounce American Wagyu all beef patties sourced from Lobel’s, a legacy Upper East Side butcher shop the Steinbrenner family frequented that led to a licensing deal with the franchise, supplying the stadium with high end beef and sandwiches they’ve slapped their brand on.

The idea of the Wagyu burger is stupid because the entire point of wagyu, why the breed has achieved its prestigious regard and why it’s so expensive, is its intense marbling of fat. A thin A5 wagyu steak, seasoned and seared simply, is a delicacy because it melts on the tongue, a rich varietal it’s hard to eat more than a few ounces of due to its decadent fattiness. Lobel’s told me the fat to lean ratio in their Wangus beef blend is the standard 80/20, made from the forequarter with some steak fat trim. When eating the burger, there’s the distinct added beefiness of patties fried on a griddle glossed in rendered tallow, but the flavor of the beef didn’t distinguish itself from the commodity ground chuck I use to make my kids smash burgers a few times a month from a low end Flatbush grocery store when I’m too lazy to make them anything imaginative or composed. It is a pointlessly expensive product that yields average results.

The Yankees have amassed a regular season record under Aaron Boone of 427-280, and are postseason fixtures, missing the playoffs just four times since 1995. It’s a stretch of success any fan would want for their team, but commensurate with the team’s spending and the expectations of the franchise. And yet, particularly the 14 seasons since their last title, what has characterized the Yankees offense is stunning power numbers and shitty averages. This year, even with Aaron Judge out for two months, they are 5th in home runs and 28th in average across the league (Incredibly, Judge still leads the team in RBI, with 40). The story of the majority of this century in Yankee postseasons is remarkably common across distinct generations of rosters.

As the team progresses through the rounds, the offense begins to slow to a trickle as each batter presses for a blast, a byproduct of the boom or bust engineering of the meaty roster. The pressure mounts exponentially and terribly, until a single run stolen in the first inning of say, Game 5 of an ALCS can feel insurmountable. The bases load multiple times throughout the game with less than two outs, and after a strikeout, entire platoons of base runners are stranded where they stand, over and over again, as yet another plucky collection of slap hitting middle infielders cobble together another series victory against a more expensive and more talented team.

(As an aside, I feel compelled to mention the team had at least a trip to the World Series literally stolen from them by the Astros in 2017, a team full of cheating bastards who should’ve all received lifetime bans from the sport and jail time)

The Bun

On a sandwich composed exclusively of bad ideas, its figurative and literal crown is the absolute worst. The brioche burger bun is hopelessly antiquated. It’s been out of fashion for over a decade, a relic of the gastropub era and its hulking patties that might sound impressive if you have no idea what functions different types of bread serve, or if you’re recovering from a severe head injury. It’s oversweet and cakey, with its shiny eggwashed crust, good for french toast or bread pudding, but not a burger. The light and airy brioche bun is a sponge for grease. In his standup classic, Raw, Eddie Murphy inadvertently did an admirable job articulating the unique effect of eating a burger on brioche in detail when he described his mother’s homemade patty melts she’d serve on Wonder Bread: The juices soak the bun, fusing the bread with its plate, and transforming the sandwich into a ball of pink dough, which is near impossible to enjoy unless you like the sensation of grease running down your forearms.

The bun is in other words, a literal covering that sounds refined and thought through, but is actually an element that ruins the burger’s overall project.

In the decade since Derek Jeter retired, the Yankees have had an unusual messiah complex. Each young prospect is touted as Jeter’s successor, as a spiritual leader for the next championship core, if not positionally. There is a kind of logic to it. If the team is not going to break out a checkbook for a Bryce Harper type, salvation must come from within, but the front office has had little success in identifying and developing talent, with a staggering pile of discarded prospects the franchise spent years assuring its fanbase would rise up and eliminate the need for a marquee free agent.

July 22nd, 12 PM: Yankees v. Royals

Now that we’ve literally dissected the burger, let’s eat one. When you get off the escalator in left field, the smell of beef fat frying beef on a griddle hits instantly. I waited in a decent sized line that moved relatively quickly as the hardworking cooks smashed the patties down on the griddle with a steel burger press, then I found a ledge overlooking the third baseline, took a few pictures, and tucked in.

The smashed beef was nearly deep fried. It had the quality of being both incredibly greasy and dry. The gray interior was badly overcooked, then left to sit as multiple burgers were assembled, leaving it with a sawdust crumble. The fried crust is awash in lukewarm fat that coats your lips. The slabs of unmelted cheese exacerbate this aridness. The onions, pickles and “secret sauce” (likely a knock off In-N-Out’s relish laced burger spread) are meant to serve as lubrication, and they do, but not enough. The bun becomes soggy and grease laden instantly, lacking the pliant chew of a potato bun. By the end, your mouth is a wad of gluey paste.

The game that followed against the Royals was reminiscent of many wins in these last few years of regular season success: a succession of bases empty home runs, the injury riddled offensive lineup still able to beat up on bottom feeding Kansas City’s poor pitching staff. One of the bright spots was the Yankees latest Jeter replacement, the fan favorite rookie shortstop Anthony Volpe, hit a ground rule double, then stole third, setting him up to score on a flyout to left field in a very un-Yankee like feat of small ball run production. It gave me momentary hope that maybe this Yankee team could get healthy, put together a late summer run, and make me, and this piece look very stupid in the Fall, returning glory and a 28th title to the franchise. I’d love nothing more.

Having been lured into the stadium early by the 99 Burger, I ended up in the shadeless left field bleachers for an extra hour, and had one more $17 Blue Point “Yankee Pils” than I had intended on drinking as I baked in the July sun. By the end of the game, I felt like I did immediately following the burger: Sick to my stomach, and in need of a shower.