Thanks to their aggressive approach to getting rid of uniform numbers, the New York Yankees are running out of numbers to don uniforms. As The Athletic’s Brendan Kuty reports, the Yankees are addressing this lack of available numbers by asking permission from Major League Baseball to stop issuing uniform numbers to manager Aaron Boone and uniformed members of their (very large) coaching staff.
As Kuty notes, the Yankees have retired a total of 22 numbers, spanning in time from Lou Gehrig’s No. 4 in 1939 to Derek Jeter’s No. 2 in 2017. No single-digit numbers are available, and the #8 has been retired for Yogi Berra and Bill Dickey. The Yankees’ total of 22 eliminated numbers pretty much eclipsed the Cardinals’ second-place finish with 14 eliminated numbers. Kuty also writes:
“Then there are the numbers that the Yankees purposely hid. Two of those are in reverence for recently deceased franchise stars – a common practice across the league. These include No. 19 for Masahiro Tanaka and No. 52 for CC Sabathia.”
A third number, 69, is also no longer in circulation for reasons the reader should appreciate.
A number of managers and coaches across the league either hide the uniform top under a hoodie or jacket, or don’t wear the jersey at all. So it’s not an unprecedented leap to allow them to go numberless. That would reduce demand for these dwindling numbers, especially in the Bronx where supply is less than elsewhere. One could argue that teams like the Yankees should be a bit more selective when retiring their unified numbers, but this particular ship — and its retired hull number — has already sailed.