Eric Morris picked up his allegiance to the New York Yankees in the 1990s when the team began throttling the rest of baseball, winning four World Series titles in five seasons. He remembers the roar of the crowd, the champagne showers, the ticker-tape parades.  This season, Mr. Morris says he has fallen in love with the Yankees all over again, but for an entirely different reason—because they decided to trade away all of their best players and give up.  “I’ve been rooting for this for a few years now,” he said.  The imperial Yankees, the team that has come to define the aggressive, relentless pursuit of excellence in American sports, have finally looked down the barrel of a mediocre season and chosen to surrender.  On Sunday, the team announced it was trading pitcher Andrew Miller to the Cleveland Indians for a quartet of anonymous young prospects. The following day, it sent Carlos Beltran to the Texas Rangers. Those moves followed a July 25 trade that sent star pitcher Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs.  The Yankees aren’t the first proud, old American business, or even the first baseball team, to bow to the chorus of actuarial nagging. Baseball’s modern conventional wisdom teaches that the best way to build a winner is to take advantage of the lean years by trading your best players to contending teams in exchange for promising young talent.  But for years, the Yankees resisted that idea. The team’s brass found the idea of capitulation abhorrent. They preferred to stand pat, or to open their checkbooks to sign expensive stars who might help them stay competitive. Though they have only won the World Series once since 2001, they haven’t posted a losing record since 1992.  After years of watching the team fall short in October, while becoming saddled with bloated contracts, fans have abandoned the pretense that winning every year was an ironclad rule of being a Yankee. Rather than burning the stadium down, they have made a collective decision to embrace lousiness.  “Losing is really terrible, but mediocrity is a killer,” said Mitch Guss, a lawyer in Pennsylvania who has been a fan since the 1960s. “To the true Yankee fan, it’s unacceptable to just be in the playoffs. Maybe if you were talking about Seattle or some other city they’d say, ‘Great! We were in the playoffs!’ Not Yankee fans.”  When it comes to investing in young players, Mr. Guss said, “It’s like working for a company. You’ve got to bring along the younger employees.”  “I was tired of these older players,” said Scott Mortman, 40 years old, who grew up idolizing the great Yankee first baseman Don Mattingly. “It just got stale and boring.”  Geoff Hutchinson, a 27-year-old Yankee fan from Brooklyn, N.Y., is a member of an even more radical tribe. He was so sick of the team’s bungled attempts to stay afloat that this season, he found himself hoping they would lose so many games it wouldn’t be an option. “I did not want them to get momentum where they would decide they could contend, because they couldn’t,” he said.  The Yankees’ change of heart this season is rooted in economics. Over time, the team’s passion for signing proven stars led to catastrophically bad contracts—$153 million to the outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, for instance, and $275 million for Alex Rodriguez, who is now a fixture on the bench.  In 2013, when the Yankees faced a similar situation at midseason, they refused to trade star second baseman Robinson Cano, choosing to push on instead. They wound up missing the playoffs and watching Mr. Cano, a free agent, sign with the Seattle Mariners and leave the Yankees with nothing.  After trading Mr. Miller, Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, said the team was “trying to get back to a situation where we can build an uber-team, and a sustainable one.”  The Yankees dynasty began in the 1920s when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig started a tradition of dominance. The team had a series of managers who were perfectionists, and a string of owners, such as the late George Steinbrenner, who hated finishing second. They have won 27 championships and produced so many Hall of Fame players that the team built a shrine to them in the outfield.  “In a tough age which called for tough men in baseball, the Yankees were the toughest,” David Voigt wrote in “American Baseball.” Ernest Hemingway, in his 1952 classic “The Old Man and the Sea,” wrote another immortal line: “Have faith in the Yankees my son.”  The team’s Appomattox moment is still meeting some resistance. Barry Piatoff, a New York public-relations-executive recruiter who has been a fan since 1972, noted that the last time the Yankees were truly bad, in the late 1980s, they still had some star power, but today, they don’t.  “It’s been a while since the team has been boring, and I don’t see it getting any better next year,” he said. “If they start to be real bad offensively this year and next year, I don’t know how people are going to react.”  Yet the majority of Yankees fans seem to be ready for an excursion to the bottom of the standings—and even excited by the novelty of it. Mr. Morris said he hasn’t attended a single game this season, but now that the Yankees have started to bring up young players from the minor leagues, he plans to buy a ticket.  “We’ve needed a fresh start for a while,” he said. “It’s a good reality check for some Yankees fans who didn’t think this day would come. It’s good to go through the trials and tribulations every team goes through.”  “Real smart fans are willing to rebuild,” Mr. Mortman added, “as long as it doesn’t take as long as it took the Mets.”  Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com
Fans of the New York Yankees, Major League Baseball’s most iconic team, are embracing a new tradition: losing. In a break with the past, the struggling team traded away its star players at the midseason trade deadline.