No one is talking about how NY's team will compare to BOS's next year here, there are way too many unknowns for that. Also not sure what Gardner has to do with anything, I have an OF of Stanton/Hicks/Judge with Andujar at DH and Frazier as a 4th OF (this combo is weak in CF behind Hicks, Judge played there once this year and Frazier some in the minors). Add in Sanchez, some combo of Voit/Andujar/Bird for 1st (Frazier can also DH), Torres and Didi, and that is 8 out of 9.
I don't get the Machado comment either, I think he would jump at the chance to play 3B in NY. Apologies for linking a Heyman column on a Boras client but I think it's still worth doing in this case:
https://fancredsports.com/articles/inside-baseball-machado-maybe-harper-like-yankee
Also in general, I feel like people have misunderstood NY's plan and overall position in recent years. In August 2016, they sold off pieces because they were way way way behind BOS and CLE and HOU in terms of putting long-term pieces in place, they had literally none of their young core in place before then (Severino didn't win a spot for good until the next spring training, Sanchez and Judge first came up then). Anyone claiming that NY has jumped past any of those other three teams at any point since is mistaken, the plan since August 2016 has been to put as many pieces in place as possible for this upcoming winter and then try to fill in where needed. We haven't seen Cashman's full plan yet, but by spring training we will. That still doesn't mean that they'll have passed any or all of the three other powerhouses, but they will have taken their best shot to build a team that can.