The Yankees lost again on Tuesday for their third straight loss and their ninth loss in their last 11 games.
The Yankees lost again on Tuesday for their third straight loss and their ninth loss in their last 11 games. Their division lead, which was once 15 1/2 games is now eight games in the loss column. The are losing ground each day and not doing anything about it from a roster or lineup standpoint.
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Aaron Boone still thinks the Yankees “are good” and believes they will get back to being the team they were earlier in the season.
Shut out. Again. That’s what happened to the Yankees on Monday night at the Stadium in a 4-0 loss to the Rays. It was their second straight game being shut out and their fourth in their last nine. Since the third inning on Friday night against the Red Sox (a span of now 34 innings), the only Yankee to have driven in a run is Isiah Kiner-Falefa.
Since June 19, the Yankees are 23-28. They are 8-16 since the All-Star break and 2-10 since in their last 12 games. They are in a free fall. Not the kind of free fall that will find completely blowing what was once a 15 1/2-game lead in the division (it’s now at 10), but a free fall that will inevitably end in an early postseason exit.
Despite playing like the Nationals (who traded away their 23-year-old generational star) for the last three-plus weeks and like the Rangers (who fired their manager earlier this week) for the last two months, Aaron Boone doesn’t view his team like one that is extremely fortunate no other team in their division has capitalized on their eight-week slide. He said as much in his postgame press conference after Monday night’s shutout loss to the Rays.
“When we are right, and we are hole. We are going to be a very good offense.”
What exactly is “right” and what is “hole?” Because if being “right” and “hole” is having every possible available player healthy then the Yankees will likely never be “right” or “hole” again this season.
DJ LeMahieu has missed the last two games with a foot issue that has reportedly been bothering him for a good amount of the season. Giancarlo Stanton has missed one third of the season with various injuries and still hasn’t played in rehab games. Everything has to go exactly right in Matt Carpenter’s healing from his broken foot for him to return this season. The Yankees need to get all three of those players healthy and back and producing to meet Boone’s promise that the “offense will be very good” again. (I didn’t include Harrison Bader since I expect as much out of him offensively as Aaron Hicks has provided.) What Boone isn’t considering is that more players could get injured even if any of those three return.
Every team deals with injuries and the Yankees have dealt with seemingly more injuries than every other team over the last four seasons. This might be in terms of the Yankees’ lineup though since you can’t count on injured players to return and be productive and you can’t count on other players not getting injured. With the Yankees’ unwillingness to give any player in either Triple-A or Double-A a chance at the major-league level over players like Kiner-Falefa, Hicks and Josh Donaldson, there will be more shutouts over the next six weeks.
“Big picture, there are some good things happening. We just gotta get some guys on track offensively right now.”
The starting pitching has been better of late and the bullpen has gone from completely untrusworthy to just untrustworthy. That’s about the only positives I can see that Boone could possibly be referring to.
Who are the guys that need to get on track? The only offensive players to be consistent all season are LeMahieu, Carpenter, Aaron Judge and Jose Trevino. With LeMahieu and Carpenter out, that leaves Judge and Trevino as the only consistent available bats, and no one should be counting on the best defensive catcher in the league to be an important bat for the Yankees. That leaves Judge.
Anthony Rizzo has had his moments this season, but he’s been bad since returning to play last week and has been up and down all year. He’s the only other “healthy” possibility at the moment you can maybe rely on.
The players Boone is referring to are clearly Hicks, Donaldson and Gleyber Torres.
When Hicks homered in three of four games from July 6 through July 9 there was this perception his power (or whatever power he has ever had) had returned and he was going to turn his season around. Since that home run on July 9 (38 days ago), he hasn’t homered again, and hasn’t even had an extra-base hit. He’s hitting .159/.289/.159 since and on Monday single-handedly helped the Yankees to a loss.
Last Monday in Seattle, for the third time this season, people thought Donaldson was finally going to turn his season around after going 4-for-5 with three RBIs. Since then he’s yet another slump, going 2-for-21 with 11 strikeouts. (I guess it’s not technically a slump since it’s really just been one atrocious season.) His OPS is back down under .700 at .692. The lowest full-season OPS of his career.
Torres had a pair of singles on Monday night, which were his first hits in exactly a week. He has one home run in nearly four weeks and the early-season idea he was returning to the 2018-19 version of himself was always as ridiculous as thinking the 2022 Yankees could achieve what the 1998 Yankees did.
There’s no getting these three “on track.” This is who they are. Hicks is a 32-year-old outfielder who spent his entire 20s on the injured list and is now playing with a surgically-repaired elbow and wrist to go along with all of the ailments he has had in his career. Donaldson is a 36-year-old, washed-up and overpaid shell of his former self who the Yankees foolishly owe $48 million to. Torres is a former star who was on his way to a Monument Park-like career before coming to 2020 spring training out of shape and never recovering. It’s no surprise post-deadline reports have come out that the Yankees were trying to trade all three two weeks ago.
“We’re good. We’re going to get a little more whole as we move forward here.”
You’re not “good.” You were good in late April, May and early June. Now you’re a team that is living off what they accomplished two-plus months ago and seems to be destined for another ALDS exit. And again, you may get “whole,” but there’s no assurance you will.
“We’re going to recover.”
I don’t know that the Yankees will recover. And recover to me means to play like a championship team, which it seemed like they were earlier in the season, but last were on June 18. Back then it was the Yankees and Astros in the American League and everyone else. Now in the AL? It’s the Astros and everyone else.
The Yankees may have a bye to the ALDS, but that doesn’t mean they will survive the ALDS. If they play the Mariners, who will feel confident, considering the Mariners just won four of six against the Yankees and boast Luis Castillo, who the Yankees failed to acquire. What Yankees fan would feel good about a matchup with the Rays or Blue Jays? No Yankees fan that has seen how they have played against either of those teams in the last few years.
By claiming the Yankees will recover, Boone opened himself up to a potential disaster if they don’t.
“It’s not great right now.”
No, it’s not.
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For the last two months, the Yankees have done nothing to suggest they won’t endure yet another early postseason exit.
The Yankees are going to the postseason. But what they do when they get there is all that matters. For the last two months, they have done nothing to suggest they won’t endure yet another early exit.
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The Yankees lost another series, this time to the last-place Red Sox finish their 2-7 on their nine-game road trip. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees. 1. I haven’t heard the YES broadcast booth
The Yankees lost another series, this time to the last-place Red Sox finish their 2-7 on their nine-game road trip.
Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.
1. I haven’t heard the YES broadcast booth or any Yankees fan compare the 2022 Yankees to the 1998 Yankees lately. I wonder why that is.
Maybe it’s because the only Yankees the 2022 Yankees are comparable to are the 2021 Yankees. A team whose season was based around one hot streak and who ultimately (to use Aaron Boone’s second-favorite word after “obviously”) underachieved. The 2022 Yankees’ hot streak might have lasted longer than the 2021 Yankees’, but it looks like they are headed down the same path with the same inevitable fate: an early postseason exit.
2. The Yankees are 23-27 since June 19. They are 8-15 since the All-Star break. They are 2-9 in their last 11 games. They were shut out on Sunday night for the third time in eight games. If not for the rest of the AL East playing nearly as poorly as they have for the last eight weeks, they could have easily blown their massive division lead. The lead was at its highest at 15 1/2 games and now sits at 10 games. So while they have managed to erase 35 percent of their lead, it’s still a double-digit lead because the Blue Jays and Rays failed to capitalize on an opportunity to overtake the Yankees.
“If you would have asked me at the start of the year, would I like a 10-game lead in the middle of August?” Aaron Judge said to the media after Sunday night’s shutout loss, “I think any of us would have signed up for that.”
That’s true. But that’s also like being given $1 million, losing one third of it and then trying to justify being fine with it just because you didn’t expect to have the $1 million in the first place.
3. At 3-10 since the trade deadline, the Yankees’ marginal upgrades at the time haven’t even been that. Andrew Benintendi looks like the guy the Red Sox gave up on, and while he was always expected to regress, regressing to be worse than Joey Gallo is certainly something else. Scott Effross’ only earned runs came on one mistake pitch (a giant mistake at that) and Lou Trivino has been OK, but both have them have been used at times after Albert Abreu and Lucas Luetge have pitched and been allowed to blow games. Frankie Montas has pitched like a No. 5 starter in two starts, and a bad No. 5 at that, and Harrison Bader still isn’t close to playing for the Yankees. Add in Jordan Montgomery putting together two scoreless starts for the Cardinals (with one coming against the Yankees), and to date, the Yankees couldn’t have botched the deadline any worse than they did.
The new Yankees are only a small portion of the team’s problems. The majority of the rest of the team is the still the problem.
4. Anthony Rizzo finally decided to halt his non-injured list stint after a week of missing games and is 1-for-15 with six strikeouts since returning.
A week ago, for the third time, people thought Josh Donaldson was finally going to turn his season around after he went 4-for-5 with three RBIs in the series opener in Seattle. Since then he’s 2-for-18 with nine strikeouts, and his season OPS is back below .700 yet again.
The idea that 2018-19 Gleyber Torres was back was always an illusion. Since July 28, Torres is hitting .154/.167/.200. His OPS was at .802 at the beginning of play that day. It’s now at .729 as he tries to become another everyday Yankees to have a sub-.700 OPS.
Aaron Hicks is part of the sub.-700 OPS club. His is at .650. Remember when he homered in three of four games from July 6 through July 9 and there was this perception his power (or whatever power he has ever had) has returned and he was going to turn his season around? Well, July 9 was the last time he homered, 37 days ago. Since then he’s hitting .165/.297/.165 with no extra-base hits.
Benintendi is an exceptional candidate for worst deadline acquisition of all time, hitting .196/.323/.294 with the Yankees. If you want to say “Oh, it’s only 16 games,” well, the Yankees traded for him prior to Game 100, so he has played more than one quarter of the games he will be a Yankee for.
Want to call Saturday’s win over the Red Sox the “Isiah Kiner-Falefa Game?” Go ahead. That’s the only game he has had as a Yankee that could be considered that. After 104 games played, he’s hitting .269/.315/.323 with one home run as he tries to be the worst everyday player to play for a championship team.
5. The Yankees aren’t currently a championship team. Not with the combination of an abundance of underachieving players and an abundance of injuries. Maybe in late April, May and early June they were when they were getting seven innings of one-run or shutout ball every night from their starting pitching and they were completely healthy. But even then, the offense was severely flawed, and as the injuries have mounted, the offense has only gotten worse.
6. The only players to be consistent this season have been Judge, Jose Trevino, Nestor Cortes, DJ LeMahieu, Matt Carpenter, Jose Trevino, Nestor Cortes, Michael King, Ron Marinaccio and Clarke Schmidt. Judge is the AL MVP and Trevino and Cortes All-Stars. LeMahieu is now injured, which is why he didn’t play on Sunday night. Carpenter is out for possibly the season and King is out for this year and maybe all of next, while Marinaccio and Schmidt are both wasting away in Triple-A because they have options to allow the Yankees to manipulate the team’s depth. Everyone else has been inconsistent, awful or has underachieved.
7. I never thought Clay Holmes would be a part of the inconsistent group on this team. Not after how good he was for the first three months of the season. But now that he doesn’t know where the ball is going and walks at least one batter an appearance, he can’t be trusted just like the rest of the bullpen. He’s been so bad since mid-July that Aroldis Chapman has jumped him on the bullpen pecking order and Chapman is the least trustworthy reliever given the high-leverage situations he’s used in. Holmes has allowed 11 earned runs, 11 hits and 10 walks in his last 9 2/3 innings with opposing batters hitting .282/.482/.385 off him. Prior to July 9, batters had hit .165/.213/.188 off him and he allowed two earned runs, 22 hits and five walks in 38 innings. The Yankees’ bullpen is too beat up and too shallow now to have Holmes be Jonathan Holder.
8. It would be nice if Giancarlo Stanton could play baseball in the near future. Stanton has missed 35 games this season, the equivalent of 32 percent of the season. (I thought Eric Cressy and his team has solved injuries! It’s almost as if you can’t prevent injuries, especially for historically injury-prone players.) But what you can prevent is the amount of time it takes for Stanton to return. Stanton has taken one day to shag balls, another to swing a bat, another to run the bases, another to go through a pregame routine, and so on. Basically one day per baseball-related activity. It’s all pretty ridiculous and there’s no evidence this will prevent him from getting injured in his first game back.
With Rizzo out and now back but being unproductive, LeMahieu now out, Carpenter out, the Yankees could desperately use Stanton. But I’m sure he will need to brush his teeth on Monday and then go through buttoning his jersey on Tuesday and then try to tie his cleats on Wednesday and maybe at this rate he will be cleared to play by Labor Day.
9. Things are likely to get worse before they get better, and I don’t know how much worse they can get for a team that has the second-worst record in the AL since the All-Star break, trailing only the Tigers. On Monday, the Yankees begin a nine-game homestand against the Rays (3), Blue Jays (4) and Mets (2). For a team that in the last month has split a series with the Pirates, lost a home series to the Reds, has lost five of nine to the Red Sox, got swept by the Mets and Cardinals and lost four of six to the Mariners, I don’t know how anyone could feel good going into these nine games. Add in the unknown with LeMahieu’s foot injury, the underperformance of every offensive player not named Judge or Trevino, the shakiness of the rotation after Cortes, the instability of the entire bullpen, the front office’s unwillingness to call anyone up, and the incompetency of the manager, and you have a team that could really screw up its season over the next nine days.
10. Now that the comparisons to the 1998 team’s success have stopped, the comparisons to the Septembers of the 1998 and 2000 teams have started. Two teams that finished out their regular seasons like these Yankees have played for the last eight weeks. The difference is those teams knew how to flip a switch and they could flip the switch once the postseason began. They also earned the right to be allowed to flip the switch with four championships in five years and six championship appearances in eight years.
These Yankees haven’t earned that benefit. They haven’t earned anything other than for fans to think this season will end the same way every other season has ended with this group and this core: early. The Yankees may be headed to the postseason and headed there with a bye to the ALDS, but that doesn’t mean they will do anything once they get there. After these last eight weeks, the only thing I can see them doing is holding an end-of-the-season press conference while the ALCS is going on without them.
They have six-and-a-half weeks to change that.
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The Yankees have lost 25 of 47 since June 19 and have blown a nine-game lead over the Astros for the 1-seed in the AL.
The Yankees blew a late two-run lead to the Mariners on Wednesday to lose the three-game series in Seattle. After ending their five-game losing streak on Monday, the Yankees have started a new losing that currently sits at two straight. They have lost 25 of 47 since June 19 and have successfully blown a nine-game lead over the Astros for the 1-seed in the American League.
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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!