Tomorrow there will be Yankees baseball. Real baseball that counts. Over the last four-plus months there were many days I didn’t think I would write that in 2020, but here we are, one day away.

In what has become an annual tradition, here are the over/under predictions for the 2020 Yankees.

(I understand the season could be called or canceled at any minute, so these totals are based on the entire 60-game regular seaon being played).

Aaron Hicks: 45.5 games played
Last season, I was an idiot and set Hicks’ games played total at 145. Through 2018, he had never played more than 137 games in a season and had only played more than 97 games twice in six seasons. But I thought after playing 137 in 2018 and having signed a seven-year contract extension he would show that he wasn’t as brittle as he had been throughout his entire career. Hicks repaid my positive thinking about his health by injuring his back on a 35-minute bus ride in spring training, which would keep him out of the lineup until mid-May. Eventually, he would be shut down with an elbow injury that would require offseason Tommy John surgery. Name a baseball-related injury and Hicks has had it. Now 30 years old, I have a hard time believing a player who couldn’t stay on the field in his 20s is suddenly going to get healther on the other side of 30. I hope I’m wrong, but I know Hicks all too well to think he’s going to get through a two-month season with only six scheduled off days without a problem. Under.

Gleyber Torres: 13.5 home runs
The home run total for Torres last year was set at 25 and he crushed it with 38. So much for a sophomore slump and pitchers adjusting to Torres as he increased his OPS by 51 points from his rookie season and carried that play into the postseason where he and DJ LeMahieu tried to carry the offense by themselves through the ALCS. (It turns out you need more than just two of your nine hitters to win the pennant.) If Torres were to hit 14 home runs and pass this total, it would be the equivalent of hitting 38 home runs over 162 games. I don’t think he’ll have a problem doing that, especially with 10 of the 60 games this season coming against the Orioles. Over.

Brett Gardner: .340 on-base percentage
I’m reusing this one from last season, which Gardner failed to eclipse after posting a .325 OBP. He did hit a career-high 28 home runs to make up for it, but if you were an everyday player in 2019 and didn’t 25 home runs with the super ball, I’m not sure what you were doing at the plate. Gardner went from finished in 2018 to looking 10 years younger in 2019 with ridiculous(ly manufactured) power. However, that’s not his game and if Gardner isn’t getting on base, he’s not doing his job. With Gardner inexplicably hitting prominently in the Yankees’ 2019 postseason lineup (even ahead of Torres!), his inability to get on base cost the Yankees dearly in the ALCS, and he was part of the reason why the team’s World Series drought continued for another season. Even with Hicks, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton all “healthy”, Gardner is never just outfield insurance with those three being counted on as the starting outfield. As long as Gardner is on this team, he will be used like he’s an everyday player, and he needs to play like he’s one. Under.

Gerrit Cole: 2.50 ERA
Cole will most likely get 12 starts this season, and in each one of them, he will have unrealistic expectations with every pitch he throws. He has proven he can handle the type of pressure he’s going to endure as a Yankee, even with no fans in the stands, but the expectations for him feel like they’re at least seven innings and two earned runs or less for each of his starts. I think Cole would tell you his personal expectation is to be better than that, and he was better than that last year, posting a 2.50 ERA and allowing an earned run every 3.6 innings. Cole didn’t lose a game over the last four-plus months of the 2019 season, going 16-0 with a 1.78 ERA in 22 starts. I don’t think anyone is expecting him to duplicate that performance in 2020 … actually, I take that back since I have seen Yankees social media and I know how scary of a place it can be … so, while there are some who expect him to duplicate that performance in 2020 and go 12-0 with a sub-2.00 ERA, I’m not. I am however expecting him to be the best pitcher in the league. It would have been nice if Cole could have pitched in front of fans in Baltimore at the end of March and done in his first start was CC Sabathia wasn’t able to do in Baltimore in 2009, but unfortunately, his first season as a Yankee will come in empty stadiums and he will need to take to social media each postgame for adulation. Under.

Aaron Judge: 0.5 stints on injured list (for an injury, not illness)
Sometimes I will stare off into space or my wife will ask me why I’m being so quiet, wondering if something’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong, I’m just wondering if I will ever get to see Judge play a full, completely healthy season. It’s no secret Judge is the most important part of the Yankees’ lineup. When he’s not in the lineup, it screws everything up. We end up with Brett Gardner batting in the top third or Giancarlo Stanton leaving runners on base out of the 3-hole or Aaron Hicks being counted on like a top-of-the-order major-league bat. The Yankees go as Judge goes, both in the regular season and postseason. When he hit in the 2017 playoffs, the Yankees won. When he didn’t, they went down 0-2 to the Indians, 0-2 to the Astros and couldn’t win either of their two chances to clinch the pennant. When he hit against the Red Sox in 2018, the Yankees nearly pulled off a miraculous Game 1 comeback and did win Game 2, and when he didn’t, they were once again eliminated. Judge disappeared in the 2019 ALCS after his home run off Justin Verlander in Game 2, and the Yankees won one of the final five games of the series. In 2016, Judge’s first season ended early because of an oblique injury. In 2017, his only true full season, in which he set rookie records and should have won the MVP, he was hampered by a shoulder injury, which hurt his numbers in the second half. In 2018, a freak hit-by-pitch came him out for two months, and in 2019, another oblique injury took another two months from him. If not for the shutdown these past four months, Judge would now just be getting back into the lineup and would have missed the first half of the season after this odd broken rib/collapsed lung fiasco. Staying healthy is part skill and part luck, and Judge has been unlucky through the first three “full” seasons of his career. I’m going to be optimistic with this one because I don’t have any other choice. If the Yankees are going to get to where they want to go and where they haven’t been in more than a decade, Judge has to stay healthy. Under.

Miguel Andujar: 40.5 games started
DJ LeMahieu was so good in his first season as a Yankee that it can be forgotten that he wasn’t even in the Opening Day starting lineup and he wasn’t supposed to be in the starting lineup every day. The Yankees were going to use LeMahieu to play multiple positions and give guys (unnecessary) days off. But instead of being a super utility player, LeMahieu turned into the team’s best hitter and MVP candidate and became the first Yankee to be able to make contact at will since Robinson Cano left the team. I have a feeling a similar situation is going to happen with Andujar this season. I love Gio Urshela for what he did last season as much as anyone and hope that he really did figure it out offensivley for good last season, but one season out of a career coupled with the super ball isn’t enough to think Urshela definitely has gone from an AAAA player to the best 8- or 9-hole hitter in the majors and a true 25-home run threat. Whenver everyone else was getting blown away by Cole over these last few weeks of Summer Camp, Andujar was busy taking the Yankees’ ace and probably the best pitcher on the planet deep twice. Andujar’s defense at third has reportedly improved, but he will never be Urshela there. I think Andujar will force his way into the lineup and reclaim the spot he vacated in early 2019. Whether through performance or injury, Andujar will get his at-bats. Over.

Gary Sanchez: 20.5 games before going to old stance
It’s hard to break a bad habit, especially if that habit has been with you your entire life and has been with you through the minors up until becoming an everyday major leaguer. Sanchez’s catching stance changed this offseason and the new one is more than obvious and couldn’t have been easy or comfortable to transition to. Over the years we have seen many Yankees try to change what they have always done and most of the time, they end up resorting back to what they have always done. Maybe Sanchez has fully accepted and taken to his new positioning behind the plate, but if anything feels funny or goes wrong once actual meaningful games start, he will quickly drop the change the way Adam Ottavino went back to his mid-delivery glove tap this week. Under.

Giancarlo Stanton: 73.5 strikeouts
Last year, I had this at 200 strikeouts for Stanton, which he went under because he only played in 18 games. I will never understand what happened with Stanton throughout the 2018 regular season or why he was in and out of the lineup in th ALCS as the Yankees looked for some semblance of an offense, but now in his third season as a Yankee, he had a chance to erase the up-and-down 2018 season, which was marred by his final at-bat of the season, and erase whatever happened to his 2019 season. I’m less confident when Stanton is at the plate than when any other everyday Yankee is at the plate, and that shouldn’t be the case for someone with his ability and history. I’m willing to give him a clean slate in 2020 and I don’t want to regret it with him weakly flailing through sliders in the other batter’s box. Under.

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

Yankees baseball is so, so, so close to being back. But even it had already come back or if it had never been forced to be suspended, Aaron Judge still wouldn’t have played a game for the 2020 Yankees as a result of him diving for a ball nearly 10 months ago.

The Yankees’ handling of their injuries since Judge went down with a fractured wrist in July 2018 has been nothing short of ridiculous. The amount of times a Yankees player has been properly evaluated or correctly diagnosed or has returned from injury within the team’s original timetable can be counted on one hand, and you might not even need all your fingers on that one hand to do the counting. The Yankees were set to begin this season without their No. 2 and No. 3 starting pitchers and without their entire starting outfield. This coming a season after the team set the all-time record for most players placed on the injured list in a single season. To make matters worse is the injury to Judge, like the injuries to Luis Severino and James Paxton, were all sustained last season and went untreated the entire offseason. Judge injured himself in mid-September, Paxton in late September and Severino in October. Even Aaron Hicks’ elbow injury which needed Tommy John surgery was delayed enough that he would miss somewhere around half this season, had the season started on time, and it didn’t have to be the case.

After enduring the mysterious statements, announcements and timelines for injuries to Hicks and Giancarlo Stanton last season, Judge’s current injury status is as bizarre and confusing as his fellow outfielders were a year ago. Judge’s situation began as a minor injury and has since transformed into a complicated and complex saga over three-plus months.

How did we get here? Here being July 2 with baseball set to begin in three weeks and Judge still isn’t healthy, wouldn’t be playing if the 2020 season had never been delayed and still might not be able to play when the season does begin on July 23? Let’s go through it all.

On Feb. 18, on the first actual day of spring training, the Yankees immediately shut down Aaron Judge like he’s some disgusting, unsanitary dive bar that John Taffer just walked into.

“Just dealing with some crankiness,” Boone said rather nonchalantly about Judge as if he could be cured with some Tylenol and a couple days off. “I guess a little soreness in shoulder.”

Boone’s lack of emotion is a main reason why he is the Yankees manager and Joe Girardi is now with the Phillies. But when it comes to injury news, Boone’s even-keeled temperament comes off as comical when injuries go from a player being day-to-day to missing two months, and that happened all of the 2019 season.

“I feel like it’s a pretty minor thing,” Boone said. “Probably in the next couple days, start ramping him back up.”

Boone’s first “ramping” reference of 2020 and it came on the first day of spring training! It wasn’t the first appearance of “ramping” in the calendar year that got me though, it was his use of the word “minor” that truly got me upset. Nothing is “minor” when it involves the team’s best player and no injury of any magnitude is “minor” with the Yankees until they prove they can accurately diagnose and successfully heal injuries. Not playing baseball since Oct. 19 and implementing sweeping changes on the team’s medical staff didn’t just erase what happened last season. A winter layoff didn’t magically build trust between the team’s handling of injuries and the fans. The botched timelines by Boone and the Yankees last season eventually led to Boone simply not giving timelines for any injured Yankees, and there were a lot of them as the team set the single-season record for most players to land on the injured list. In many of the cases, Boone made it seem like everything was fine only to have the player land on the IL later that day or in the following days. So when Boone refers to an injury as something “minor” and uses the word “ramping” to describe Judge, you better be worried.

“We did put him through a battery of tests,” Boone said. “He had the MRI.”

Normally, an MRI means an issue is significant enough to warrant an MRI, but not when it comes to the Yankees. The Yankees aren’t worried about their players absorbing an abundance of magnetic imaging. When I was in elementary school, the school nurse would take your temperature no matter. You could break your collarbone in gym class and the first thing she would do is take your temperature. Cut your knee open? “Let me take your temperature.” That’s sort of how the Yankees operate when it comes to MRIs. If a player speaks up about not feeling 100 percent, they’re getting an MRI. I wasn’t overly worried that Judge had to receive an MRI. If anything, I was more worried that Boone said, “It was kind of what his shoulder has always been” in regard to the MRI results, which made it seem like Judge’s shoulder isn’t in the best of conditions.

“It probably started a couple weeks ago, when I first got down here,” Judge said. “I’ve been hitting since early November, and working out since early November. Once I got down here, hit on the field, hitting outside I just felt a little soreness up in the shoulder.

“Nothing alarming, nothing that I was like, ‘Hey we need to really check this out,’” Judge continued. “So I said, ‘We got plenty of time going into spring training: let’s take it slow these next couple days, make sure everything’s right, and then kind of go from there.’”

Nothing alarming! Nothing Judge thought needed to be checked out!

It only got worse on Feb. 18 as Boone uttered the same sentence that got him in trouble with Hicks a year ago.

“I don’t anticipate it will delay the start of the season,” Boone said. “We will treat it very conservatively.”

Not even two weeks later on March 1, Boone told YES that Judge is going through “testing” to find out why his shoulder is still bothering him. The injury Boone described as “minor” and the one Judge thought didn’t need to be checked out had not progressed in 12 days.

When Judge’s shoulder issue was originally announced by Boone less than two weeks ago, I freaked out and was told I was overreacting. No one knew at the time that a pandemic would delay or possibly even shut the 2020 season down completely. Had I known what I know now back on Feb. 18 or even in the first two weeks of March, I would have spent a lot less time worrying about the Yankees’ injuries and a lot more time watching TV series for the third and fourth and fifth and sixth times like I have been doing for three-plus months. But sorry if I have been traumatized by the 2019 Yankees and their medical staff.

After Boone said Judge would be shut down from throwing and batting for at least the next week, it was only two days later that he was seen throwing and before his shut down period ended, he was once again swinging a bat, which seemed odd given the Yankees’ stated rehab plan for him. The shoulder “crankiness” that Boone described still hadn’t gone away for Judge 12 days later, and not only had he not played in a spring training game yet, but the Yankees couldn’t even identify the problem.

“It’s frustrating that we haven’t pinpointed exactly what it is, what’s caused the discomfort, so that’s the frustrating part,” Boone said. “But I would say I feel a little more optimistic as to where we’re at.”

It’s statement like that that makes me wonder why the Yankees even allow Boone to speak to injuries. The front office clearly tried to place a gag order on him in the second half of the 2019 season when they stopped letting him give significant injury updates and timelines, but I guess they thought the offseason had changed him.

Two days later on March 3, Judge underwent tests in both the morning and afternoon. 

“Right now, more likely than not I don’t see him being ready for Opening Day because of the time frame, 3 1/2 weeks,” Brian Cashman said. “Hopefully, [the tests] come back negative. In the meantime, he is responding well to the treatment protocols that we are running him through.”

“The bottom line is he has been better the last few days,” Boone said. “Until we get to the bottom of what exactly is going on, if anything, then we will have better idea.”

It had been 13 days since Boone said Judge had a minor injury, and yet, the Yankees manager was questioning if anything is even going on inside Judge. Originally, Judge’s injury was described as a right shoulder injury, but now the team was saying different.

“He feels it now more in the pec area,” Cashman said. “Just trying to figure it out, what’s bothering him. In the meantime, he is feeling better the last 48 hours.”

Later that day, Cashman went on WFAN and spoke further about Judge.

“They are optimistic that it’s a muscle, but it’s premature,” Cashman said on the radio. “I know he feels much better and optimistic.”

After Judge underwent a second test that same day, Cashman said the team would determine whether further testing was necessary.

Three days later, on March 6, Judge spoke about the injury.

“Frustrated, especially with an injury that happened at the end of last year and still didn’t heal up,’ Judge said. “At least we have an answer, so now we can start working on a solution. Overall, I’m just mad. I want to be out there with my team, especially in spring training. We’ve got a good team here, a good club, and we’ve got a lot of goals here in 2020.”

Boone spoke about the tests showing progress for the injury, but wouldn’t say if surgery was out of the question to remove a bone.

“It shows signs of healing,” Boone said. “I wouldn’t say [surgery] is off the table, but you wouldn’t want to go to that right now especially if the bone is healing.”

Two weeks later, on March 20, the Yankees announced that in addition to Judge dealing with a fractured right rib, he was also suffering from a collapsed lung. It only took 31 days from Judge’s shoulder “crankiness” for the Yankees to announce the complete diagnosis.

“The pneumothorax came back completely gone, which is a good thing,” Judge said of his healed lung. “Which means I can fly if I need to go home [to California].”

On May 5, Boone appeared on MLB Network Radio on SiriusXM.

“All signs are encouraging,” Boone said of Judge. “Hopefully have him as part of all this, as well,” he added if the season gets played.

On May 14, Cashman told reporters he always thought Judge would miss significant time, despite saying back on March 3 that Judge was feeling much better.

“When it happened, I always felt we wouldn’t see Judge more likely ’til the summertime,” Cashman said. “But Aaron Judge is like most superstar athletes. [They think] they’re invincible and they feel they’ll be back sooner than later.”

Even without any reports of Judge being ready to go should the season resume in the near future, Cashman stuck by his prediction that Judge would be available to play.

“Once we resume play, we’re excited to believe that he’s going to rejoin us at full capacity,” Cashman said. “He wants to play as much as anybody, and we look forward to getting him back in the lineup.”

Eight days later, on May 22, more than three months after his injury was first announced as “crankiness” and “minor” and after several updates in which the Yankees used a form of the word “optimistic” and said Judge was feeling better than he had been, he still wasn’t swinging a bat in Tampa, according to Yankees hitting coach Marcus Thames.

“He walks by the cage and helps guys pick up balls,” Thames said. “He really wants to get going. [We’re] just trying to stay safe. When the doctors let him, [we’ll] turn him loose. He’ll be ready.”

That update from Thames was about six weeks ago now and until earlier this week, it was the last update regarding Judge we had until Cashman gave an update on Judge this week and said he had done a throwing program and has been hitting against a pitching machine. Cashman went so far as to use the word “optimism” again when speaking about a Yankees injury, but quickly negated that by throwing in a “dream” reference.

“Where he’s at physically is he feel goods,” Cashman said. “There’s a great deal of optimism that as long as there’s no setbacks … we can dream that his words will ring true when he said that he would be ready for Opening Day despite this injury.”

Back in March the Yankees were going to open the season without their entire expected starting outfield, and now they believe they will open the 60-game season with all three healthy even though three weeks of summer camp is three more weeks of having to stay healthy before a meaningful game.

Judge is the most important player on the Yankees and not having him for part of any season is an issue, especially in a shortened season. Ten months after sustaining this ongoing injury, who knows if Judge will actually be ready to play once the MLB season finally begins? The Yankees certainly don’t.

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

I always feared the Sunday before the Major League Baseball All-Star break. That Sunday is the last Yankees game before a four-day layoff. It’s the last meaningful baseball before a four-day layoff. It’s the last day of any sports before a four-day layoff. Each year I wonder how I will possibly get through the four days without a Yankees game or a baseball game or a sporting event. What would I do at 7 p.m. each night to pass the time? What do non-sports fan do every night at 7 p.m.? Those four days would always feel like an eternity, but they won’t ever again.

Nearly 12 weeks ago, I was watching the Rangers-Avalanche game in what would be a hard-fought loss for the Blueshirts as they let a much-needed point slip away in the standings (and what would also be a hard-fought losing bet for me on the Rangers’ enticing money line) when the news broke that the NBA season had been suspended. I knew the NHL would be next to suspend their season and I knew I was watching the last Rangers game for a few weeks ago, I just didn’t know how long.

That night, Opening Day was 15 days away, though the following day, after MLB had allowed spring training games to inexplicably be played, MLB also postponed the start of their seasson by at least two weeks at the time. My late-March, early-April trip to Tampa to watch the Yankees play the Rays in Games 4, 5 and 6 of the season had in turn been canceled, but I thought, maybe I will be able to reschedule the Tampa trip for the mid-May series at the Trop (spoiler: that also didn’t happen). While MLB was delaying the season by two weeks, the NCAA Tournement announced the entire Tournament would be played without fans in the stands. At the time, it seemed like the Tournament of all events would be a farce or ruined if played in empty arenas, but in hindsight, everyone would have signed up for Tournament being played at half-court playground courts if it meant the Tournament could still take place as it was canceled completely.

Here we are, nearly 12 weeks since the Rangers lost in overtime to the Avalanche and missed an opportunity to increase their playoff odds, and 12 weeks since the last time I wrote anything. The morning of that Rangers game, I wrote my weekly Wednesday spring training Spring Cleaning blog titled What’s Wrong with the Yankees? in which I once again called out the Yankees for their mishandling of injuries. The following day as I was set to write my weekly Rangers Thursday Thoughts blog, I decided to take a break from writing and podcasting until the pandemic passed. I didn’t think it would be June 1 the next time I would write something.

These nearly three months have been a grind to say the least. A grind to fill the space usually filled by sports. I didn’t want to spend my time writing nonsensical blogs about if the 1998 Yankees would beat the 2009 Yankees or what were the Top 10 games of the 2000 season. There was enough of that filler content to go around and I could care less about ranking Paul O’Neill’s career home runs in day games at Yankee Stadium. I wasn’t in the mood to write or record anything during a time when sports seemed so distant and unimportant. I spent the first few days of a sports-less world watching old Yankees games on TV and YouTube, but that habit ended around the same time the Yankees should have been starting their season on March 26 in Baltimore. The farther removed from actual hockey and spring training baseball I have gotten, the more the absence of sports in my life has become the norm. Seeing old Yankees games on TV with a packed Stadium and players hugging and high-fiving after monumental moments now feels odd to watch.

In the first few days of quarantine, July 1 became a reported target date for the return of baseball. After spending all winter and the offseason waiting for March 26, a potential Opening Day target date had been moved back another half-offseason. Back in late March, July 1 felt like years away. But now it’s June 1 and July 1 is a month away, which means another spring training would only be about two weeks away. There could be baseball in the not-so-distant-future … if the MLB owners want there to be baseball. And every report and indication to this point is that they don’t care if baseball returns or not, and the only way it will return if is the players, the ones who will be at risk during a pandemic, take a massive and unnecessary pay cut.

I want baseball back even if means empty stadiums, a weird postseason format and the possbility the Yankees could end their championship drought in a shortened season in which all non-Yankees fan will say it doesn’t count. I want it back the same way I want hockey back even if the always-intense Stanley Cup playoffs will feature empty arenas and players celebrating goals by jumping into the glass without anyone behind them banging on it and a team hoisting the Cup in a neutral-site arena in front of no one. I can’t watch anymore old games. I just can’t. I can’t watch Game 1 of the 2000 World Series, or Game 6 of the 2009 World Series or Hideki Matsui’s first Yankee Stadium game or David Cone or David Wells’ perfect game (which seem to be the only games YES has avaialble for Yankees Classics) anymore. I just can’t.

I want baseball back if it can come back safely. But in order to even get to the safety precautions needed for it to the return, the owners will first have to pay the players the prorated salaries they are owed. The NHL has already agreed to return in a 24-team format, which will include the Rangers as part of the postseason, but it seems like their restart won’t begin until the end of July at best. Baseball has the opporunity to come back much sooner with spring training games beginning in the next two weeks or so and actual regular-season games four weeks from now. The return of baseball falls completely on the owners, and because of that, I’m more than pessmistic about a single pitch being thrown this year.

I want to be wrong, however, last week was reported to be a “big week” for negotiations between the owners and players, and if anything, it seems as though the two sides are farther apart than they were the week before. So now I guess this week is “an even bigger week” for the two sides to reach an agreement to play in 2020, but I’m sure nothing will come out of it other than the owners asking the players to take another pay cut from their pay cut.

I’m back and the site is back and I will write and prepare as though there will be baseball at some point, even if that point ends up being late March in 2021. If there’s no baseball, I will just have to wait for hockey to return about two months from now. I know that feels like a long time from now, but it’s only two months. What’s another two months?

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!