I have been writing about the Yankees and home-field advantage in the postseason a lot lately because I think it’s that important. It was the difference in the 2017 ALCS and screwed up the team’s chances in 2018. Avoiding a situation in which the Yankees would have to play the first two games of the ALCS in Houston against Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole and four of the seven games of a potential series there is crucial. It has to be avoided, even if that means using pitchers other than Nestor Cortes, Luis Cessa, Cory Gearrin, Tyler Lyons, Ryan Dull and Chance Adams when there is a game to be won.

As I wrote on Wednesday, there’s certainly the chance the Astros could be upset in the ALDS or don’t reach the ALCS, and there’s also the chance the Yankees could upset the Astros in the ALCS despite not having home-field advantage. But the odds of either happening aren’t likely and aren’t in the Yankees’ favor, and the Yankees’ entire organization is based on decisions made to put the odds in their favor.

The Yankees have proven they would like to have home-field advantage, but they’re not going to go out of their way to win it, even if going out of their way only means giving a little less extra and unnecessary rest to the roster. To the Yankees, if it happens and they fall into home-field, great, and if they don’t, oh well. Somehow the organization has come to the conclusion that giving even more rest and days off to their regulars will help them be more successful in October than potentially needing to win at least one game in Houston against Verlander or Cole or Cole again or Zack Greinke. Despite their best efforts to prevent injuries in a season in which they set the all-time record for most players placed on the injured list in a single season, the Yankees still watched J.A. Happ, Edwin Encarnacion and Gary Sanchez all come away from Thursday’s doubleheader injured.

The Yankees have a right-handed heavy lineup and their only available left-handed hitters who will play in the postseason are Didi Gregorius and Brett Gardner, and neither should be hitting above seventh in the postseason lineup. That leaves the strikeout-prone Yankees extremely vulnerable in a series in which they will face the two best power starting pitchers in baseball, who also happen to be right-handed, in Verlander and Cole, and they will face them twice if the series lasts longer than four games. Already without the switch-hitting Aaron Hicks for the rest of the season and not knowing what the next few weeks will hold for the recently-injured Sanchez or the always-injured Giancarlo Stanton, and the fact the Yankees have a much inferior rotation compared to the Astros, the Yankees need every edge they can get in a potential ALCS matchup. They need every advantage they can get in a potential ALCS matchup. They need home-field advantage for a potential ALCS matchup.

The Yankees have a two-game lead over the Astros with two weeks and 14 games left in the season. (They also have a two-game lead over the Dodgers for the best record in baseball and home-field in the World Series). Home-field is theirs right now and it’s set up to be theirs as long as they don’t decide to go full-spring training on the remaining games once the division is clinched. Since the magic number for the division is down to 5, the Yankees have the opportunity to clinch as early as Sunday, which would mean if you have tickets to any of the games in the final two weeks of the season, get ready for a lot of Tyler Wade, Breyvic Valera and the endless Goof Troop of relievers the Yankees will pitch from their 40-man roster. The Yankees were already going to treat the final two weeks of September like the first two weeks of March and that was before Happ, Encarnacion and Sanchez were injured on Thursday, which will certainly scare them into increasing whatever rest they were already prepared to give to their regulars.

The Yankees remaining schedule is: three games at Toronto, three games against the Angels, three games against Toronto, two games at Tampa Bay and three games at Texas. Outside of the two games against the Rays, it’s about as easy as final 14-game schedule gets. The only easier remaining schedule you could come up with is the Astros’. The Astros remaining schedule is: three games at Kansas City, two games against Texas, three games against the Angels, two games at Seattle and four games at the Angels. The Astros won’t play a winning team in their remaining 14 games.

The Yankees have to beat the Astros by at least one game to win home-field, and a tie will go in the Astros’ favor after the Astros won the season series, thanks to a three-game sweep in Houston in April in which the Yankees blew two of the three games in the seventh and eighth inning. (It’s almost as if April games do matter. Who knew?)

I don’t think the Yankees will finish worse than .500 in their remaining games and even that seems low given their remaining opponents. But let’s say the Yankees play between .500 and undefeated baseball through the end of the season, here is what the Astros would have to do to at least tie them to win home-field.

If the Yankees truly want home-field advantage, it’s there for them to win. The Yankees should go into the postseason knowing they did everything possible to put themselves in the best position to win a championship for the first time in a decade and make the path to doing so the easiest as possible. It won’t be easy to win the American League, even if they don’t have to face the Astros to do so, but it will be that much harder if they do, and if they have to win it by winning in Houston.

The Yankees control their own home-field destiny with two weeks to go in the season. It could once again be the difference between winning the pennant or missing out on the World Series for the 10th straight season. The Yankees shouldn’t want to take that chance.

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

When it was announced that Nestor Cortes would start (or open) for the Yankees on Tuesday and when the lineup against the Tigers was posted and DJ LeMahieu, Aaron Judge and Luke Voit weren’t in it, I shook my head in disbelief like Lee Trevino in Happy Gilmore. The Yankees were once again trying to erase a game on their schedule rather than trying to win home-field advantage for the postseason.

The Yankees have made it clear in recent weeks they aren’t going to go all out to win home-field advantage, but now they aren’t even trying to win. With an eight-game division lead and only 16 games remaining, the Yankees are being managed as if they have won everything when they haven’t won anything. It was bad enough when Boone managed the season finale against the A’s like a mid-March game in Florida, but Tuesday night’s managing took the Yankees’ late-season, huge-division-lead approach to a whole other level.

It began with the decision to start Cortes, a pitcher the 2018 47-win Orioles didn’t want, and someone who was bad when the Yankees called him up and somehow has gotten progressively worse. Entering Tuesday, Cortes had a 5.13 ERA and 1.468 WHIP this season and has managed to remain not just in the Yankees’ system all these months with those numbers, but on the major league roster. With an opportunity to sweep the worst team in baseball and put the pressure on the Astros to keep pace, the Yankees were giving the ball to Cortes for his major league start. Cortes lasted 2 1/3 innings and was pulled after he put seven batters on and turned a six-run lead into a two-run lead.

Next up was Luis Cessa, who entered Tuesday with a 3.80 ERA from 80 appearances in the lowest of low-leverage situations. He has somehow picked up quite the number of fans this season, who seem to have short memories when it comes to Cessa having any success and who seem to be OK with disregarding his career as a whole, only focusing on his ability to protect seven-run leads in the eighth and ninth innings or hold six-run deficits in the middle innings. Cessa, trying to hold a small lead on Tuesday, failed to do so like he has so many times in his career, and the Yankees’ early six-run lead was erased. (The lead might have been saved if not for a Gleyber Torres error, but could the pitching staff pick up their star middle infielder for once after all the times he has picked up the pitching staff this season? Instead, Torres would later pick himself up with a solo home run to retake the lead.)

After Cortes and Cessa made the six-run lead disappear like the magicians they are, Cory Gearrin was next out of Boone’s bullpen. Gearrin, who was let go by the 59-win Mariners, has become a Boone favorite, pitching just about every other day since becoming a Yankee in late August despite pitching to a 6.48 ERA. Gearrin faced three batters and two of them singled. With an 8-7 lead in the sixth and two on with one out, the situation called for a strikeout from one of the Yankees’ actual major league relievers. Or at least it would have if the Yankees were actually trying to win. Instead, Jonathan Loaisiga got the call.

Single, sacrifice fly, single, walk, walk is how Loaisiga’s night went. He allowed both inherited runners from Gearrin to score and one of his own for good measure. The Yankees had lost leads of 6-0 and 8-6 and Boone had seen enough. To stop the bleeding he went to the one and only Ryan Dull.

Dull came to the Yankees with this 2019 line: 9 IP, 19 H, 13 R, 12 ER, 4 BB, 8 K, 4 HR. Throw in the one batter he hit and he put 24 baserunners on in nine innings before becoming a Yankee. Since his September 1 call-up, he had only appeared in one game for the Yankees (1 IP, 2 H, 3 R, 3 ER, 2 BB, 1 K), but here he was, the next in line in a long line of pitchers who don’t belong in a major league bullpen. I have always been for 40-man rosters in September, but this game changed my stance. Give me the 28-man September rosters next season, so the Yankees are forced to be managed to win.

After Dull miraculously recorded an out without allowing a baserunner, the Yankees took the lead back thanks to a two-run home run from Edwin Encarnacion. At 11-10, Boone decided he was going to try to win the game. He went to Adam Ottavino, but after a walk, passed ball and single, the game was once again tied.

Boone stayed with his major league relievers in the eighth, pitching Zack Britton, who had 1-2-3, nine-pitch inning. But then after proving he did in fact want to win the game, Boone went back to his pregame and early-game strategy of using the entire 40-man roster, calling on Chance Adams for the ninth inning. I expected the game to end with a ninth-inning, leadoff, walk-off home run off Adams, but it didn’t end until three batters into the inning. The Yankees might have lost 12-11 to the worst team in baseball, but to Boone and management it was a win: they didn’t pitch Ben Heller, Chad Green, Tommy Kahnle or Aroldis Chapman and they were able to give complete days off to LeMahieu and Judge, and that is more important than winning a game or winning home-field advantage for the postseason.

It’s clear the Yankees don’t care about having home-field advantage throughout the postseason. They don’t care to face the wild-card winner in the ALDS after that team will have already burned their best starting pitcher just to reach the ALDS the way the Yankees had to the last two years. They don’t care about facing Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole in Games 1 and 2 of the ALCS in Houston rather than New York and they don’t care about boarding a plane for a cross-country flight to Dodger Stadium for the first two games of a potential World Series to face the second-best home team in baseball. The Yankees are content with being the 2-seed in the American League. They are content with not having any and every edge they can obtain for October. They are content with taking the path in the postseason filled with “Go Back to Start” obstacles.

For a team which allows analytics to drive every decision, how could the Yankees not care about home-field advantage? How could they not remember the toll the wild-card game took on their rotation and bullpen the last two seasons and not want to face the wild-card winner in the ALDS? How could they not see the Astros’ 56-18 home record and feel it would be best to avoid playing the first two games of a series at MinuteMaid Park and an extra game in a series there as well? How could they not remember how the home team won every game of the 2017 ALCS and how could they forget that they scored three totals runs in the four losses in Houston in that series?

The Yankees are setting themselves up for their right-handed heavy lineup, which has a propensity to strike out excessively, to face the two best power pitchers in baseball, who sit 1 and 2 atop the strikeout leaderboard, and who also happen to be right-handed. They are setting themselves up to have to win at least one road game against Verlander, Cole, Verlander again or Zack Greinke. They are setting themselves up to have their entire season ruined because they took their foot off the gas for the final month of the season, playing as if they had clinched the best postseason possibilities when they hadn’t even clinched the division.

There’s certainly the chance the Astros could be upset in the ALDS and don’t reach the ALCS. There’s also the chance the Yankees could upset the Astros in the ALCS despite not having home-field advantage. But the odds of either happening aren’t likely and aren’t in the Yankees’ favor, and the Yankees’ entire organization is based on decisions made to put the odds in their favor. Why is it that the Yankees care about lefty-righty matchups in every situation and extreme defensive shifts tailored to probability percentages, yet when it comes to being the 1-seed in the postseason, something which will decide their season more than anything, they could care less?

The Yankees have determined days off are more important to achieving postseason success than home-field advantage. For a team which now holds the all-time record for the most players put on the injured list in a single season, you would think the players have had enough days off this season. If the Yankees are wrong in their decision to favor days off over home-field, their season will end early for the 10th straight year. At least then, the players can have more days in October off.

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

The first edition of the Yankees’ Postseason Rotation Power Rankings was on July 23. Back then, trading for Madison Bumgarner seemed more realistic than Luis Severino returning this season and finding anyone to follow Masahiro Tanaka and Domingo German in the rotation seemed impossible.

My postseason rotation hasn’t changed over the last six weeks, but it’s getting close to. James Paxton is pitching like the front-end starter the Yankees thought they traded for and Severino came out of his first rehab start in Triple-A without any issues. The third edition could see drastic changes depending on how the next two weeks go.

These power rankings will be updated frequently between now and the end of the regular season. They are based on a combination of personal preference, recent performance and historical performance. This rotation is based on the current 25-man roster and is created under the assumption the players on the injured list won’t be available for the postseason.

Game 1: Number 19, Masahiro Tanaka, Number 19
Masahiro Tanaka could pitch to a 15.10 ERA for the rest of the season and I would still give him the ball in Game 1 of the ALDS. Tanaka has proven his worth in the postseason in three different postseasons now with the worst of his five starts being two earned runs over five innings in a game the Yankees were never going to score in let alone win (2015 AL Wild-Card Game against Dallas Keuchel).

Last October, Tanaka was the only Yankees starter to pitch well in the four games against the Red Sox (5 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 4 K, 1 HR), and had he pitched Game 1, I might be writing about the Yankees looking to become the first team since 2000 to win back-to-back championships. In 2017, he allowed two earned runs in 13 innings in the ALCS to the eventual champion Astros and shut out the Indians over seven innings in Game 3 of the ALDS to save the season and kickstart the Yankees’ improbable comeback over the Indians.

Advanced metrics suggest Tanaka has been the same pitcher in the postseason as the regular season, with a little more luck, while his postseason success has been attributed to a small sample size. Well, the postseason is a small sample size. At most, a team could play 20 games, and in the Yankees’ case, the most games they could play this October is 19. Jobs, careers, salaries, memories and legacies are built on the small sample size of the postseason, and so far, Tanaka has been outstanding (30 IP, 17 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 7 BB, 25 K, 3 HR, 1.50 ERA, 0.800 WHIP). Same regular-season FIP or not, he’s getting the ball in Game 1.

Game 2: Number 55, Domingo German, Number 55
Do I trust Domingo German in a postseason start? Not particularly. But outside of Tanaka, it’s hard to trust any of the current available starting options. As of now, German’s going to get a postseason start and will be asked to get 12 outs, which makes things a lot easier to stomach. If he’s going to get a start, it has to be at home.

German at home:
61.1 IP, 44 H, 17 R, 16 R, 17 BB, 74K, 10 HR, 2.35 ERA, 0.995 WHIP

German on the road:
71 IP, 75 H, 47 R, 43 ER, 16 BB, 67 K, 19 HR, 5.45 ERA, 1.282 WHIP

There’s still the chance the Yankees shut down German as a starter for the rest of the season at some point or screw with his routine and off days to the point that it messes him up, the way they have with so many other young starters to try and prevent injuries that eventually happened anyway. If the Yankees allow German to pitch uninterrupted for the remainder of the season and they win the World Series and he never pitches again, he did his job. His job is to pitch for the New York Yankees. The Yankees’ job is to win the World Series. The goal isn’t to grow careers. The goal is to win. Sadly, the Yankees’ effort to achieve this goal for the last decade hasn’t been what it once was.

Game 3: Number 65, James Paxton, Number 65
After the first edition of these rankings, Paxton went out and got rocked by the Red Sox (4 IP, 9 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 0 BB, 9 K, 4 HR) and his ERA rose to 4.72. But since getting embarrassed in Boston, Paxton hasn’t lost, winning six straight for an undefeated August after the Yankees lost all five of his July starts.

Over this six-game winning streak, opposing hitters are batting .192/.271/.344 against Paxton as he beat two wild-card race teams in the Red Sox and Indians and dominated the National League-best Dodgers on the road. He’s looked like the pitcher I thought the Yankees traded for and not the pitcher who gave them four-plus months of mediocrity to begin the season.

I actually trust Paxton more than German right now, but since German is going to get a postseason start, it should be at home, which pushes Paxton to Game 3 on the road. Paxton has also been worse on the road than he has been at Yankee Stadium, but I trust him more to get comfortable, adapt and adjust wherever Game 3 is because I don’t have to.

Game 4: Number 57, Chad Green, Number 57
When Severino comes back and proves he’s healthy, the opener will fall off as a postseason starter. But until then, I’m giving the ball to Chad Green, Tommy Kahnle, Adam Ottavino, Zack Britton, Aroldis Chapman, and hopefully Dellin Betances to piece together 27 outs. There’s absolutely no way CC Sabathia can start a postseason game, and it’s comical to think J.A. Happ is going to be on the postseason roster, let alone given the ball for an October game. That leaves the opener strategy as the only available option.

Green hasn’t opened a game since August 15 against the Indians (0.1 IP, 4 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 1 BB, 1 K, 2 HR). He has worked strictly as a reliever since then, holding batters to a .394 OPS for 7 1/3 innings.

My preference would be to have Green go one inning and maybe two innings depending on how he looked in the first inning. Then I would go right to the bullpen. I don’t care that you’re asking the bullpen to possibly get 24 outs. Worry about the next game when you get there.

This season, Green has either been dominant or a disaster with very little in between. He’s either looked like he did in 2017 or given up a crooked number while only getting an out or two. The opener plan with Green starting the game is far from a guarantee, but you could say that about all of the Yankees’ starting pitching options for the postseason.

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