Yankees Thoughts: Sixty-Four Games to Go

The Yankees finished the first “half” of the season by blowing a late lead and losing the last game before the All-Star break for the third time in the last four seasons.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The last four nights have been enjoyable. Four calm, relaxing, peaceful nights free of frustration, anger, depression, elevated blood pressure and the urge to heavily drink. That’s because there was no Yankees baseball. Well, Yankees baseball is back this weekend.

2. I’m still not over the loss from Sunday to the Orioles in Baltimore. A win would have given the Yankees a three-game winning streak going into the break, a 5-5 record against the Orioles for the season and a one-game lead in the division for as bad as the last month has been. Instead, they suffered another inexcusable, catastrophic, ninth-inning loss, negated the positivity of the previous two games, dropped to 4-6 against the Orioles (now needing to sweep the three remaining games against them to win the head-to-head tiebreaker) and trail the Orioles by one game for the division.

3. If you want to view what has gone on through 98 games as the Yankees are only one game back despite being the worst team in the league for a month, go for it. In actuality, the loss on Sunday was a trend of big-moment blowups this team has made a habit of as they had similar losses to the Mariners, Royals and Red Sox. Only once this year have the Yankees had an improbable ninth-inning comeback that led to an unexpected win (the series finals against the Giants). Their other two unexpected ninth-inning comebacks in Cleveland and Kansas City ended in losses.

4. Sunday was a really bad loss. As bad of a loss as you can have in the regular season. It was the worst loss of the season and the only way it will be topped is if the Yankees lose a regular-season game down the stretch that eliminates them from the postseason. Thankfully, for their sake, the “cushion” they built up that Brian Cashman refers to should be more than enough to get them into a postseason in which 40 percent of the teams make it.

5. Unfortunately, the four-day break likely didn’t change the Yankees’ offense from a three-batter lineup with six bel0w-league-average bats. It likely didn’t flip a switch for the rotation to pitch like they did in April and May. It didn’t turn their mediocre-at-best bullpen into a stable of strikeout arms. It didn’t magically make their manager someone capable of using basic logic and reasoning for in-game decisions in close games.

It’s like the opening scene in Mrs. Doubtfire, where Robin Williams’ character, with his marriage falling apart, tells Sally Field’s character, “Come on, Miranda. We’ve got problems, but who doesn’t? We could work them out.”

Field responds, “We’ve been trying to work them out for years.”

Williams answers, “Well, let’s take a vacation with the kids …”

Field rebuts, “Our problems would be waiting for us when we got back.”

The Yankees’ problems from mid-June through Sunday in Baltimore will be waiting for them on Friday night at 7:05 in the Bronx. How they handle those problems and if they’re able to overcome them in the second “half” will be evident before the end of the night on Friday.

6. The Yankees’ upcoming schedule is brutal. Four against the Rays, two against the Mets, three against the Red Sox and three against the Phillies. You may think they finally have a soft landing on August 2 against the Blue Jays, but the Yankees are .500 against the Blue Jays this season, while the Blue Jays are eight games under .500 against the rest of the league.

7. Ideally, the Yankees’ roster will look a lot different on July 31 after the trade deadline than it does now, but we don’t live in an ideal world. (If we did, Anthony Volpe would be able to cleanly field game-ending ground balls hit right at him and Alex Verdugo would be able to catch game-ending fly balls with a catch probability of 99 percent). It’s hard to envision the Yankees making a move (or moves) to become drastically better, and minor upgrades will be costly with 21 of the league’s 30 teams within 5 1/2 games out a postseason spot. The American League is wide open (even though the Astros are now in a position to pass the Mariners for first in the West this weekend), and the Yankees will likely operate over the next 11 days with the idea the path to the World Series isn’t difficult as is, and will refrain from making themselves the clear-cut team to beat.

8. The Yankees are “in contention” and that’s good enough for them. “Just get in” has been their mantra for the last 15 years, and after they get in and get eliminated, they refer to the playoffs as a crapshoot and talk about small sample sizes and short series. Oddly enough, they talk didn’t like that from 1996-2009 when they went all out to field the best possible team and did everything in their power to put themselves in the best possible position to win.

Just look at Nestor Cortes’ tweet from Tuesday.

“Everyone talks down about the yanks but they wanna be us. It’s a privilege to wear pinstripes. Every year we are in contention. I’m blessed to be able to compete for a playoff spot and always be contenders at the end.“

Cortes is delusional, like the rest of the organization, but his perception of the Yankees in 2024 is understandable since all he has known as a Yankee is a front office that claims they’re “pretty fucking” good after going 82-80 and a manager who lets sloppy play slide and only cares to speak about tomorrow until the season runs out of tomorrows. The Yankees moved on from Joe Girardi in part because they thought his tense nature would rub off on their young roster. The roster under Boone has hasn’t just had Boone’s tendencies wear off on them, they have become him. From Aaron Judge walking through Fenway Park carrying a boombox playing “New York, New York” after winning Game 2 of the 2018 ALDS to Boone saying “the league has closed the gap” on the Yankees after losing the one-game playoff in that same venue three years later to Boone continuously saying “it’s right in front of us” for the last three years and his players using that same phrase over the same time, the Yankees believe they are still the Yankees when they haven’t been in a long time and have never been with this core under this manager.

9. The replies to Cortes’ tweet were alarming with Yankees fans calling him out and opposing fans laughing at his and the Yankees’ expense. Cortes was a Yankee in 2019 and again in 2021, 2022, 2023 and this season. In that time, the team has lost four of the last five games of the ALCS, finished third in the division and fifth in the AL and lost the one-game playoff, were swept in the ALCS and missed the postseason completely. This season’s team has the worst record in the majors since the middle of June and coupled with Sunday’s humiliating loss, the timing of Cortes’ message couldn’t have been worse. I have been hoping all week Cortes would delete the tweet and claim his account was hacked by a Red Sox fan.

10. For better or worse, Yankees baseball is back. The break is over. The vacation is often. The physical, mental and emotional escape is over. When Gerrit Cole throws the first pitch of Friday night’s game against the Rays, the stretch run will be under way. The last 64 games with Juan Soto under contract as a Yankee will be under way. The glaring issues and problems from the first “half” and from the last four seasons will still be there. We’ll find out if this group handles them differently.