Yankees' second half set to begin with familiar storyline: What can Brian Cashman do at trade deadline?

It’s all about the trade deadline.

The Yankees come out of the All-Star break and begin the de facto second half of the season Friday night at Truist Park against a disappointing Atlanta team before heading to Toronto to face the American League East-leading Blue Jays.

And the dominant storyline/ question is the same as it was before the break: What will general manager Brian Cashman be able to do before the trade deadline?

To use an oft-phrase of his over the years, it’s “pencils down” on his roster when the deadline arrives on July 31.

Three significant areas need to be addressed, with none of the three any more — or less — important than the other.

Starting pitching depth has been a club concern since spring training, when Gerrit Cole was lost for the season because of Tommy John surgery and Luis Gil was lost for the first four months of the year because of a right lat strain. (Gil began a rehab assignment last Sunday and could be back within the month, assuming no setbacks.)

Yankees starters mostly excelled in the season’s first half, but organizational worry about the unit’s depth never really went away. It jumped right back to the front burner the week before the All-Star break when Clarke Schmidt was lost for the rest of the season, and most if not all of next season, because of a UCL tear in his right elbow that required Tommy John surgery.

The other major needs — acquiring at least one power reliever and upgrading at third base — also have been organizational areas of concern since spring training. In the case of third base, that issue dates to last December’s winter meetings.

None of which is of immediate concern to Yankees manager Aaron Boone. All he can do is manage the 26 players in his clubhouse, not the ones who may be there after July 31.

Speaking a couple of days before the All-Star break, in evaluating his team’s first half, Boone used the word “incomplete.”

Split personality would be another description.

The defending AL champion Yankees rode a roller coaster of performance in the first half, inching out of the gate slowly but steadily before getting hot in May. On May 28, they had a seven-game lead in the AL East at 35-20. After completing a three-game sweep of the Royals in Kansas City on June 12, they were a season-high 17 games over .500 at 42-25 and held a 4 1⁄2-game lead.

But a weekend sweep at the hands of the Red Sox at Fenway Park followed, the start of a 6-16 plummet that included a pair of six-game losing streaks.

They followed the second of those skids with a five-game winning streak before two straight losses to the Cubs before the break in which they looked inept at the plate.

All of which added up to a 53-43 record and a hardly insurmountable two-game AL East deficit.

“There’s been a lot of good, there’s obviously been two weeks where we really struggled,” Boone said of the season’s first half. “But we set out in spring training, and the start of the year, to get back to the playoffs and go chase after a world title, and all those hopes and dreams are right there and still exists for us.”

All true, though none of that is likely to come to fruition with the roster as currently constituted.

The good news for them? They have the resources — both financially and when it comes to prospects — to execute pretty much any kind of deal.

The bad news? Aside from the fact that they annually overvalue their prospects (something that is hardly unique to the Yankees; most teams behave as if their systems are bursting at the seams with future big-league stars), just about every contending AL and NL team is looking for the kinds of pieces the Yankees are in the market for. That generally means higher prices.

More good news? Of the contenders in the far weaker AL, the Tigers, and maybe the Astros, seem the lone clubs that truly are a threat in terms of willingness to make the kind of deadline splash the Yankees are capable of.

“Hopefully I can fix what ails us,” Cashman said earlier this month after the Yankees designated infielder DJ LeMahieu for assignment. “Because there’s some areas on this team that need fixing.”

And now, it’s less than two weeks before it’s pencils down.

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.