Is Yankees' series against Red Sox indicative of a problem or just an aberration?
Yankees' Ben Rice strikes out swinging against the Red Sox in the ninth inning on Saturday in Boston. Credit: AP/Steven Senne
BOSTON — The Yankees were not yet a week into LWAJ (Life Without Aaron Judge), and manager Aaron Boone already had his fill of one topic in particular:
How would his club manage offensively without the two-time reigning — and three-time overall — American League MVP?
“I’m already a little tired of answering the question and we’re only a couple of days into this,” Boone said after a 6-1 victory over the Red Sox on June 7 that followed three losses in the first four games without Judge.
He hasn't been asked those questions of late, but they may well be on the horizon.
That June 7 win began a stretch of eight victories in nine games for the Yankees that brought them to 45-27 and gave them a 3 1/2-game lead on the Rays. However, after swinging limp bats for a third straight game on Saturday in a 4-1 loss to Boston, they have lost six of their last eight and dropped to 48-34. They fell into a virtual tie with Tampa Bay (which has a .588 winning percentage to the Yankees’ .585) and trail the Rays by a game in the loss column.
Saturday's loss dropped the Yankees' record to 12-11 in this most recent iteration of LWAJ. Not a disastrous record by any means, but it’s at least a little bit of a red flag considering Judge, still shut down from baseball activities as he deals with a broken rib, won’t be back anytime soon. (There remains no timeline, but ask just about anyone in the organization and they would sign on the dotted line for a return by Aug. 15.)
Is the situation beginning to catch up to an offense that is missing Judge and Giancarlo Stanton?
“I don’t think so,” Gerrit Cole said. "I think it’s just been a little bit of a struggle for us the last few games.”
Games that haven’t been good in any respect, particularly offensively.
Thursday’s 6-3 loss couldn’t be pinned on the bats; the main culprit was slipshod work in the field that resulted in four errors and four other misplays.
But the Yankees totaled three hits in Friday night’s 6-1 loss and accumulated the same hit total in a 4-1 loss Saturday that took just 2 hours, 22 minutes to play. Both games resembled the final game of spring training when teams’ respective priorities are getting it over ASAP (Friday’s contest lasted 2:21).
“Obviously haven’t been able to mount much,” Boone said Saturday. “I felt like today we swung the bats a little bit better than yesterday. Yesterday we didn’t mount much at all, there wasn’t a lot of hard contact. Today I felt like we had some hard contact going.”
Really, it was a distinction without a difference.
The Yankees were 6-for-59 with five walks in the two games. They went 0-for-4 with runners in scoring position and left four men on base on Friday and were 0-for-3 with four left on base on Saturday.
On Friday, the Yankees didn’t get their first baserunner against lefthander Payton Tolle until Spencer Jones’ one-out single in the sixth. On Saturday, the Yankees were hitless against rookie lefthander Jake Bennett until Max Schuemann’s two-out homer in the fifth.
That cut the Yankees’ deficit to 4-1 after Cole allowed solo homers by Masataka Yoshida and Anthony Seigler in the first two innings and a two-run double with a 114.4-mph exit velocity by Willson Contreras in the third. Yoshida's homer was his second of the season. Seigler's was an opposite-field shot just over the Green Monster in leftfield for his first major-league homer.
“[We were] kind of chasing uphill and weren’t able . . . had a couple of chances to get a big hit and weren’t able to do it,” Boone said.
Those chances came in just one inning, the seventh.
After Amed Rosario and Cody Bellinger opened with sharp singles against Bennett, Jasson Dominguez went down swinging in a non-competitive five-pitch at-bat. After Justin Slaten struck out Jose Caballero looking, Caballero started tapping his helmet, signaling for an ABS challenge, almost before plate umpire Clint Vondrak had finished his pull-back called third strike mechanic. The ABS graphic showed the pitch almost a full baseball in the lower part of the strike zone. Schuemann then struck out to end the inning.
“We’ve got to find a way right now,” Boone said.
Making that difficult at the moment is the fact that two players in the thick of team MVP honors, Bellinger and Ben Rice, are in mini-slumps.
Rice, an AL MVP candidate who was neck-in-neck with Judge for the league lead in homers before the Yankees’ captain got hurt, went 0-for-4 Saturday and is in a 2-for-23 skid in his last six games with one homer in his last eight games. Bellinger, 1-for-2 with two walks on Saturday, is 5-for-33 with no homers in his last 10 games.
The Yankees started this trip by winning two out of three in Detroit. In their 4-2 victory in the series finale, they homered three times — two by lefty-killer Paul Goldschmidt and one by Dominguez — off lefthander Tarik Skubal, who won the AL Cy Young Award the previous two seasons.
So three rough games offensively isn’t necessarily indicative of anything, especially with them coming in a ballpark that historically has given the Yankees trouble.
It still is the smallest of sample sizes when it comes to forecasting what LWAJ will look like during the next month-plus.
A few more games similar to these first three at Fenway, though, inevitably will revive the kind of question Boone hoped might be in his rearview mirror but may be fast approaching.
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.
