Even with occasional blip, Yankees are in control
Matt Carpenter of the Yankees celebrates his 10th-inning two run home run against the Reds with teammate Giancarlo Stanton at Yankee Stadium on Thursday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Maybe it’s baseball sacrilege, the sort of thing you don’t admit out loud, lest the purists hunt you down and rip the scorecard out of your trembling hands.
But though the Red Sox capitalized on the Yankees’ weaknesses Friday night, and though the Yankees are embroiled in their worst stretch of the season, this final series before the All-Star break isn’t the fatal marker so many seem to worry it is.
It isn’t season-defining. It isn’t the unequivocal sign that the magic has run out. If, heaven forbid, they drop two out of three, the Yankees will not immediately wilt into second-half oblivion. Aaron Judge, mired in a perfectly human slump that Friday was extended with an 0-for-5, will not see his OPS swan dive off a numerical cliff, never to begin with a “9” again.
As long as no one gets hurt, everything will mostly be OK.
I know: It’s weird to say it after a game like Friday’s — a 5-4, 11-inning ordeal in which the Yankees loaded the bases with none out in the ninth and one out in the 10th but didn’t score before losing on an 0-and-2 wild pitch with two outs in the 11th — but it’s also somehow true.
There’s no point in sugarcoating how ugly this has been. It’s not just that the Yankees have lost five of six, it’s that the losses were to the Reds — one of the worst teams in baseball — and the Red Sox, still rivals, even if they’re 14 1⁄2 games behind them in the standings.
Three losses have been in extra innings. Along the way, Luis Severino went on the injured list, Clay Holmes looked mortal and they’re navigating various dings and scrapes to Aaron Hicks, Josh Donaldson and Miguel Castro. Judge is in that aforementioned slump (.188 in his last 13 games) and Joey Gallo has been in a slump all season (he’s 4-for-his-last 55 with 27 strikeouts).
But there’s this bad habit we’ve got to crack — the one that says that things have to either be incredible or horrible and never anything in between. It’s not just a few bad games before the second half, but a death knell waiting to be rung. You know the deal: sackcloth, rended garments, 280-character declarations of woe, all underscored with that meme of a dog in a fiery room declaring “This is fine.”
You know what, though? This is fine. Not good. Not ideal. Just fine. At least for right now.
The Yankees have a 12-game lead on the Rays in the AL East. If they lose every game going into the break, they still will have the best record in baseball.
That’s not inviting complacency as much as acknowledging that no one survives a 162-game gantlet without some version of this happening. There’s another element, too — a layer of trust the Yankees should have earned from their fan base. Baseball, though often seen as data-driven, also is an especially human sport, played as much between the ears as it is between the lines, and in this regard, the Yankees have proved remarkably resilient.
When presented the uncertainty of his contract extension, or even his (now-settled) arbitration case, Judge merely shrugged and kept hitting balls very far. When Josh Donaldson invited controversy by calling Tim Anderson “Jackie” — taken by many to be a racist action — Aaron Boone didn’t hesitate to say his player was wrong.
After the team had a handful of unvaccinated players last year, every Yankee made the trip to Toronto this season. Though there’s no telling what made them change their minds, their cohesion does serve in stark contrast with the Royals, who essentially had to send minor-leaguers to play the Blue Jays after 10 players didn’t meet Canada’s vaccination requirements.
The Yankees have a major league-leading 11 walk-off wins and a propensity for the comeback. Ask them why and various players will say it’s because they know it’s not up to just one guy. That sort of thinking shifts the focus: Suddenly, it’s not fear of failure but desire for success. It’s not up to one guy, but it would sure be nice if you were the guy anyway.
“That’s what has me excited about this group — their closeness, their single-mindedness on the task, their attention to the small things,” Boone said.
He was asked, too, if he ever finds it funny the way people will look at a single game or series or week in July and declare all hope lost. In big markets, it’s not just a bad few games, it’s a canary in a coal mine, dropping dead before your very eyes.
“A little bit, yeah,” he said with a wry smile. “We make declarative statements off a week or a series or whatever we want to define things as. Hopefully we go on and win the East and win 100-however many games, and if we’re able to do that, it would be a tremendous regular season, but even in that, you’re going to have bumps, you’re going to have a week like we just had . . . We know ultimately, this team will be judged by October.”
That they will, and nothing that happened on July 15 will change that.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
