There’s bedlam in the Bronx. Just not the good kind.
In a season marked by entertaining highs mixed with frustrating lows, the New York Yankees now find themselves experiencing another bump in the road in 2021. Except in this instance, it could not come at a more inconvenient time.
It was just under two months ago that the Yankees were in their first bout of frustrating baseball heading into the second half of the season. On July 15th, their record was only two games above .500 (46-44) and their bats, despite having two of the league’s best hitters in Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, were struggling to put runs on the board in a fashion expected of them. Irritated fans were dishing out calls for management personnel heads to roll, and for the organization to make some move to juice a dormant offense.
That’s exactly what Brian Cashman and company did, two days before the MLB’s trade deadline on July 31st. Perceived as putting all of their chips into the middle of the table for the team to make a push for the postseason, the Yankees acquired OF Joey Gallo in a six-player deal with the Texas Rangers followed by a trade with the Chicago Cubs for first baseman Anthony Rizzo.
Following the two mega deals, the tide predictably changed and the Yankees became the hottest team in baseball. Despite having to deal with some COVID-19 issues amongst their pitching rotation with Gerrit Cole and Jordan Montgomery missing time on the protocols, the Bombers took a series sweep from the Marlins in late July before proceeding to win 20 of the next 24 games throughout the month of August. That stretch included a 13-game winning streak which propelled the Yankees to as high as 24 games above .500 and put them within sole possession of the first wild card spot in the American League.
Not only were they building some breathing room in the wildcard race, they were beginning to at least tap on the door of the first place Tampa Bay Rays in the AL East division standings.
As the calendar was crossing into September and the final stretch of regular season baseball just last week, the anticipation was building in the Bronx and broader New York for a possible Yankees-Rays series at the end of the season to decide the AL East champ.
That moment, however, was when the tide once again shifted on the Yankees, back in the negative direction. Now, after an embarrassing series loss and atrocious Labor Day performance at home, there is cause for grave concern. Not for the team’s division title prospects, but for those of making the postseason at all.
Coming back from their west coast road trip where they managed to split an important series with the Oakland Athletics and steal one game from the LA Angels, the Yankees have not brought their best baseball to their home stadium.
Against the last place in the division Orioles, a team simply hungry to mess with their rivals’ plans for the postseason at this point, the Yankees staved off defeat in game one of the series, 4-3, in extra innings. However, Baltimore found their bats at the right moments to steal the latter two games, the third game in heart-wrenching fashion as the Yankees squandered a 7-4 lead.
On Monday, the Yankees celebrated Labor Day by opening a four-game series with the Toronto Blue Jays. It was clear who took off from that game to relax like the rest of the country, as Toronto put up eight runs on the board, including a grand slam from Marcus Semien, to shut out the Yankees in front of their home crowd. Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Toronto’s star slugger, also hit his 40th home run to help the Blue Jays improve to 5-2 on the road in New York.
The humiliating defeat not only handed the Yankees their seventh loss in the last nine games, it may also spearhead a trend of losing that leads the team towards flirting with missing the postseason all together.
In the current American League Wild Card standings, the Yankees remain in sole possession of the first wild card spot, however breathing down their necks–only a half game back–are the rival Boston Red Sox. The expectation is for these two ball clubs to meet in the “win or go home” matchup if the current standings continue. Yet, what haunts Yankee fans right now is the prospect of facing a Red Sox team that may not beat them in a full series, but that could shock them in one game with Chris Sale on the mound, particularly in Fenway Park.
Then, right behind Boston, both at 4 games back of the Yankees, are the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners followed by the Oakland Athletics at 4.5 games back. Aaron Boone and company will continue their four game set with Toronto over the next three days, however they also have another series–a three game stint–left to play in Toronto in late September. Add onto that one more series with their three other division rivals as well.
With the recent dominance the Blue Jays have had against the Yankees, particularly in New York, if Guerrero Jr. and his squad manage to steal a couple more games from the series there is the real possibility that the Yankees could fall as low to the fourth spot in the wild card standings, currently held by the Seattle Mariners. Pending that were to happen, eclipsing Seattle again might be difficult given they, like Toronto and Boston, have started to develop their own hot streak recently.
Thus, the final three weeks of the regular season are shaping up to be the most vital for the Yankees, an organization that just sold off a bunch of capital before the deadline to build a 5-man group of power hitters in their lineup that would help them compete for a World Series title. Instead of spacing itself out in the final month, the wild race has tightened dramatically to the point where every game is as important as the previous one. The Yankees are currently dancing with falling below the postseason dotted line, and the risks associated with crashing under it are substantial.
“It’s a concern,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “These are big-time games right now. These are important games. I want us to play well. We need to dig ourselves out of this little funk we’ve been in for a week.”
One of the necessary fixes they need to make is towards their propensity to strike out, particularly within the beef of their order and with runners in scoring position. In Monday’s game alone, the Yankees struck out 10 times with their 2-3-4 hitters–Joey Gallo, Aaron Judge, and Giancarlo Stanton–accumulating seven of those strikeouts on a combined 0-11 at the plate. Gallo has also struck out on half of his at-bats (61 of 123) and is batting an average of .130, the second worst average of his career after 2016 in Texas when he only played in 17 games.
Errors from the Yankees infield have been another Achilles’ heel in this recent rough stretch. The recent victims of these mistakes have been a mix of shortstop Gleyber Torres and third baseman Gio Urshela. The two Bombers combined for three errors on Monday, two of which came off soft grounders in the middle of the infield. Luckily for the Yankees, none of those errors lead to any runs for Toronto. The Yankees as a team have 81 errors this season.
The games will continue to roll as October draws closer, with the Yankees in the midst of twenty straight days of competition that won’t see an off-day until Sept. 23rd. Nine of their remaining twenty five games will be against teams chasing them for the top wild spot in the AL. There is no longer room for miscues and time for the Yankees to act as if they are going to skate into the postseason this year.
If not their biggest lesson from this season so far, the Yankees have at least learned that a winning streak is only as good as the next victory you add to it. Once it is ended, it is deemed meaningless and the playing field becomes level once more, demanding a more concerted effort be put into winning so that the momentum can be reattained when it needs to most.
As the Yankees experience this untimely skid, it remains to be seen whether they regain their previous momentum at the most crucial time.
