This was not supposed to be the Yankees’ year, until it was right in front of them.
And when general manager Brian Cashman recognized that — making three trades before the deadline — the Yankees were suddenly all in. Now there are World Series dreams coupled with the possibility of frustration.
“Everybody has to recalibrate and reset what they thought,” YES Network play-by-play man Michael Kay said. “Coming into the season it was, ‘Just be competitive, just be in the wild-card hunt in September.’ Now, it would be a disappointment if they don’t win the American League East. If they get to a wild card and they don’t win that game, I think it would be a disappointment. And if they don’t make the wild card I think it’d be a colossal disappointment.
“You can’t all of a sudden go back to what you thought in spring training because this team proved they were better than that. And the deals the Yankees made will obviously help in the future, but were made to help them right now. I think they have to get into at least a round to be somewhat satisfactory, and I think they should even win more than a round.”
The Yankees’ best chance of winning the American League East, or at least staying in the race, comes this weekend at Fenway Park with a three-game series that begins Friday night. The Yankees trail Boston by four games with Thursday’s 7-5 win over the Mets, with a four-game set in The Bronx in two weeks still left on the schedule.
The Yankees had pulled ahead of Boston during a 12-day stretch in which they acquired Tommy Kahnle, David Robertson, Todd Frazier (White Sox), Jaime Garcia (Twins) and Sonny Gray (A’s), but have only gone 7-8 (entering Thursday’s game) since all those trades were completed.
The Yankees have dealt with a battered rotation and a beleaguered closer (Aroldis Chapman) in that time, but Kay said he believes the lineup is the biggest issue.
“It comes down to their hitting. It has disappeared,” Kay said. “They have got to get [Aaron] Judge back to a semblance of what [he was] in the first half. If they don’t do that then somebody else has to step up and do more: [Matt] Holliday and [Starlin] Castro when they come off the DL, and the wild card in all of this is [Greg] Bird. If Bird can come back and approximate 70 percent of what he did in spring training, that would be like making a really good trade for a left-handed bat and would give the lineup more balance.
“You see [Masahiro] Tanaka and [CC] Sabathia out, and you think the starting pitching isn’t good enough, and it may not be good enough to win a World Series, but it’s good enough to win the East. The hitting has been the letdown and the reason they’ve been under a .500 team for the past 80 games.”
Judge has taken the most precipitous fall, given the massive heights he started from. But fans have remained loyal to him even as the strikeouts pile up at a record rate.
“I think they fell in love with him. If you fall in love with a girl and she gets a pimple, you still love her,” Kay said. “I just think that Judge is everything that a Yankees fan would want: He’s got power, he’s a sweet kid, he plays hard. Yankees fans haven’t forgotten that he gave them a first half that no fan base had seen in the history of baseball. Just cause it’s a long downturn doesn’t mean they fell out of love and I don’t blame them.”