As the final days of June passed the Yankees by, Aaron Boone explained why he was not concerned about his team’s latest annual summer swoon.
“Every year is different. Every group’s a little bit different. I have a lot of confidence in our team,” the manager said at the time. “There’s been different times where I haven’t been as bullish or as optimistic.”
Boone, always striving for an even-keel approach, added, “I don’t even know if we’re necessarily that far into anything.”
Well, it’s August now, and the Yankees are so far into a stretch of poor play that they’re in third place in the American League East, a division they led by seven games on May 28.
After getting swept by the Marlins over the weekend, Boone’s squad was 4.5 games behind the first-place Blue Jays and 1.5 games behind the second-place Red Sox.
Prior to Monday’s series-opener in Texas, the pinstripers held a half-game lead over the Mariners for the final wild card spot and a 2.5-game lead over the in-pursuit Rangers.
With that in mind, Boone briefly dropped the “everything will be OK” messaging that he’s disseminated throughout the majority of his managerial tenure.
“It’s getting to be real gut-check time,” Boone said Sunday, via the YES Network. “It’s getting late. It’s certainly not too late for us, and I am confident that we’re gonna get it together, but that’s all it is right now. It’s empty until we start doing it.”
When asked why he remained confident, Boone returned to the notion that the Yankees “have a really good team out there.”
But the Bombers entered Monday 22-29 since June 6, giving them a worse record than the basement-dwelling White Sox, Pirates and A’s over that stretch.
The Yankees haven’t just been losing, either. They’ve played consistently sloppy baseball for two months now, routinely justifying the Dodgers’ post-World Series criticisms with porous defense and boneheaded mistakes on the bases.
Almost every day, it feels as if Boone says something “can’t happen” or a play has to be made. And yet…
Fortunately for the Yankees, they have a rather easy remaining schedule, with 23 games left against the lowly White Sox, Nationals, Twins and Orioles. All of those teams are in last place except for the Twins, who just had a fire sale.
The Yanks also expect to get Aaron Judge back from a flexor strain in Texas. While he will only DH at first, he’ll be a welcomed addition to what is still baseball’s top offense.
Mark Leiter Jr. is also supposed to rejoin the team in Texas, further boosting a once-battered bullpen that underwent significant upgrades prior to the trade deadline. While those upgrades – Jake Bird, David Bednar and Camilo Doval – didn’t make the strongest first impressions in Miami on Friday, the trio and fellow newcomers Ryan McMahon, Austin Slater and José Caballero make the Yankees a much better team than they were for the majority of this stretch.
The pieces are in place. There is talent on this team, as Boone has said.
The question is whether these Yankees can put it together with 50 games to go.
“Since I’ve been here, I feel like we have a chance to be as good as any team as we’ve had,” Boone said. “I really feel like that. That starts with me and helping them get it out, but we gotta do it. And again, I am very confident that we will. But it has been a long enough stretch of ups and downs, lose a few, win a few.
“We gotta do better than that.”
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