With his club stumbling through the last two months of the season, Aaron Boone has insisted that he is leading one of the best teams he’s managed over his eight seasons with the Yankees.
“I do feel like, since I’ve been here, we have a chance to be as good as any team as we’ve had,” the skipper said last weekend after the Bombers were swept by the middling Marlins. “I really feel like that.”
Two series losses later, the Yankees have yet to show any sort of evidence that supports Boone’s claim.
On Sunday, they dropped a rubber match against the Astros as their ace, Max Fried, struggled again. Meanwhile, Houston’s Jason Alexander, who woke up with a 5.97 ERA, permitted just one hit over six scoreless innings. The Yankees did end up scoring in the 7-1 loss, but a few sloppy mistakes and some poor bullpen work let the game get out of hand, continuing trends that have plagued this team for a while.
The Yankees led the American League East by seven games on May 28, but they are now in third place. With the team six games behind the Blue Jays and three behind the Red Sox at the conclusion of Sunday’s contest, the Wild Card race is the primary focus right now.
Even that is in jeopardy, as the Yankees control the third and final Wild Card spot by just half a game. Had it not been for the abysmal White Sox beating the Guardians on Sunday, Cleveland would have the Yankees on the outside looking in.
“We’re not doing our job,” Aaron Judge said Sunday. “We’re not doing the little things that put ourselves in a good position to go out there and win baseball games.”
The Yankees have no one but themselves to blame for that, as they are 2-7 since what was supposed to be a reinvigorating trade deadline and 20-31 since June 13. Only the Nationals, Rockies and Mets – New York’s other catastrophe – have been worse over that latter stretch.
And yet, the Yankees publicly consider themselves among baseball’s best.
“We’ve got a great team in this room,” Judge insisted, making the claim more than once despite insufficient proof. “A lot of great players, guys that have had their backs up against the wall before and in tough situations. Just like every year you play here, you’re gonna have your back up against the wall. So guys have been there and done that, and we just gotta step up and do it on the field. We can sit here and talk about it. You can ask me how everything is going, but it’s about what we do on the field.”
Judge, a bit frustrated with some questions over the Yankees’ struggles and his health – he is rehabbing a right flexor strain – is right about one thing: the team has players who have been in this position before.
That’s partly because prolonged summer swoons have become an annual occurrence under Boone.
There have been years when the phenomenon has sunk the team, such as 2023, when the Yankees didn’t make the playoffs. Then there was last year, when the Yankees played a very similar style of baseball, only to overcome it and reach the World Series.
Of course, that style of baseball contributed to a loss in the Fall Classic. But it’s too soon for the 2025 Yankees to be thinking about how their poor fundamentals could hurt them in October.
“The game is littered with dead and buried teams,” Boone said Sunday. “We’re in a playoff position right now, and we’ve been through a bad two months where we haven’t performed at a level we need to. But look at last year. Go back the year before, the year before. You can pick out a number of teams that are sitting in a worse position than we are right now that go on that run. We have the people to do that, no doubt in my mind, but it’s just sitting here as talk right now.”
Boone better hope that he is right about his personnel, or the Yankees could be looking at an early end to their season.
A first-round exit in the playoffs wouldn’t surprise anyone at this point. Heck, the Yankees have to make the postseason.
They still can — and should — but the on-field product needs to start matching the descriptions the Yankees have peddled.
“We haven’t been good enough for the last few months,” Boone acknowledged. “But this is different than say even 2023, where I didn’t think we were necessarily capable of that run that we needed to really get hot. And we were out of position at that point. This is different. We’re in a position right now where we’re in control of things. We’re in a playoff spot technically right now, and I believe we have the people to get it done.
“We’ve gotta play consistent baseball, period.”
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