Home field could mean World to Yanks
Bombers need to keep up fight for MLB’s best record
The Yankees can win the pennant and win the World Series even if they don’t get homefield in the American League, which would mean plenty if it is them against the Astros again in the American League Championship Series. After everything they have overcome this season, you can’t count them out, even as they keep losing guys all the way into the middle of September. This is as tough a Yankee team as I can ever remember, and that includes 1977 and ’78 and Torre’s Yankees, too. They have played the whole season with a club fighter’s heart. And keep coming.
But they need homefield throughout the playoffs to give themselves their best chance. They just do. They need to close that deal. It only might mean everything in the end, in an ALCS, then in a World Series.
Start in their own league: As good as they are at home, the Astros are better. And please remember what happened the last time the two teams played in October: The Yankees won the middle three games of the American League Championship Series at the Stadium. The Astros won Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 at Minute Maid Park.
You know how many of those games Justin Verlander pitched? Two. You know who will get two starts if the thing goes the distance again? Him. The best starting pitcher in the sport and one of the best of his generation.
Dallas Keuchel is with the Braves now. Charlie Morton
is with the Rays. But Gerrit Cole, who has been almost as good as Verlander has been this season, is A.J. Hinch’s No. 2 in Houston. Zack Greinke is Hinch’s No. 3. The Astros have even better starting pitching than they did two years ago even though the Yankees have the better bullpen.
And by the way? In those four games at Minute Maid Park in ’17, the Yankees scored a grand, whopping total of three runs. It doesn’t mean these starters will shut down the Yankees the way Verlander and Keuchel and finally Morton, in Game 7, did. But they could. And then it would be 10 years since the Yankees last played in the World Series.
What this really means is that the playoffs have started already for the Yankees. They need to treat the rest of the regular season like a pennant race out of the past, them against the Astros for best record, all the way down the stretch. Because the best record in the league really might mean everything this time. The Yankees need to grind the rest of the way the way the Mets have been grinding since the All-Star Break.
Incidentally: Winning the East guarantees the Yankees nothing in the first round. If they do end up with the best record, they have to play either the Rays or the Indians or the A’s, who swept the Yankees in Oakland the last time the two teams played. And please know that the Yankees were 3-4 against the A’s this season, 3-4 against the Astros, 3-4 against the Indians, 4-2 against the Twins. The best they have done against any possible playoff team is the Rays, against whom they are 12-5.
“When you play us, my goal is always when you’re facing our offense, I want you to feel it,” Aaron Boone said during the Red Sox series last weekend.
People have felt it all year long. The Yankees still have a chance to hit 300 home runs, in a season when Giancarlo Stanton has still hit a grand total of one. They have been something to see across the long season. But it is a different story in a short series. They found it out against the Red Sox last October, after breaking the all-time team record for home runs (at the time) with 268. It wasn’t home runs that we remember from that fourgame series against the Sox. It was all the strikeouts and ground balls in big moments. In Games 6 and 7 against the Astros in ’17, the Yankees’ offense shut down entirely. Verlander stuffed them in Game 6, Morton and Lance McCullers did the same in Game 7.
This isn’t the season we thought we would get from the
Yankees back in Tampa. But I still believe it is the most compelling they have had, because of the record and because of a Biblical number of injuries, they have had since Torre’s Yankees won 114 in the regular season of 1998. Ending up with the best record isn’t a requirement, of course. We know they went back to Houston ahead three games to two two years ago. But they will always wonder how everything plays out if the first two and last two had been on 161st Street.
When we think back on this season, we’re going to think that most days were like the one the Yankees had in Detroit on Thursday, when the Yankees won two games off the Tigers and lost three more guys to injuries: Edwin Encarnacion (oblique), J.A. Happ (sore forearm) and Gary Sanchez
(groin). They keep coming. They do it with home runs, they do it with bullpen, they do it with Brian Cashman’s
Regular Irregulars, they’ve done it into this weekend without Luis Severino, Stanton, Dellin Betances, Miguel Andujar, with Aaron Hicks playing just 59 games. You know who wasn’t supposed to look indispensable at the start of the season? Brett Gardner. But he sure looks that way now.
Starting Tuesday, the schedule smiles on the Yankees: Three against the Angels, three against the Blue Jays, two against the Rays, finally three against the Texas Rangers. If they are going to win the 11 games in October that Reggie Jackson always talks about, they have to kill it in those 11 games. Might make all the difference in the world as in, World Series.