HIT MACHINE
DJ TOPS IN A.L. BATS
MARLINS 5
YANKEES 0
The Yankees know where and when they will begin the 2020 playoff. They just don’t know which version of the Bombers will show up in Cleveland to start a series against the Indians in the wild-card round of the expanded MLB playoffs.
Will it be the team that rattled off 10-straight wins and clinched a playoff spot a week early? Or will it be the Yanks that lost four out of their last five games, including a 5-0 shutout by the Marlins at Yankee Stadium Sunday in the final regularseason game of the season?
Not even DJ LeMahieu, who went 2-for-3 Saturday and claimed the American League batting title with a .364 batting average, knows for sure.
“It’s been kind of a roller coaster. I think we’re all excited to get in the postseason and kind of turn the page on this last week,” said LeMahieu, who becomes the only man to win the batting title in both leagues. “I know we’re gonna be ready on Tuesday. ….I love our team in that clubhouse. So I’m just excited … to get out there with them in the playoffs. I think it’s gonna be a really fun month.”
It will not be an easy month if the Yankees are to play through the tightened MLB playoff bubble.
Thanks to losing six of their final eight games, the Yankees finished with the fifth seed. That means they will play every game on the road, where they were 11-18 this season, and they drew a very dangerous first-round matchup in Cleveland. The Yankees’ struggling offense will face the one-two punch of likely AL Cy Young winner Shane Bieber and Zach Plesac in the best-ofthree series at Progressive Field.
The added challenge is that the Yankees have not seen Cleveland this season. The teams played regional schedules to try to minimize the COVID-19 risk by cutting down on travel in this pandemic-shortened, 60-game regular season.
“That’s a little different thing about this postseason is you’re going to be playing teams that you haven’t seen all year,” Brett Gardner said. “Obviously, they’re a team that has spring training out in Arizona, so we literally have not seen them at all. So we’ve obviously got a lot of guys looking at what they do.
And we’ll get on our iPads and look at some video and and try and come up with a good game plan.”
“I think they’ve got some pretty good pitching, and obviously Shane Bieber had a really, really good year,” the veteran outfielder said. “And, we’ll just be ready for whoever it is they’re going to throw at us.”
As daunting as that Bieber-Plesac, one-two punch is, the bigger challenge for the Yankees might be trying to find their offense again.
The Bombers, who finished second in the AL with 94 home runs led by the 22 from Luke Voit (the major-league home run king), hit just four homers over the last eight games. The Yankees were just 2-14 in games without a homer.
They had significant injuries throughout the regular season, but during this final week, they had everyone back. Still, a day after they broke out for 11 runs, they suffered their second shutout of the season Sunday.
The last weekend seemed to encapsulate their inconsistent season.
“It just seemed like we’d get hot and then have a couple games snowball on us and just couldn’t rebound,” LeMahieu said of the inconsistencies in the offense this season. “I think we’re the best team in the league. We still are definitely most talented. I don’t know why it was so up and down. I’ll just chalk it up to 2020.”