Forecast will improve with solid outings
BALTIMORE — Rain battered Oriole Park at Camden Yards on Thursday night, and plenty more is expected here Saturday.
In between, the Yankees enjoyed a Sonny Friday.
The more the weather impacts the Yankees’ season, the more they’re going to need starts like the one Sonny Gray provided in their 4-1 victory over the terrible Orioles. The seesawing Gray honored his recent pattern of alternating good and bad outings by following his previous stinker, May 26 against the Angels at home, with this sharp, six-inning, one-run, six-strikeout performance; he didn’t walk anyone for the first time this season.
“I feel good,” said Gray, who lowered his ERA from 5.98 to 5.50. “It’s only a matter of time before it starts clicking consistently.”
That would make life easier for the Yankees, who are playing tremendous baseball, yet find themselves locked in an American League East dogfight with the easily spectacular Red Sox, who suffered a 7-3 loss to the Astros on Friday night. Thanks to the topsy-turvy weather the Yankees have endured, the Yankees (36-17) both trail the Red Sox (39-19) by a half-game in the AL East standings and lead them by two games in the loss column.
As Al Pacino’s Tony D’Amato preached in “Any Given Sunday,” the inches we need are everywhere around us. Will the immense difference between an AL East title and a win-or-go-home wild-card contest come down to the inches … of precipitation? The key to that could be the Yankees’ starting rotation.
Besides the American League Cy Young Award candidate Luis Severino, the Yankees’ starters have ridden a collective rollercoaster, benefiting from regular bailouts by the team’s stellar lineup and strong bullpen. The Yankees’ starters rank sixth in the AL in ERA (4.07) and ninth with an average of 5.45 innings per start, as per FanGraphs.
“[We’re] wanting to get some more innings consistently out of our starters,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said before the game. “It’s just managing the long haul of the season. … Especially with these weather issues that we’ve had to where we can protect guys knowing we’ve got some doubleheaders on the horizon.”
If they were a lesser team, the Yankees’ weather issues might have devolved into a full-blown weather complex by now. The Yankees’ seven official postponements — that doesn’t count their suspended game at the Nationals on May 15, though it does include the postponed resumption of that contest on May 16 — rank them second in baseball, behind the Tigers’ eight. Their 53 games completed tie the Twins for the fewest in baseball.
The first of 2 ¹/2 doubleheaders (counting the suspended Nationals contest as a halfgame) comes Monday, with the Yankees (assuming they play Saturday) set to start Severino in one game and a minor league call-up for the other. The call-up likely won’t inspire Yankees fans a la freshmen like Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar; Justus Sheffield doesn’t hold a spot on the 40-man roster, which decreases his chances of getting the assignment
“You deal with different things during the season, so hopefully it doesn’t have any impact,” Yankees pitching coach Larry Rothschild said. “Just keeping guys scheduled and, when the makeups come, not to have to use guys too much.”
A straightening out of Gray, for whom the Yankees gave up an interesting package of youngsters to acquire from Oakland last July, would go considerably toward that goal, especially before the trading season starts in earnest. On this night, the right-hander talked about throwing more curveballs to tame the O’s after Manny Machado’s first-inning homer, in front of a crowd chanting, “Let’s go Yankees!” The data from Brooks Baseball’s Pitchf/x tool indicate only a modest increase in that pitch. He just needs to get better results more regularly, no matter how.
“I feel confident. I feel good,” Gray said. “Keep moving forward.”
Forward through the storms, and the makeups of those storms, to come. kdavidoff@nypost.com