THIRD AMONG EQUALS
BOSTON — It wasn’t a concession speech as much as it was a confession that the Yankees, through four-plus months of baseball, have been exposed as — horror of horrors! — the third-best team in baseball.
“There’s no question that they’ve established themselves right now as the best team in this league,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone had said Saturday night, after the Red Sox had shooed away the Yankees for the third straight night 4-1, moving 8 ½ games ahead in the A.L. East.
“That said: If you walk through our room right now, to a man, we know we can absolutely play with them. We know that when we’re at our best we can beat them. We acknowledge who they are right now. There’s no denying the season that they’re having.”
And there’s no denying what Boone, his team, the 37,830 inside Fenway Park and whatever stragglers may have stuck around by the time Sunday night’s game — a 5-4 Yankee loss — finally ended early Mondayd morningi saw: a Redd Sox team pushed to the brink, all but over that brink, rallying from three runs down and winning in the 10th.
Boone can, admittedly, sound awfully Pollyanna when things aren’t going well for his nine, but he is actually onto something with that description of his team’s plight, regardless of this gruesome loss.
Despite the first four months of this season, despite the first three games of this series, they should look across the field at Fenway Park and identify an equal looking back at them.
And look: The weekend is a bummer. It is. It wasn’t easy for the Yankees to get a firsthand look at what they’ve mostly just been observing from afar, from the safe remove of the out-of-town scoreboard and television highlights.
Numbers alone give you a sense of how good the Red Sox are: You don’t rise 45 games above .500 before August is a week old simply by being lucky. But when you watch the Sox up close, what you see is a team thath ddoes everythinghi well, much like the Astros who have slipped ahead of the Yankees in the race for AL East supremacy.
The lineup is superb, even missing Rafael Devers. The pitching is dynamite, even with Chris Sale taking a breather, as Rick Porcello and Nathan Eovaldi were nice enough to display firsthand. They have excellent speed (torturing poor Austin Romine most of the weekend) and run the bases well (Jackie Bradley Jr.’s mad dash of home ignited the Sox on Thursday) and they play outstanding defense. Alex Cora has yet to show an obvious weakness as a rookie manager.
The lone soft underbelly spot is the bullpen, which was on display Saturday when Craig Kimbrel did his best to muck up a non-save situation and wound up putting the tying runs on base before coaxing a fly ball off Greg Bird’s bat, and again Sunday when it turned a dicey seventh inning into a dumpster fire. All of that is true. All of that is fair. Now: take a step back. Exhale. Breathe. And remember that the worst of the Yankees schedule is behind them for the time being. After Sunday, the next eight games are against the White Sox, Rangers and Mets, who are a combined 63 games under .500 for the season. After three home games with the always-pesky Rays it’s 16 straight games against the Jays, Marlins, Orioles, White Sox and Tigers, who combined are a nifty 121 games under .500.
Yes, yes, yes: We can talk about how the Yankees haven’t been at their finest against terrible teams, how they occasionally lower themselves to the level of their competition, but that’s still 24 softballs in the next 27 games before their intriguing Oakland/Seattle swing in early September. There ought to be an awful lot of wins lurking in there. And, by the way: Aaron Judge will be back sometime in there, as well.
Maybe the deficit the Yankees find themselves in leaving Boston is too much to make up, maybe it isn’t. But the opportunity is there, right in front of them, for the Yankees to beef up their record, shore up their swagger and make sure the Sox, at the least, don’t have a cruise-control September ahead of them. The weekend just past might have been difficult. But the good news is, it’s over. And there are better times ahead.