Rays know who they are, Yankees still seek identity
NEW YORK — This is what Brian Cashman said the other day, in one of the earliest State of the Yankees speech we’ve ever gotten from him, one that actually sounded more like State of the Injured List:
“We got a good group of people, player-wise, staffwise, support-staff wise. It’s a championship-caliber operation.”
At which point Yankee fans probably wanted a word, thinking the team’s for-life general manager had to be talking to Hal Steinbrenner, just because he couldn’t possibly have been talking to them.
The Yankees lost a game to the Rays on Friday night in St. Petersburg, and found themselves 10 games behind the Rays, at the end of the first week of May. At that point the Yankees’ record was 17-16 and they were still in last place in the AL East. On the same night the Mets won a game they badly needed, 1-0, over the Rockies, ending their night with the same record as the Yankees, with an even bigger payroll. The Mets have been injured, too. They just didn’t call a press conference this week to talk about it.
Here is the real State of the Yankees, one-fifth of the way into things: They ended last season getting swept in the American League Championship Series by a team — Astros — better than the Yankees, deeper, more talented, better constructed. Now the Yankees start this season feeling as if they’re being swept by a Rays team that looks, well, better, younger, deeper, more talented, and better constructed.
In addition to being a championship-caliber operation, one that spends $200 million less than the Yankees on baseball players according to the current Spotrac standings (and a whopping $272 million less than Uncle Steve’s Mets), the Rays continue to know who they are. The Yankees? Their fans once again wonder exactly who they are, what their biggest strength is, where they’re going with this roster, even when everybody, or mostly everybody, is fitter than fighter pilots.
“If you want to convict somebody, convict me,” Brian Cashman said the other day in the Yankee dugout.
It’s just something executives and coaches and managers say when their teams are losing more than they should be. They don’t really mean it. It just makes them sound more accountable than they’re comfortable being. But when Cash said that, you wanted to ask:
Convict you of what, all the injuries you just talked about?
The Yankees have plenty of time to turn this around, and likely will turn things around to some extent, when they have Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton back, at least until Stanton is back on the injured list again, at this point in Stanton’s Yankee career when it is disingenuous at best and idiotic at worst to see him as any more than a big, talented, home-run bashing parttime player. They certainly can turn things around real good when — or maybe it should be if — Carlos Rodon gets the ball, even though Yankee fans probably heard alarms going off all over the Bronx when Rodon talked about his back issues being “chronic.” Oh good.
There are 128 games left in the season. So, of course no one is writing off anybody, as tough as the AL East looks like it’s going to be now that the Orioles are playing this well and the Red Sox are playing better than anybody except perhaps a pretty great manager named Alex Cora thought they could.
If Yankee fans want to be optimistic about how sharp a turn a team can make, and in a good way, they actually should look to their rivals in Boston. Put me down, top of the heap and head of the list, as somebody who thought the Sox were on their way to last place again after they were swept by the Pirates early at home and at The Trop by the Rays, fourgame sweep by them, a week later. Through Friday night, the Sox were riding a sweet seven-game winning streak and weren’t just ahead of the Yankees, too, were a halfgame ahead of the Blue Jays.
Maybe the Yankees even have it in them to totally flip the script from last season, a rather amazing script that saw them be 64-28 through the All-Star Break and then be nothing more than a mediocre .500 team the rest of the way until the Astros got them again in October.
The Yankees are better than they’ve shown so far, and should be a lot better just when Judge is back to being the kind of presence he is at the top of Aaron Boone’s batting order. And spoiler alert? If you think what you’ve witnessed so far is the manager’s fault, you’re watching the wrong movie.