Are Yankees coming down to earth?
OAKLAND, Calif. — Who would have pegged the lovely state of California, where Lana Turner once got her big break at a soda counter, as the locale of shattered dreams for these 2017 Yankees?
Or, as Brett Gardner put it late Sunday afternoon: “I like California. But we’ve been here long enough.”
The Yankees flew out here a week ago on top of the world, metaphorically. They return home more beat up than Willis from “Diff ’rent Strokes” when bullies sent him to the hospital. Owners of a six-game losing streak after a 4-3 defeat to Oakland, the American League’s worst team, the Yankees have thrown a worst-case scenario onto the table: Their track records, or lack thereof, just might be catching up with them. “You know at some point you’re going to go through some tough spells,” Joe Girardi said. “We just went through one and we’ve got to bounce back on Tuesday.” Many of Girardi’s Yankees teams have been favored and started strong, only to slow down due to age. This one doesn’t fall into that category. Rather, these Yankees, a considerable mystery to the industry at the season’s outset, proved a delightful surprise as they climbed atop the American League East. They did so by enjoying surprisingly strong performances from superstar rookie Aaron Judge — as well as rookie Jordan Montgomery and veterans Starlin Castro, Brett Gardner, Aaron Hicks and Matt Holliday in the lineup and Michael Pineda, CC Sabathia and Luis Severino in the starting rotation. None of these players have fallen off a cliff statistically. Rather, they have understandably failed to maintain producing over their heads, be it due to injuries (Sabathia) or relative ineffectiveness. When you combine those realities with the continuing struggles of Masahiro Tanaka, you get the club’s current status, in which they lost their last two games to the mediocre Angels before suffering a four-game sweep at the hands of the A’s. Four of the losses, including Sunday’s, came by one run, two by two runs, and one by three. They didn’t quite get obliterated, getting outscored on the seven-game Anaheim/Oakland swing by a modest 37-30 count.
“Sometimes you worry a little bit more [when you get blown out],” Girardi said. “But when you lose tight games, it probably upsets you even more. It’s kind of a little bit of both.”
Statistically, you choose the tight losses, betting on your fortunes turning. “I feel like this road trip could’ve gone a lot differently if just a couple of things had gone our way,” Gardner said. “Sometimes we didn’t come up with the big hit, or make the right pitch. Sometimes we might not have played great defense. But we just came up short.”
With this group, however, you wonder whether a course correction will leave them on the wrong side more often after they rode much excellence to the penthouse.
“Listen, we’re still in first place,” Gardner said. “If you told me on June [18th] we’d be in first place, I’d have signed up for that. I think everyone would rather be eight or 10 games up right now, but that’s not just too realistic in the division that we’re in.”
Actually, the Red Sox went into Houston on Sunday night with the chance to virtually tie the Yankees, although they’d still trail by a game in the loss column.
Who will rise to lift the Yankees toward another good streak? Maybe Judge can climb even another level. Perhaps Severino is truly ready to become a frontline starter. Or Castro, with an unusually long track record for a 27year-old, can establish a new ceiling.
Plenty more candidates exist, given the youth of this club, and don’t forget that Brian Cashman will be in a position soon to upgrade the team with trades for pitching and infield help.
Nevertheless, you’re not being an irrational pessimist to wonder whether this team has already hit its high point for 2017 while acknowledging that plenty more potential good times remain in the year ahead. It’s on the Yankees to nullify that worst-case scenario. It’s not on you to discount it.