Is anyone else just, like, confused by the Yankees?
Is anyone out there watching these games and struggling to understand why exactly the season has gone sideways again?
There are fans caught up in assigning blame, consumed by determining whose fault this is and demanding that person be fired. I’m still stuck trying to figure out exactly what’s happening.
The team’s inconsistency, which occasionally veers into the horrific, has become perhaps the central mystery of the 2021 baseball season -- although in fairness to the scouting community, some of the game’s sharper eyes suspected this would happen.
“I have coaches who saw them in spring training who saw this coming,” said one MLB manager on Monday, as I made a round of calls and texts in an attempt to unpack what I’d seen transpire over the weekend (another sweep at the hands of the Red Sox, in case you were in an area with no TV or internet).
The critiques of the Yankees in spring were indeed going around in scouting and coaching circles. Their offense was too one-dimensional, the position players not athletic enough. Gleyber Torres was a second baseman. Gary Sanchez was not a catcher.
It extended to the pitching: Corey Kluber’s fastball velocity was alarming. Jameson Taillon’s only plus pitch was the breaking ball, not the four-seam fastball with which he was attempting to revive his career.
The first three months of the regular season validated some of those concerns more than others, and led to the weekend debacle.
As one rival scout said, “They have been living and dying by the home run for several seasons, and it’s proving itself to be a problem again this year. The Red Sox situational hitting and baserunning are far superior, and it was never more evident than this weekend.”
Take out the valid baserunning critique, and the rest of that comment gets to a question that has been asked behind closed doors in the Yankees’ clubhouse. Is their offense particularly affected by the deadened baseball? Is their lack of situational hitting exposed by their need for power, at a time when power is newly difficult to come by?
Scouts identify Torres and DJ LeMahieu in particular as victims of this change. All those outs Torres is making? Maybe some of those would have sailed over the wall earlier in his career. Perhaps LeMahieu’s opposite field pop, perfectly tailored to Yankee Stadium, is a bit less poppy nowadays.
“Maybe they benefited from the 2019 rubber balls,” said one rival manager of the Yankees' offense as a whole.
(At least LeMahieu has hit better lately -- actually, the team had stronger overall at-bats in the Boston series than at earlier points in the season, not that moral victories should comfort the fan base).
Alongside clubhouse discussions about the deadened balls are talks about the drop in spin on the baseballs since MLB began enforcing its ban on foreign substances. In part because of this hitter-friendly change, hope and belief linger that the rest of the season will be better than what we have seen so far.
If it isn’t, uncomfortable questions about the team’s leadership will grow louder. We’ve already posited that Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone have earned the right to return next year and beyond, but the only opinion that will ultimately matter on that is Hal Steinbrenner’s.
And as we have reported before, the owner is said to be less than thrilled of late, and pointed in his questions.
Hey, we all have questions (though we're not big on knee-jerk blame; internal reflection and departmental accountability feel more appropriate after so many years of success).
This team was supposed to contend for a championship, and currently holds a winning record against just one American League East team, the Baltimore Orioles. The Yanks can squeak out a series win over the Kansas City Royals, then get bullied in Boston.
Forgive me for struggling to process any of it.
"bad" - Google News
June 29, 2021 at 05:46AM
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Why do good Yankees do bad things? - Yahoo Sports
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