This week on 24: How a 24-hour stretch over the weekend exposed the Yankees for what they are, a middling team with a foundation that springs leaks in one area even when patching other holes.
Fundamentally, the Yankees were mediocre in consecutive defeats by the Blue Jays. Late in Saturday’s game, Brian McCann, out of position at first base, could not make the play when confronted with a vexing decision. Late in Sunday’s game, Dellin Betances and David Robertson, the club’s prime relief pitchers, could not hold runners on first base in consecutive innings of a tie game.
Thus, the homestand that began 7-1 ended 7-3 with Sunday’s 5-4 defeat by Toronto. Coupled with Saturday’s 6-4 loss, the Yankees not only failed to solidify their tenuous hold on the second wild card, they begin their six-game trip to Texas and Boston one game behind the Blue Jays for the final playoff berth and as one of seven teams within four games of that spot.
The Yankees, who hadn’t lost a game in The Bronx to the Blue Jays since Obama’s first term, lost this three-game series.
The commonality among those seven teams in the mix for the postseason knockout game against either the Angels or A’s — the Yankees, Jays, Mariners, Royals, Indians, Rays and White Sox — is their commonality.
If it weren’t a rule of grammar, you’d spell the New York team name as “yankees.” Lower case. Dominance and stars, past tense.
Power was restored to The Bronx through the homestand, the Yankees going yard twice in all three games against the Jays — Chase Headley and Francisco Cervelli went back-to-back in the fifth inning Sunday — while producing 10 home runs on the 10-game homestand. So that’s something. The starting pitching was good enough. That’s something else.
But for ordinary baseball teams, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. There are reasons the Yankees haven’t been able to construct a winning streak of more than four games since the middle of April, and they’re not all related to the names on the DL.
OK, so Betances caught a spike on the mound that caused him to throw wildly while attempting to keep Colby Rasmus close following a four-pitch walk to lead off the eighth. Rasmus went to third and then scored a batter later on a sac fly to left to break what was a 3-3 tie. OK, that happens.
But Robertson, who took over a 4-4 game to start the ninth after Carlos Beltran’s RBI single in the bottom of the eighth tied the game, gave a whole new meaning to defensive indifference by simply forgetting to check Jose Bautista on first base with two outs. That doesn’t happen … or at least it shouldn’t.
That lapse gave Bautista, who was taking a walking lead, essentially a free pass to second base, from where he scored the winning run a batter later on Dioner Navarro’s flare to right-center.
“I didn’t think he was going,” Robertson said. “I let it slip.”
The Yankees can afford anything and anyone — yeah, right, $189 million my asterisk — but these Yankees can’t afford slips and mistakes like that. They’re not good enough to overcome them. They won’t be good enough to overcome them even with the addition of a starting pitcher like Cliff Lee by Thursday’s non-waiver trade deadline, either.
Because 104 games into the season, it is perfectly clear that the Yankees must play near-perfect baseball in order to win games. Talent may never be quite enough on its own, but there isn’t quite enough talent here to routinely overcome mistakes, routine or otherwise.
“Our miscues cost us,” manager Joe Girardi said. “We have to be better.”
General manager Brian Cashman, who attended the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown on Sunday as Joe Torre was enshrined, has until Thursday to continue the makeover of the team that left spring training.
But unless something unforeseen develops, the GM will essentially be in the market for stopgaps that might represent incremental improvement, as have the recent acquisitions of Headley and Brandon McCarthy.
That’s not likely to create a gap between the Yankees and the six teams with whom they are enmeshed in the fight for the AL’s final playoff spot, and certainly not if the Yankees play the kind of sloppy ball they did twice in 24 hours this weekend.