This is beyond looking at the schedule anymore, circling in red ink “important” games and “statement” series. The Yankees travel to Baltimore on Monday to face the first-place Orioles and, yes, it is a series in which they’d like to play well, win two of three, remind the O’s that there’s lots of winning muscle memory in their dugout.
Yes, these are games that ought to be fun, the kind of meaningful mano-a-manos that serve as launching pads to the rest of the season.
But the hard truth about the Yankees is this: They have to figure out a way to stop spinning in the mud before they can get traction, and they need to achieve some traction before they can even begin to dream of making a dash from here to October. And once and for all, they need to figure a way to do the most basic thing in the sport.
At some point, they need to score.
“We haven’t been great all year,” Mark Teixeira said after this latest study in baseball austerity, a sleepy 4-1 loss to the Indians that completed this buzzkill of a series against the retooling-and-regrouping Indians, two losses in three games to a middling team after the feel-good 3-1 series win over the Tigers that preceded it.
“We just need to scratch runs where we can.”
He’s just being truthful, even if it’s probably always going to sound shocking to hear the Yankees, the Bronx Bombers, speak as if they’re playing the “inside game” of Muggsy McGraw’s New York Giants, circa 1912 or so. But we’re now a third of the way through August and more than two-thirds of the way through the season, so we can reasonably assume that the Yankees are who they’re going to be.
And what is that, exactly?
“This team wants to win,” Jacoby Ellsbury — responsible for the lone run in the series’ final 20 innings thanks to his two-out, ninth-inning homer Sunday — said. “And we’re good enough to win a lot of games when we get our consistency.”
But is that even a reasonable goal? The 10-run explosion Friday was aided an awful lot by a first-inning meltdown by Cleveland starter Trevor Bauer. On the previous road trip, the three games they won in a 3-3 stretch, they came back from at least three runs down in all of them. When you speak of the starts and stops of a season, those should be the starts. And they never last. The Yankees’ bats took the weekend off. It’s hard to survive that way.
“If you’ve been in this game a long time,” manager Joe Girardi said, “you know you’ll have games like this.”
And you also know that sometimes, the rest of the league will eventually stop lending you time and buying you room. For the longest time this year, the Yankees could point to an A.L. East that was less than fearsome, but the Orioles have padded their cushion out of the All-Star break during a difficult stretch of games against Oakland, Anaheim, Seattle, St. Louis and Toronto. The Cardinals halted them Sunday but they are playing scorching-hot ball, sit six full games ahead of the Yankees.[W]e’re good enough to win a lot of games when we get our consistency.
- Jacoby Ellsbury
And even the second wild card is becoming a more difficult proposition, the Royals playing better and better, sweeping the Giants this week, now three games up on the Yankees in the loss column. All of this was inevitable: The mathematics of a season insist that SOMEONE is going to get hot eventually. There’s a reason why there’s only been one race like the ’73 NL East in 145 years of professional baseball.
Eventually, you’re the one that’s got to win 15 out of 20.
So Ellsbury was 100 percent correct when he said, “This is a big series, it isn’t a must-win series.” The Yankees have to start hitting, have to start winning, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in Baltimore or anywhere else. There are 45 games left in the season, and the arithmetic is officially starting to work against them.