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).

Popular in the Community