The Yankees got walked off in eleven innings by the Tigers on Wednesday, their seventh consecutive loss, and the people running this franchise have decided the correct public posture is to describe losing as a temporary condition in a system that’s fundamentally working.
I’ve been a Yankees fan for 26 years and I can’t remember watching this team be this bad without anyone in the building having the decency to act like it’s a problem. My grandmother — she has strong opinions about the Yankees lineup, always has, texts me after games with single-word verdicts like “disgusting” or “embarrassing” or once, memorably, just the number “9” — hasn’t texted me after a game in two weeks. She doesn’t quit on things lightly. The Yankees have been so methodically bad, so relentlessly committed to losing in new configurations, that they’ve broken the will of a 74-year-old woman who grew up in the Bronx and cried when Jeter retired. When Nonna goes quiet, the situation has moved beyond sports discourse into something else.
The Yankees are 2-10 in their last 12 games. They’re batting .093 over their last five. Detroit walked in a run with the bases loaded, then hit an RBI single and scored again on a catcher’s throwing error in the eleventh in front of 37,000 people at Yankee Stadium who paid for a July baseball game and got the Hindenburg. Aaron Judge has been out since May 31 with a right rib stress fracture — reimaging still two weeks away, no baseball activities yet — and the Yankees are 12-15 without him before tonight. They were 36-23 when he last played. That’s not “Judge is important.” That’s “this is an entirely different and much worse team the moment Judge isn’t in the lineup.”
After the Red Sox swept them four straight at Fenway to close out June, Aaron Boone said this to reporters:
https://twitter.com/TalkinYanks/status/2071429866306572683
“You gotta love this stuff.” I’m going to need someone to explain that to me. Not as a rhetorical device. I mean literally: what is he loving? The process? The variance? The learning opportunity? He also said they “played crappy on this trip kinda.” Kinda. They lost ten of twelve and the manager said kinda.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t actually think Boone is delusional. I think he was told he’s fine. When managers are genuinely on the hot seat, they become very careful and bloodless in press conferences — lots of language about evaluation and needing to compete at a higher level. Boone has not done that. Boone has been chirpy and baffling. He sounded like a guy who had already checked in with the front office and received reassurance. And the Yankees’ organizational messaging has been so relentlessly committed to process-trusting and variance-acknowledging that their own fanbase has been trained to wait for the correction. To believe that Judge comes back and this rights itself.
That’s the part I’m not sure about anymore. A team that goes 12-15 without its best player isn’t a deep roster that hit a rough patch — it’s an Aaron Judge delivery system that doesn’t function without the delivery. That’s a real problem that no amount of process language fixes. The rest of this MLB season gets a lot harder if the front office keeps describing the problem as something other than what it is.
Judge said about his rib: “I’ll give you a good update when we get the reimaging. There’s no need to talk about this now.” The reimaging is two weeks out. The Yankees are 3 games back in the AL East with a seven-game losing streak in their pocket.
My grandmother would’ve had thoughts. She’s gone quiet. That’s the review.
