For the first four or five weeks of the season, the Yankees sank like a stone in the standings because the offense was unable to get much of anything going. The struggled to score night after night and it wasn’t one or two guys who were short-circuiting the offense. Everyone except Starlin Castro was a problem for a few weeks there.
Thankfully the offense has started to right the ship, even considering the two runs scored in last night’s loss. The Yankees have won eight of their last 13 games and they’ve scored five runs or more six times in those 13 games. They did it only five times in the first 24 games of the season. It’s not much, but it’s progress. The offense is trending in the right direction, by and large.
The pitching, on the other hand, has been an issue pretty much all season. Masahiro Tanaka has been very good overall and the back end of the bullpen has been ridiculous, but that’s about it. The CC Sabathia/Ivan Nova rotation spot has been fine too I guess, and while Nathan Eovaldi has had his moments, he’s still super unpredictable from start to start. He’s great one night and he can’t get out of the fifth inning five days later.
Last night’s 12-2 loss was the fourth time in the last seven games the Yankees have allowed at least seven runs. They rank 20th among all teams in ERA (4.48) and 18th in FIP (4.12). The rotation is 24th in ERA (5.01) and 19th in FIP (4.44). That’s bad. Legit bad. Not “bad but you can squint your eyes and it’s okay” bad. I mean bad bad. The middle innings are a question and rotation is a straight up liability.
The offense was always going to improve at some point because the Yankees are not nearly as bad as they looked. They weren’t going to hit .100-something with runners in scoring position all year and guys like Mark Teixeira, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Chase Headley weren’t going to slump forever. Is the offense a powerhouse? Of course not. But April was just an awful slump. It wasn’t representative of the team’s true ability.
I’m not so sure about the rotation though. We’ve been talking about Eovaldi’s and Michael Pineda’s potential for weeks and months — we’ve been talking about it since last year, basically — and yeah, that potential exists, but the only thing those two have proven at this point is the ability to be consistently inconsistent. You go into each start hoping for a strong outing and are completely unsure if you’ll get it.
Sabathia has probably been the Yankees’ second best starter this year, which is as much praise for Sabathia as it is a knock against the rest of the rotation. Luis Severino was a total disaster before getting hurt. Severino’s awfulness has been the real rotation killer. Everyone expected him to take a step forward this year and emerge as a rock for the rotation. The opposite has happened. Now guys like Nova and Chad Green are being forced into action.
The Yankees, as it stands right now, do not have the pitching to be a legitimate contender. Tanaka is awesome and the back of the bullpen is as good as it gets. The other eight pitching roster spots leave an awful lot to be desired. And there’s not much the Yankees can do about it right now either. They can swap out some relievers, but, at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to Pineda and Eovaldi being difference makers. Severino righting the ship as well.
We’re approaching the quarter point of the season and the sample size ain’t so small anymore. The rotation has been one of the ten worst in baseball overall and the pitching staff as a whole isn’t much better. It shows in their record in blowouts: the Yankees are 5-11 in games decided by four or more runs. They seem to win close games by turning things over to the end-game relievers and lose blowouts because the rest of the staff is so shaky.
The offense is the main reason the Yankees are 16-21, their worst record through 37 games since starting 15-22 in 1995. They were unable to put runs on the board for far too long. The pitching might be what prevents the Yankees from climbing out of this early season hole though. They’re allowing 4.62 runs per game on average, and that is simply too much to overcome on a consistent basis.
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