ARLINGTON, Texas — Only 22 regular season games remain for the New York Yankees. They trail the Baltimore Orioles by half a game in the American League East, and despite the high stakes with a division title on the line, the Yankees appear to be sleepwalking on some nights. Wednesday was one of those nights.
It started in the second inning with Texas Rangers light-hitting outfielder Leody Taveras dunking in a double that landed for a hit after Aaron Judge could not come up with the diving catch. Statcast estimated a 95 percent catch probability on Taveras’ double. Judge isn’t the quickest player, but his starting depth on the play was 341 feet for a player with just two home runs in the past 30 games.
Juan Soto fell asleep in the outfield on a Wyatt Langford hustle double in the fourth inning; Soto casually fielded the ball and threw it to the cutoff man instead of second base. Both Taveras and Langford ended up scoring for the Rangers.
Alex Verdugo failed to hustle on two ground balls so egregiously that Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay openly wondered if something was wrong with the left fielder’s legs.
Verdugo’s lack of hustle has been evident all season, including the day after Yankees second baseman Gleyber Torres was benched for not running out a potential double. With every game mattering at this point in the season, manager Aaron Boone said he has no issue with how his starting left fielder fails to routinely run out ground balls.
“He’s beat up,” Boone said when asked if Verdugo was healthy and able to run. “He’s playing his ass off. He picks his spots. You see him beat it out when he needs to. He beats out the force play the other night to beat the double play. Sometimes, I wished it looked better on certain ones. But when he hits the one-hopper to the second baseman and he’s got it — I get the look. I don’t have any issue with how hard he’s playing the game.”
Verdugo already ranks in the 26th percentile in sprint speed, and his groundouts in the third and fifth innings of the Yankees’ 10-6 loss on Wednesday were both well below his average sprint time to first base. The lack of hustle and urgency is merely a microcosm of how the Yankees have played since the beginning of June. Their 40-41 record since June 1 ranks 19th in MLB. That 81-game sample size represents half the season where, on most nights, the Yankees have exhibited a poor, sluggish brand of baseball.
They are unconcerned, though, with how they’ve played over the past three months.
“I don’t think there’s concern at all,” Marcus Stroman said, after allowing five runs on nine hits in 3 2/3 innings pitched. “I think we’re all very process-oriented in this clubhouse, so we all know what we’re capable of. A few bad losses doesn’t move the room in a bad way at all.”
“I got nothing on that,” Judge said of the 40-41 record. “I’m worried about this next game and what we gotta do. This team’s got a lot of fight. We got a lot of good players in here. It’s just about us going out and doing it. That’s what it comes down to. Just keep trusting each other and it’s gonna go our way.”
The Yankees have now lost three consecutive series to the Rangers, St. Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals. They went a combined 3-6 against three teams who entered those series with a losing record and nothing to play for. The Yankees failed to take advantage of the soft part of their schedule beginning in August, where they played just one team who entered the series with a record above .500. Since August 1, the Yankees are 15-15. If it weren’t for the Orioles not finding consistency either, the Yankees would already be staring down a three-game wild-card series.
Instead, the Yankees have been able to flounder for the past three months with very few negative consequences in the standings.
“You have to have perspective,” Boone said for why he believes this team can play better. “We’re right there with every opportunity to reach our hopes and dreams. That’s because of the season we’ve had as a whole. We’ve put ourselves in position to go grab this thing but if we want to grab it, we got to play our best ball and put our best foot forward here with 22 to go.”
This recent 3-6 stretch that the Yankees are on, heading into a three-game series against the Chicago Cubs, has coincided with Judge no longer hitting at a historic pace. Judge is 6-for-34 since the start of the Nationals series, with zero home runs in his past nine games. It’s the longest homerless streak of the season for Judge, putting him on pace to finish the season with 59 home runs. Judge said he’s feeling fine at the plate because his process is unchanged from when he was dominating the sport from May through almost all of August.
The Yankees’ struggles against three underperforming teams, coinciding with Judge not producing at the plate, will not quiet those fans who believe this team can’t win if he’s not hitting like the best player in the sport. It also gives some credence to the idea that teams may decide to pitch around the slugger in the postseason and allow others in the Yankees’ lineup to beat them instead of the presumptive AL MVP.
Cracks have been exposed in the Yankees’ foundation over the past 81 games, namely in the bullpen. The club said Wednesday afternoon they’ll ‘get creative’ with their closer role for the time being after Clay Holmes allowed a walk-off grand slam on Tuesday. The bullpen allowed five more runs on Wednesday. It remains a major area that needs to be fixed in the final 22 games, but on the whole, how the Yankees have played isn’t alarming to them.
“We know what we can do when we’re all clicking and doing the things that we need to do,” Verdugo said. “So, really, there’s no reason to panic. We’ve been in this tight AL race all year long and it’s just a couple series, man. We’re right there. We’re going to go to Chicago, handle business over there and kind of right the ship and just take it day by day.”
(Photo of Marcus Stroman: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
