This post is specially dedicated to our über-angry friend. Oh his head is gonna explode.
Why the Yankees’ season already could be on the brink
BALTIMORE — So the earliest of early returns are in, Thursday’s off day affording the Yankees a chance to rest up on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and boy, are they not pretty.
The schedule provided the Yankees a chance to measure themselves against the consensus top three contenders for the AL East title. And if you watched, you know the Blue Jays, Red Sox and Orioles, individually and in total, manhandled the Yankees, showcasing the gap between Joe Girardi’s group and their primary foes.
Because of a sixth-inning bullpen meltdown, the Yankees suffered a 7-5 loss to the Orioles Wednesday night at Camden Yards, giving them a 3-6 record out of the gate, sole residency of the AL East cellar — they will take on their remaining divisional opponent, the Rays, Friday at Tropicana Field — and this ignominy: This is the first Yankees team to drop its first three series of the season since the 1991 club, best remembered as the season in which Don Mattingly earned a benching for refusing to cut his hair.
Which is not the sort of company, needless to say, that any 21st-century Yankees team seeks.
“It’s frustrating,” Girardi said. “It’s not the way you want to start. … We need to turn it around. Obviously, we need to start winning series, or it becomes a long year.”
Like most bullpen implosions, the night began with great promise for the Yankees. The rapidly aging Carlos Beltran ripped a third-inning, two-run double; Alex Rodriguez crushed his 656th career homer in the fourth; and Nathan Eovaldi, in his second start for his new employers, struck out seven and walked two as he did a better job integrating his breaking stuff.
Eovaldi needed 101 pitches to get through just five innings, however, and that ultimately sunk the Yankees. They’re supposed to have a deeper bullpen this season, one replete with power arms, designed in accordance with the notion that many a game would pass in which the starting pitcher failed to provide length. Yet three of those shiny new relievers — David Carpenter, Justin Wilson and Chris Martin — teamed to turn a slight, 3-2 Yankees advantage into a gaping, 7-3 Orioles lead.
When Girardi opted to intentionally walk the red-hot Adam Jones to put men on first and second, bringing in the southpaw Wilson to go after lefty-hitting Travis Snider, Baltimore skipper Buck Showalter predictably pinch hit the righty (and lefty-killing) Delmon Young, who grounded a game-tying single to left field. What really killed the Yankees, however, was when Wilson followed by giving up a hard, opposite-field, two-run double to the lefty-hitting Chris Davis, who struck out nine times in this series.
“I just didn’t make the exact pitch I wanted to,” said Wilson, who came over from Pittsburgh in a November 2014 trade.
That the Yankees scored two eighth-inning runs off Baltimore reliever Tommy Hunter and brought the winning run to the plate in the ninth inning, with Chase Headley ending it on a fielder’s choice to second, reiterated a theme we’ve seen so far: These Yankees are not quitters. You can’t fault them for an unwilling spirit.
No, this start says more about the Yankees’ weak flesh. About their surprisingly weak defense — Didi Gregorius should have received an error for misplaying Jones’ third-inning single, but the official scorer gifted Jones a single — and their uneven base running (Gregorius, again). About their uneven lineup in which three of their regulars — Beltran, Stephen Drew and, yes, Gregorius — own batting averages below .200.
Furthermore, the Yankees have received encouraging results from the likes of A-Rod, CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira in this first week and a half, yet this fragile trio now has to prove that it can stay upright and productive through the grind of the season.
“You want to win series, but it’s the beginning,” Beltran said. “What [can I] say? We know we can play better baseball than what we’re playing right now.”
They might know that. Few outside the club are as confident. We kicked things off nine games ago wondering if this could be the Yankees’ worst season in quite a long time, and with 5.6 percent of the season in the books, such skepticism has been affirmed far more than it has been refuted.
