Reality Bites When the Yankees Can't Even Beat the Twins

By winning on Wednesday, the Yankees avoided being swept by the Twins in a series of three games or more for the first time since June of 1991. But that result aside, this was not a pleasant stay for them at Target Field as they lost the overall season series to Minnesota for the first time since 2001. On a happier note, I hope you enjoyed Chapter 3 of Hardball Hyperbole.

Losing this series, to a team the Yankees have owned for two decades, pretty much sums up the first month for this battered, wildly underachieving Yankee club.

Yes, they hadn’t lost a season series against Minnesota since 2001. Consider this: When the season series ended that June, I wasn’t even 39 years old, Taylor Swift was 12, and Anthony Volpe was two months old. Most of us had never heard of Osama Bin Laden, the Buffalo Bills had just started what would become a 17-year playoff drought, and there was no such thing as the YES Network, the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, or Uber. Hell, the internet was barely a thing - “You’ve got mail!”

Twins outfielder Byron Buxton knew the Yankees had owned the Twins during his time with the team, but he had no idea it extended so far back and he genuinely couldn’t believe it when he was told. “I don't even know how to put that in words,” he said. “Twenty-two years? Twenty-two years? I was 6! It feels a lot like that monkey is off the back for sure now.”

The Yankees avoided the sweep Wednesday with a 12-6 victory, and that was obviously a step in the right direction, but does one game solve this team’s awful offensive issues? No, not at all.

The Yankees started Wednesday ranked 24th in runs per game (4.0), 29th in average (.225), 27th in on-base percentage (.303) and 22nd in OPS (.686). Before those 12 runs, they had scored just eight runs in the last five games, and they had scored three runs or fewer in 10 of their previous 12 games.

So no, one offensive explosion on a getaway day against a team that had already won the first two games and sat two of its best hitters, Jorge Polanco and Byron Buxton, does not get me juiced about the immediate future of the Yankees.

That’s because we’ve seen this act so much over the last few years. They’ll have a big day with the bats which inflates their numbers, and then they store them in the freezer and go a week bumbling and stumbling and only win games if their pitching is great, which it often is.

Aaron Boone is trotting out lineups - not his fault because he doesn’t have a choice - which are ludicrously bad. Heading into Wednesday, nine of the 14 position players on the roster were hitting .212 or less. Nine! And eight of those guys had on-base percentages below .300. Eight!

I’m not making this shit up. It’s right there on baseball-reference.com for all to see.

I’d like to think perhaps this can be a turning point, but it’s going to take weeks of consistency with the bats to change my mind, and this current roster simply isn’t built for weeks of consistency.

➤ Joey Gallo, who ranks right near the top with Aaron Hicks as worst Yankee of at least the past decade, hit 25 homers during his egregiously awful 140-game pinstripe career. So naturally, he hit two homers in this series and already has seven for the Twins in just 15 games.

➤ In the five games prior to Wednesday, the Yankees scored two earned runs against the opposition’s starter before they eviscerated Kenta Maeda for 10.

➤ Here’s a shocker: Reliever Lou Trivino’s rehab suffered a setback. Imagine that. “I mean, it’s not good that he had to get shut down from where he was in a good spot and feeling good, so we’ll see,” Boone said. Tommy Kahnle, Jonathan Loaisiga and Luis Severino are progressing, but are not close to returning. And of course, as soon as they do get close, you know damn well there will be a “setback” that will create further delay.

➤ If the Yankees really had any hope of trading for outfielder Bryan Reynolds of the Pirates, they were dashed Tuesday when he signed a long-term contract extension. I didn’t really think the Yankees were in position to get him, but now they certainly won’t, so yay, they continue on with one of the worst outfield situations in MLB.

Here are my observations on the three games against the Twins.

April 24: Twins 6, Yankees 1

➤ Here’s what Boone said after this disgraceful night: “We’re the Yankees and we gotta find a way to do a little better than that.” These aren’t the Yankees. This is a bunch of has-been, never-will-be’s masquerading in the road grays. The outfield in this game was Hicks, Oswaldo Cabrera, and Francy Cordero. There are probably a dozen Triple-A teams that can put out a better threesome than that. It’s embarrassing, really.

➤ Gallo and Sonny Gray surely enjoyed sticking it to the Yankees. Gray dominated them the way most starting pitchers have dominated them lately. Gray went toyed with them for seven innings, three hits allowed and eight strikeouts. His ERA is now 0.62. Too bad he couldn’t handle pitching in New York, because he’s been fantastic everywhere else’s he’s been. And Gallo, another wimp who couldn’t handle New York, you knew damn well he was going to homer against the Yankees, and he didn’t get cheated, a 432-foot bomb off Greg Weissert in the fourth. Just a deplorable night all around.

➤ This was bad Jhony Brito again. He couldn’t get out of the third inning after throwing 80 pitches and giving up three runs on three hits and three walks. He has Clarke Schmidt’s problem in that he struggles way too much to put hitters away. The Twins had 10 at-bats of at least six pitches and none of those ended in a strikeout.

BOX SCORE

April 25: Twins 6, Yankees 2

➤ It’s bad enough that this team can’t hit, but when the normally reliable starting pitcher isn’t very good, and one of the top bullpen options serves up a gopher ball, and the rookie shortstop makes a costly error for the third game in a row, the Yankees aren’t beating the Twins. In fact, they aren’t beating the A’s, Nationals or Royals.

➤ “We’ve got to change it,” Boone said after this latest fiasco. “We gotta hopefully build a little bit on today in the fact that this was better than (Monday). But we gotta hang some crooked numbers up there, bottom line.” Better than Monday? How exactly was this any better than Monday? Why, because they managed one more run and two more hits (all eight were singles, by the way)? Oh, that extra run they scored, it came when the Twins failed to turn an inning-ending double play on Aaron Judge in the fifth when first baseman Donovan Solano dropped the throw. Can you even believe this is where we are with the Yankees?

➤ Pitching with no safety net, Nestor Cortes made a couple mistakes and that was all it took for him to suffer his first loss. Volpe booted a grounder to start the third and that runner scored immediately on a double by Solano, and Solano came home on a double by Jorge Polanco. Wasn’t it great that Polanco just returned from injury last weekend? In the two games he played he was 4-for-9 with three doubles and four RBI.

➤ Then in the sixth, Cortes gave up a double to Polanco and a two-run homer to Buxton to end his night. And Ron Marinaccio, whose ERA was 0.92, gave up a single and a two-run homer to Trevor Larnach. The Twins’ four-run lead looked like 400 at that point and naturally, the Yankees never scored again as they managed one single over the last three innings.

➤ Another great night for the left fielder, this time Aaron Hicks. Monday, Cabrera failed to catch a ball that almost any other left fielder - except Hicks, of course - would catch, and he went 0-for-4 to fall to .211 for the season. And then in this game, Hicks failed to run down Polanco’s double to left-center in the sixth. He did have a single and scored the gift run on the DP, so his average soared all the way up to .129.

BOX SCORE

April 26: Yankees 12, Twins 6

➤ Well, that was a lot of pent up frustration released by the Yankees in the first four innings as they scored 11 runs. And then they spent the last five looking pretty much like the team that lost the first two games of the series. But hey, they won.

➤ I loved the five-run second inning because of how the Yankees did it. Gleyber Torres hit what should have been a single, hustled it into a double and then took third on a bad throw from the outfield. Willie Calhoun singled him home, then Isiah Kiner-Falefa bunted for a single and Cabrera walked to load the bases. Volpe singled home one and Judge ripped a three-run double to make it 5-0. That might have been my favorite inning of the year. The six-run fourth was pretty nice, too, capped by Rizzo’s two-run double and Torres’ two-run homer. Scoring 12 runs with the help of just one homer? Beautiful.

➤ With the exception of the two home runs he allowed to Jose Miranda for the Twins first three runs, Domingo German was going along OK, but then he finished terribly. He gave up a two-run jack to Gallo in the sixth, then started the seventh by allowing a triple before Boone pulled him. That run eventually scored against Ian Hamilton, so six runs in six innings doesn’t look so good anymore. German did strike out eight, but in just about every other game over the past two weeks the Yankees would have lost with that pitching performance.

➤ Volpe had a very nice day with two hits, two walks, three runs and three RBI. Over his last 14 games his slash line is .292/.424/.458 with an .882 OPS, eight runs, seven RBI and he’s 5-for-5 on stolen base attempts. He’s settling in nicely to the leadoff spot.

➤ Judge stayed in the game and denied anything was wrong afterward, but him rolling over his hand on his failed stolen base attempt was worrisome. “There were talks (about him coming out) but we ended those pretty quick,” Judge said. “You can either play or you can’t play. It’s feeling good.” Well, now we wait because you know damn well we might hear Thursday that’s something wrong. Can you even imagine if he has to come out of the lineup?

BOX SCORE

➤ May 1 has been a very big day for milestone homers in Yankees history.

➦ In 1920, Babe Ruth hit his first as a member of the team in his 11th game. It was also the 50th of Ruth’s MLB career. Traded to the Yankees in the offseason, he had struggled throughout April and ended the month hitting .226 with three RBI, but things certainly changed in May as he hit 12 homers on his way to a record-shattering 54.

➦ In 1951, playing in his 13th career game and starting in center field because Joe DiMaggio was nursing a neck injury, Mickey Mantle hit his first home run. It came in the sixth inning against former Yankee Randy Gumpert, was estimated to have traveled 440 feet, and helped lead the Yankees to an 8-3 victory over the White Sox at Comiskey Park.

➦ And in 2015, in a game against the Red Sox at Fenway Park, Alex Rodriguez came up as a pinch-hitter and took Junichi Tazawa deep for his 660th career home run which tied him for fourth place on the all-time MLB list with Willie Mays. A-Rod would eventually get to 696 which puts him fifth behind Barry Bonds (762), Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714) and Albert Pujols (703).

The Yankees are 14-11 and in fourth place, six games behind the Rays.

➤ Tampa Bay 20-5: Believe it or not, I’m actually glad the Astros won a series because it was against the Rays. I don’t root for them too often (actually never, unless they’re playing the Rays). Houston took two of three, and the first of those victories Tuesday ended the Rays’ 14-0 start at the mausoleum in which they play their home games. That night, the “crowd” was announced at 9,916. For a team that at the time was 20-3 and 14-0 at home. Across the three games in a series between what will probably be, at year’s end, the two best teams in the AL, it drew 34,695 fans. Total. And again, that’s the announced crowd; it was likely much less than that. What a disgrace. That might be why I hate the Rays so much, because they play in front of a fan base that doesn’t give a shit about them and doesn’t deserve a team this good. Now they resume their tour of the dregs of MLB as they head to Chicago for four more easy, breezy games against the 7-18 White Sox.

➤ Baltimore 16-8: The Orioles had their seven-game win streak snapped Tuesday at Fenway, but they bounced back and won the series Wednesday with a 6-2 victory. The Orioles’ bullpen ranks third in MLB (just behind the Yankees and Rays) in ERA at 2.78. They have a kid named Yennier Cano who tied a franchise record by retiring the first 24 batters he faced to start a season, but he didn’t break the record because he hit Justin Turner with a pitch. Cano is a 29-year-old who didn’t get to the majors until 2022. They start a four-game set in Detroit Thursday.

➤ Toronto 16-9: The Blue Jays swept the putrid White Sox, winning the last two games 7-0 and 8-0. Jose Berrios threw seven scoreless innings Tuesday and Yusei Kikuchi threw six scoreless innings Wednesday and the bullpen finished off both shutouts. George Springer had to leave the Wednesday game when he was hit on the wrist with a pitch, so that will be interesting to watch. In their most recent trip through their rotation the Blue Jays starters (two of the games against the Yankees) pitched 33 innings and allowed just two earned runs, 16 hits and 6 walks with 37 strikeouts. They host the Mariners for three games starting Friday.

➤ Boston 13-13: Boston dropped two of three at home to the red-hot Orioles. As usual, the Red Sox are mashing as they rank third in runs scored and ninth in team OPS. Rafael Devers hasn’t been great with a .282 on-base, but he does lead the AL with nine homers and he’s tied for third in MLB with 24 RBI. And rookie Japanese import Masataka Yoshida hit three homers against Baltimore and now had 16 RBI. Boston hosts Cleveland for three games starting Friday.

The Yankees open what should be a tough four-game series in Texas starting Thursday, though it looked a lot tougher earlier in the week than it does right now. The Rangers are still leading the AL West at 14-10, but they just found a way to get swept by the lowly Reds in Cincinnati.

They blew a 5-1 lead Monday and ultimately got walked off 7-6 on a T.J. Friedl single off their closer, Will Smith. Another 7-6 loss Tuesday came when they blew a 6-0 lead through six innings as the Reds scored six times in the eighth off relievers Cole Ragans and ex-Yankee Ian Kennedy. Cincinnati’s Jonathan India had the go-ahead two-run single. And then Wednesday, another walk-off loss. They had just tied the game at 3-3 in the ninth, but in the bottom half Nick Senzel hit a two-run homer for the Reds.

The Rangers had been rolling, even without injured shortstop Corey Seager. They still rank second in runs scored (6.41 per game), their 32 homers are sixth, and their on-base percentage (.340) is fourth. Adolis Garcia leads MLB with 29 RBI, and Marcus Semien leads MLB with 23 runs scored. On the pitching side, their team ERA is eighth at 3.67 as Jacob deGrom is starting to find his dominant self, and both Martin Perez and Jon Gray have been solid.

All four games are on YES. Thursday at 8:05 it’s Gerrit Cole (0.79 ERA) vs. Andrew Heaney, the same Heaney who had a disastrous 12-appearance tenure with the Yankees in 2021 and pitched to a 7.32 ERA. Last year he had a 3.10 for the Dodgers, then signed with the Rangers and he’s at 4.34. Friday, another 8:05 start has Clarke Schmidt (6.30) against deGrom (3.04). Saturday at 7:05 it’s Brito (6.11) against another ex-Yankee, Nathan Eovaldi (5.20). And Sunday’s 2:35 game has Cortes (3.49) against Perez (2.60).