The Last-Place Yankees Have Hit Rock Bottom

We may have just watched the beginning of the end to this 2023 season for the Yankees. I can’t recall this team having a worse road trip than the one that ended Wednesday in a sweep at the hands of the Angels, on the heels of losing two of three to the Rockies. Buckle up for the ride people, this won’t be pretty.

Last Friday morning, the Yankees literally woke up feeling a mile high, and not just because they were in the Mile High City of Denver. It was much more than that.

After a disappointing pre-All-Star Game portion of the season, they were coming off four days of rest and, presumably, rejuvenation which surely had to have them feeling excited and energized to start their push for a postseason berth.

Why, after so much struggling the past six weeks, would they be feeling this way? Because they were starting a three-game series against the worst team in the National League, the Rockies, followed by a three-game set against the middling, constantly underachieving Angels who weren’t going to have injured stars Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon, and who wouldn’t be pitching Shohei Ohtani.

They had to be thinking winning five of six against these two opponents was perfectly reasonable, and then they’d be coming home for five games - three against the dreadful Royals and two against another massive underachiever, the Mets. This was go time, a soft spot in the schedule that was exactly what the Yankees needed to take advantage of to get their season turned around.

Instead, the Yankees turned out to be the soft spot in the schedule for the Rockies and Angels and so here we are, at the absolute lowest point of this now impossibly miserable season. They lost the series to the Rockies who went into it at 34-57, and then they got swept by the Angels who had lost 11 of their last 13 games and hadn’t won a series since they took two of three from the Royals June 16-18.

As usual, the New York Post nails it with this morning’s back page:

The Yankees have become every team’s homecoming game. You know, the opponent you schedule when all the alumni come back to town because you know you’ll beat the shit out of them and then go out and party like you did in your undergrad days. It’s incredible that this is who the Yankees now are.

Here was Aaron Boone’s clueless, tone deaf take Monday night when his offense struck out 17 times: “I thought we did a lot of good things tonight, but certain situations there, you gotta be able to make better adjustments in certain situations.”

A lot of good things!!! He actually said that after they struck out 17 god damn times and lost!!!

Here’s what he said Tuesday after his pathetic lineup managed one run on two hits: “We’ve gotta fight. We’ve got really good players in there and a lot of guys are going through a tough, tough stretch - for some, probably as tough a stretch as they’ve been in their career. You don’t take your ball and go home, you stick your nose in there and grind it out and compete your ass off. We’re doing that.”

What are they doing exactly? Competing? All I see are a constant parade of awful at bats which has led to posting some of the worst offensive numbers in MLB since Aaron Judge got hurt in early June, during which they’ve gone 15-22?

Finally, Wednesday, there was this: “We have to acknowledge where we are. We stink right now, we understand that. This is a low point for us but the silver lining is that it’s still in front of us. We are in the fight and we need to continue to stay in the fight and we control all this with our play.”

Still in the fight? Dude, your team has lost nine of its last 11 games, and this month went 3-9 against the Cardinals, Cubs, Rockies and Angels. Right now its back is on the canvas trying to see how many fingers the referee is holding up. I can’t comprehend a thing Boone says anymore. He’s so full of shit. The only thing he said that was the actual truth in all of that is that they stink right now. Everything else was a bunch of typical Boone gibberish which he somehow thinks we believe.

This team looked like it quit on him in the Angels series and the time has come for all this nonsense to end. When this miserable season is over, Boone needs to be gone, and so does Brian Cashman. This franchise is old and stale, it’s boring, and the blue print needs to be burned and recreated by a new leadership group because Cashman and Boone have this team spinning its wheels and digging a hole deeper and deeper every year.

The Yankees are miles and miles away from being a legitimate World Series contender and they need to stop pretending that they’re close. They’re not. Teams have zoomed right past them including the Orioles, Rays and Jays in their own division, and those teams are all young and exciting and aren’t going anywhere. It’s just a disgrace what has happened this season.

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

July 17: Angels 4, Yankees 3 (10)

➤ The whole Sean Casey as hitting coach thing is working out great so far, isn’t it? Like that coaching change was ever going to make a difference. There was another low point in this game as the Yankees struck out 17 times including four by helpless Anthony Volpe and three each by Giancarlo Stanton and Oswaldo Cabrera. Angels starter Griffin Canning whiffed a career-high 12. The Yankees managed three runs on eight hits and six walks. Yes, all that traffic but only three runs because they left 10 men on base thanks to another ridiculous 1-for-9 effort with runners in scoring position.

➤ At least when he wasn’t whiffing, Cabrera did something useful. With two outs in a scoreless game in the sixth, Harrison Bader and Volpe singled and Isiah Kiner-Falefa walked as Angels manager Phil Nevin left Canning in way too long at 120 pitches. Jimmy Herget relieved and Cabrera ripped a two-run double which would have been a three-run double if the ball hadn’t bounced over the wall. Bad break for the Yankees, and as it turned out, a costly one because that run might have won the game.

➤ Luis Severino looked like a major league pitcher again. Not a great one, but at least passable which is a big step up from where he’s been. He blanked LA for five innings but then gave up a solo homer to Matt Thaiss in the sixth. He finished the inning and his line showed just the one run on six hits and three walks, though only three strikeouts. Progress.

➤ The Yankees made it 3-1 in the seventh on a Gleyber Torres sacrifice fly, but as it did Friday and Sunday in Colorado, the bullpen failed. Michael King gave up another massively deflating home run, though this time it was to a guy named Shohei Ohtani, a game-tying two-run bomb in the seventh. What killed him wasn’t so much the homer, it was the stupid walk to No. 9 hitter Eduardo Escobar that gave Ohtani the chance with two outs. And of course, there was Boone being Boone.

➤ In the fifth, Boone had Sevy intentionally walk Ohtani even though first base wasn’t open, and that loaded the bases. It was the right move and Mickey Moniak flied out to end the inning. In the seventh, with Escobar on first and two outs, Boone decided not to walk Ohtani because he apparently was more worried about what Moniak (.324 average, 10 homers, 29 RBI on the season) might do than Ohtani, who is the best player in MLB. So naturally, the best player in MLB made Boone and the Yankees pay. Look, this is the ultimate second guess, but I can’t stand Boone so yeah, I’m saying it was a dumb move.

➤ Of course, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered because King wasn’t done being a disaster. After the homer he walked two batters and hit another to load the bases as Boone stood in the dugout blowing his bubbles. Finally he woke up and called on Ron Marinaccio, one of the last guys we want to see coming into a game these days, but he somehow escaped by getting Thaiss to ground out, keeping the game tied at 3-3.

➤ In the ninth, DJ LeMahieu singled and Oswald Peraza walked for the fourth time. What became of that? Nothing. Stanton flew out and Torres hit into a double play. Then in the 10th, the free runner Torres went to third with one out and Bader and Volpe struck out. In the bottom half, the Angels’ free runner was still on second with two outs, but Michael Stefanic - who grew up a Red Sox fan, by the way - singled off Nick Ramirez to end it. Just another miserable, maddening night of Yankee baseball and on the evening of July 17, they were officially all alone in last place in the AL East.

BOX SCORE

July 18: Angels 5, Yankees 1

➤ There was a historic explosion of offense across MLB on this day and night. An incredible 12 teams scored at least 10 runs, the most since 13 teams did so on July 4, 1894. It was truly astonishing watching the scores get updated all night. Four games featured both teams scoring at least 10 runs which tied the record that was also set on that date, and then matched five days later on July 9, 1894. By the way, teams averaged 7.38 runs per game in 1894 because pitchers were still trying to figure out how to pitch from 60 feet, 6 inches as the mound had just been moved back the year before. In 2023, teams are averaging 4.60 runs per game, so yeah, it’s a little more difficult these days to have a league-wide night like this.

➤ What did our beloved Yankees contribute to all this? One run on two hits, a Torres homer in the third and a Volpe single in the eighth, with most of that fruitless flailing coming against Patrick Sandoval, another sub-par pitcher who started the night with a 4.60 ERA. As I tweeted during this game, this may be the worst stretch of offensive baseball for the Yankees since I’ve began paying attention to them in the early 1970s. The Horace Clarke Yankees were more dangerous than this bunch of pea shooters.

➤ If you didn’t bother to stay up, you missed almost nothing. Domingo German had a crazy six innings where he looked great for a few innings and shitty for a few. He gave up a two-run homer in the first to Moniak, and in the third he walked the first three batters and threw a wild pitch to gift the Angels a run, but then he escaped that mess and kept the score at 3-1. And then in the fifth, he allowed the Angels to put the game woefully out of reach when he hit Zach Neto, gave up a triple to Ohtani and an RBI single to Moniak that made it 5-1.

➤ After getting on base all five times on Monday (four walks and a single) from the leadoff spot, Peraza went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. Hey, here’s a positive. Albert Abreu pitched two scoreless mop-up innings. Oh, and the game took only two hours, 16 minutes.

BOX SCORE

July 19: Angels 7, Yankees 3

➤ The Yankees waited more than three months for Carlos Rodon - the big offseason free agent signing - to make his injury-delayed debut, and when it finally happened, so many people thought that he was going to be able to provide a lift to a team that desperately needed another reliable weapon in the rotation. Three starts into his pinstripe career, he has absolutely sucked. He’s now 0-3 with a 7.36 ERA after this absurdly bad performance. Rodon gave up two runs in each of the first three innings and when Boone finally yanked him in the fifth, he had allowed those six runs on four hits and five walks.

➤ This game was over quick. Rodon walked Ohtani in the first and got tagged for a two-run homer by Taylor Ward. He walked Hunter Renfroe leading off the second and gave up a two-run homer to Luis Rengifo, a guy hitting .214 with a .649 OPS. And then two more walks and a single led to two runs in the third. That made it 6-0 and if you thought this pathetic Yankees offense was overcoming that, you haven’t been paying attention lately. As Rodon left the field, some Yankee fans behind the dugout got on him and he blew them a kiss, so not only was he awful, he was thin-skinned. That’ll play well in New York, huh?

➤ The Yankees pitchers walked 11 batters, their most since Aug. 6, 2009 when they walked 12 against Boston. There was yet another boneheaded baserunning mistake, Franchy Cordero at second and trying to go to third on a ball hit in front of him to the shortstop. More fielding gaffes as Volpe had a throwing error and Cabrera failed to catch a catchable ball down the left-field line that wound up going as an RBI double to make it 7-3.

➤ After his brilliant start to the season, Kahnle was terrible for a third straight appearance as he gave up a run on two walks and the hit that Cabrera failed to make the play on. He went into the dugout and lost his mind, destroying a fan. Nice. But hey, at least he showed he cares, unlike some of the other stiffs in the dugout smiling and laughing while they’re getting their teeth kicked in. Click below to watch.

➤ Of course it’s been a little while since there was an injury so they were due. Bader got plunked in the back and suffered a rib contusion. Would anybody be surprised if he ends up on the IL for the third time this season?

➤ We all wanted Peraza to come up. He struck out four times in this game on top of the three on Tuesday. As a team they whiffed 16 times, so when this shit show was over, the Yankees struck out 42 times in the series, the most ever recorded by an Angels pitching staff in a three-game series.

BOX SCORE

 ➤ July 20, 1965: Mel Stottlemyre sure didn’t need a designated hitter on this day, eight years before the DH was approved for the 1973 season. In a season that will always be remembered as the point where the Yankees dynasty ended, and a decade of mediocrity or worse began, Stottlemyre delivered one of the most memorable moments during a 6-3 victory over the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium.

The second-year pitcher, who somehow went 20-9 for a team that finished 77-85, came to the plate with the bases loaded in the fifth inning, and he crushed a Bill Monbouquette pitch to deep left-center. The ball landed between Boston outfielders Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Gosger in what was known as death valley and rolled all the way to the 475-foot sign.

The three baserunners scored easily, and third-base coach Frank Crosetti read the situation and decided to send Stottlemyre, who had decent speed for a pitcher, home. Yaz retrieved the ball and hit shortstop Rico Petrocelli as the cutoff man, and Petrocelli fired home to catcher Bob Tillman, but his throw was up the first-base line about five feet. Tillman tried to reel it in and quickly tag Stottlemyre, but the ball got past him and Stottlemyre became just the third Yankees pitcher to hit a grand slam, and the first to do it without sending the ball out of the park.

“The play would have been very close if the catcher got the ball,” Yankees manager Johnny Keane said. “I was surprised to see him coming in.”

Stottlemyre’s day wasn’t done. He ended up pitching a complete game to earn his 10th victory of the season, and his ERA dipped to 2.77. “I remember a lot about it,” Stottlemyre said many years later. “It was in the stadium, the ball was hit to left-center field, against Boston, a real hot day in July. The pitcher was Bill Monbouquette. Those things you don’t forget.”

The Yankees return to action after an off day Friday to play the Royals, and my son Holden and I will be there to greet them, probably by booing at Yankee Stadium. No, just kidding. I don’t boo at games, never have, never will. But if they start to suck, I’ll be muttering plenty of colorful language. This was Holden’s Christmas present to me, but of course when he purchased the tickets back in December, we both thought the team would not only be watchable, but probably good. Sadly, they are neither, but we’ll make the most of it.

The Royals suck. There’s no other way to put it. They are battling the A’s for the worst record in MLB and when they finish their series against the Tigers Thursday, they will be at least 40 games under .500 when they arrive in the Bronx. If the Yankees don’t sweep this series, there may be no point even bothering with the rest of the season. I’ll still be dutifully writing the newsletter, but I fear many of you might not bother reading!

Did I say the Royals suck? They have two position players who could start for most other teams - catcher Salvador Perez and shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. The rest of this lineup belongs in Triple-A, but they play for the Royals because, one more time, the Royals suck. They rank 29th in runs scored, 28th in OPS (.667) and dead last in on-base percentage (.294), but here’s a punch in the gut - they rank 25th in batting average at .233 while the Yankees rank 29th at .230. On the pitching side, they’re 28th in ERA (5.24) and 25th in WHIP (1.44).

All the games are on YES and the pitching matchups look like this: Friday at 7:05 it’s Clarke Schmidt (4.31) against Alec Marsh (5.40); Saturday at 1:05 it’s Gerrit Cole (2.78) against Brady Singer (5.70); and Sunday at 1:05 it’s Severino (6.66) against Jordan Lyles (6.05).