Yankees go back to work, refocus on AL East after celebrating playoff berth
The Yankees’ Aaron Judge talks with Jose Caballero after his walk-off hit against the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday at Yankee Stadium. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Little looked different inside the Yankees clubhouse on Wednesday afternoon. On the entry door hung a lineup card with a standard batting order for facing a lefthanded starting pitcher. Players began hustling around as scheduled meetings for pitchers and hitters were about to start. One could faintly hear the crack of bat on ball coming from the indoor batting cages aways down the hall.
The only indication of the great accomplishment from the night before was scent of stale Champagne and beer that lingered in the air.
While the clubhouse was quite a scene after the Yankees scored twice in the bottom of the ninth off the White Sox for a 3-2 win that clinched a postseason berth, it was a workplace again on Wednesday filled with players focused on the next – and reachable – goal.
The race for the AL East crown goes on and the Yankees went into Wednesday’s start by ace Max Fried one game back of Toronto, the narrowest the margin has been since the first week of July when the Blue Jays swept the Yankees and overtook them for the division lead.
“There are five games left (in the regular season) and we’re still playing for something,” Cody Bellinger said. “Maybe there is a let up if you’re not – if you clinch the division or best record or something – but there’s still important games to be played here and I don’t expect to see and foot-off-the-gas here.”
“We're playing for a lot still,” manager Aaron Boone said. “We're focused on what we need to be. (There’s) a little pause to kind of appreciate where we got to last night, but (we) really understand the bigger picture and where we want to go and we still have a chance to impact this regular season in a more positive way . . . It's another important game tonight.”
Boone was asked if there’s something about the character of the Yankees that leaves him assured that the intensity will remain for the rest of the regular season and replied, “I don't think we consider ourselves running through the tape. We stopped and smelled the roses for 30 minutes (for) the fact that we're going to play postseason baseball.”
If the Yankees were to run down the Blue Jays in these last five days and win the division – and they need to finish a game ahead of them because Toronto owns the tiebreaker – they would not only sidestep playing a best-of-three AL Wild Card Series and get a bye into a division series, but also get six days off.
“We understand the math’s not great for us necessarily, but we also understand that we want to play our best here in these final games and that starts tonight.” Boone said. “At the end of the day, (we) need some help (from Jays’ opponents Boston and Tampa Bay), but we have to handle our business.”
Getting the time off would certainly appear to be an advantage in players getting rested and rotations getting sequenced, but the players haven’t had a break that long since the winter and that has disrupted some teams in previous seasons.
“It's not totally ideal, I guess, but – in theory – you’re winning a series so sign me up for that all day long, right?” Boone said. “To avoid that first (series) and not have to play a best-of three where anything can happen? I'd sign up for that 10 times over.”
The Yankees were the top AL seed in 2024 when they won the pennant and reached the World Series and Boone said “we did have the time off (and) I felt like we came out playing pretty sharp.”
Rice catches Fried
The Yankees starting battery Wednesday night was lefthander Max Fried and catcher Ben Rice. Though Rice had started 15% of the club’s games behind the plate, he’d never caught the Yankees’ ace. In Fried’s previous 31 starts, Austin Wells was behind the dish 27 times and J.C. Escarra the other four. Boone said the genesis for the move lay in Chicago’s plan to use only relievers and that its bullpen makeup is five righthanders and four lefthanders. But he didn’t shy away from the notion that this could be seen in the postseason when he said, “If we do make a deep run in the postseason, and who knows what comes up, getting them together at least once: I think there's some benefit in that.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
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