Erik Boland: How can the Yankees find some offense? That's the issue on the table.
Yankees' Ryan McMahon looks on after striking out during the second inning of a baseball game against the White Sox on Thursday in Chicago. Credit: AP/Melissa Tamez
CHICAGO — This wasn’t the calculated performance art by Aaron Boone involving a table roughly four years ago.
It was Aug. 20, 2022. The Yankees had lost a sixth straight series and Boone started answering yet another question about his skidding team.
“We’ve got to go out and do it,” he said. “And the great thing is . . . ”
Pause for effect.
Boone, sitting on the slightly raised dais, reared back and brought his right hand down on the table . . . hard.
“It’s right in front of us.”
Boone thankfully steered clear of that phrase — one that generally causes a good portion of the Yankees' fan base to hide sharp household items from themselves — after Thursday afternoon’s 2-1 loss in 11 innings to the White Sox.
The game featured the usual kind of blunders characteristic of Boone’s managerial tenure when his team isn’t playing well — Jasson Dominguez sloppily oversliding third base on what should have been a leadoff triple in the sixth inning and Jazz Chisholm Jr. getting picked off (technically scored as a caught stealing, but that’s a distinction without a difference in this case) for the final out of the seventh.
The Yankees lost when the usually reliable Fernando Cruz, moments after recording a crucial strikeout with the bases loaded for the second out of the 11th, issued a four-pitch walk to Tristan Peters to force home the winning run.
Responding to a question about Cruz near the front end of his postgame meeting with reporters, Boone abruptly and appropriately changed the subject to his scooping-water-with-a-fork-offense.
The Yankees arguably reached the lowest of what essentially has been two months of low points since Aaron Judge last played a game on May 31 in Sacramento. They went 1-for-15 with runners in scoring position and stranded 11 runners Thursday.
That came on the heels of a 6-5, 12-inning loss to the White Sox in which the Yankees took a 4-0 lead in the first inning. They were 3-for-16 with runners in scoring position and stranded 10 in that one.
“He did a lot of good things out there,” Boone said of Cruz. “Look, we have to score a freakin’ point. The story is not . . . the pitchers again did their job. We gotta score. I mean, that’s the story, the beginning and end of it. We’ve got to find a way.”
It is no secret that general manager Brian Cashman is attempting to upgrade that side of the ball in advance of Monday’s 6 p.m. trade deadline to make it somewhat easier for the offense to find a way, something it hasn’t done with any consistency since Judge went down with a rib stress fracture.
But Boone said he isn’t remotely interested in what might happen on the trade front.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m not going to play the speculative game every single day now. What’s going to happen Monday will happen or not happen. We have to score better. We have to do a better job offensively. Period. And not looking over our shoulders for anyone. We have to find a way.”
The “anyone” was a reference to whatever reinforcements Cashman might succeed in bringing in, but it tangentially related to Judge and, to a degree, Giancarlo Stanton.
The follow-up MRI Judge underwent during the All-Star break showed healing in the rib but not enough to allow the three-time American League MVP to begin the regimen of baseball activities that officially would start his clock toward a return. When that will occur continues to be shrouded in mystery, as is the condition of Stanton, who hasn’t played since April 24 because of a right calf strain.
Stanton recently restarted his running program — paused after a setback in mid-June because of, in the words of Cashman, a “new injury” that occurred in the calf area when he started to run — but his timeline for a return remains as foggy as Judge’s.
The production of the offense in both players’ absences — Judge’s in particular — continues to be striking.
Through May 31, the Yankees were 36-23, averaging 5.2 runs per game and hitting .243 with a .770 OPS.
Entering Thursday, when they fell to 25-25 without Judge, the Yankees were averaging 4.1 runs per game and hitting .223 with a .675 OPS.
They scored only two runs in the final 23 innings of this series. Each of those runs gave them a lead in extra innings that they couldn't preserve.
“I think one to two guys in a lineup doesn’t change much,” Chisholm, who gave way to pinch runner Jose Caballero in the 11th because of what he said was cramping in his right hamstring, said of missing Judge and Stanton. “Yes, it makes a big difference with the two guys that we have out of the lineup, but at the same time, I feel like there’s a lot of plays we could do a better in and play a lot more team ball.”
It isn’t exactly clear what Chisholm, who himself could be dealt before Monday, meant by “team ball” and how that would translate into more runs.
Regardless, it’s the latter staring down the Yankees as their most pressing issue, an issue that keeps producing far more questions than answers (not to mention runs).
Answers, incidentally, that the deadline isn’t guaranteed to solve.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
