Yankees' next step: Start beating the best
Yankees starter Max Fried pitches during the first inning against the Boston Red Sox on Friday night at Yankee Stadium. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Another important game. Another defeat. Another day off the calendar.
The Yankees still have time to become that team they’ve aspired to be all season — the one that gets back to the World Series and wins it this time — but the clock continues ticking and they have yet to prove that they can be.
This isn’t about the way they morphed from a team that spent more than two months in first place to one that spent almost two months playing poorly and slid down the standings as far as third. And it’s not generally about the consistently inconsistent fielding, the bullpen letdowns, the ill-timed hitting droughts or the mental mistakes.
It’s about the way they have played against the better teams in the American League. Those are the games in which winning proves teams are World Series-capable, and the Yankees haven’t done that.
They had another chance to demonstrate that they can beat a good team Friday night against the Red Sox at the Stadium. Against a foe they’re jockeying with for playoff position and with ace Max Fried on the mound, they came up miserably short in a 1-0 loss that dropped them into third.
Fried was everything they needed him to be, turning the page on a rough eight-start stretch with six scoreless innings, but the Yankees managed only three hits — one after the third inning — and a walk and couldn’t get a runner past first base.
Reliever Mark Leiter Jr. let Boston get on the scoreboard in the seventh. Austin Wells blundered on the bases and got doubled off after leading off the sixth with the Yankees’ third and final hit. And though it didn’t ultimately come with a price, Anthony Volpe threw to the wrong base in the ninth, giving the Sox an extra out. Jasson Dominguez threw to the wrong base in the ninth, too.
After the Blue Jays dominated the Yankees in a four-game sweep on June 30-July 3 in Toronto, Aaron Boone told his team in a closed-door meeting that it is “the best team in the league.” Asked on Friday afternoon if he still believes that, he replied: “We’ve got a great opportunity in front of us here with games left to go out and still realize all our hopes and dreams.
“I believe we can do that. I believe that’s who we are. But right now, it’s just belief. We’ve got to go do it.”
They didn’t. And while the Yankees went into the night with a 96.5% probability for making the postseason, according to FanGraphs, thanks to a remaining schedule ranked the second-softest in the AL, their record against the teams they likely would face is abysmal.
If the season ended today, the other five teams in the AL playoffs would be division leaders Toronto, Detroit and Houston and wild cards Boston and Seattle. The Yankees’ aggregate record against those five teams is 11-19, with five of those wins against the would-be No. 6- seeded Mariners. That run of seven wins in eight games before this series? Those wins were against sub-.500 teams.
Toronto is 7-3 against the Yankees. Boston has beaten them seven straight times for a 7-1 lead in the season series and has ace Garrett Crochet going Saturday afternoon.
“They’ve had our number here for a stretch,” Boone said.
Asked about the lack of success against their two division rivals, Ben Rice replied, “There’s absolutely frustration . . . We’ve got to be better.”
There are five games remaining against Boston and three apiece against each of the division leaders. Winning those games would not only prove to doubters that they can be Boone’s “best team in the league” but also prove it to themselves.
“There’s plenty of good feeling when your team is winning games against teams with great records and winning games against teams in positions to make a deep World Series run,” said Nathaniel Lowe, who was on the Rangers when they won the 2023 World Series and scored the only run of Friday night’s game. “You see what you’re capable of, winning games like that. But at least for us that year, the magic that led to us winning the World Series didn’t come until we beat Tampa in the Wild Card [Series].”
Boone doesn’t think there is something that happens when the Yankees face the top teams, but he said that suffering a three-game sweep in Boston in mid-June “came in a week we were scuffling” and “we were on the wrong side of some close games” and that the games in Toronto were “probably a handful of our worst games.”
These last two weren’t much better. Friday’s anemic offensive performance came after the Yankees committed four errors and walked nine Boston hitters in Thursday’s 6-3 loss.
The old saying is that to be the best, you have to beat the best. The Yankees haven’t done that.
There’s still time, and it begins on Saturday when they try to beat Crochet.
“When it comes to Red Sox-Yankees, everyone wants to bring out their best,” Fried said, “so you know that everyone’s going to be on top of it.”
But do we? The Yankees haven’t proved they can do that yet.
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.
