NEW YORK — Finally, after rescuing the Yankees from historic failure to return them to merely moribund, the hero made his first mistake of the night. DH Aaron Judge wound up for a celebratory high five with right fielder Oswaldo Cabrera—and missed. Judge had to swing back around and grab Cabrera on the glove.
It’s hard to blame them. Before they beat the Nationals 9–1 on Wednesday, the Yankees hadn’t enjoyed a victory in nine games, since Aug. 11. (Perhaps more remarkably, until Judge homered in the first, they hadn’t even held a lead since Aug. 14, a span of 61 innings.)
“It’s been so long,” said catcher Kyle Higashioka with a laugh, joking that it was hard to remember who goes high and who goes low. “We’ll get it back,” he insisted.
It might not matter much. The victory improved their record to 61–65 and raised their odds of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs, from 0.1% to 0.3%. Everything GM Brian Cashman said before the game about how this season has been “a disaster” remains true.
But they did celebrate on Wednesday, with the club lights and loud music that punctuate victories, because they finally won a game. A loss would have been their 10th straight, the worst stretch in 110 years, since the 1913 team lost 10 straight in May and June. Babe Ruth was a 17-year-old catcher and pitcher at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. Joe DiMaggio would not be born for another 18 months. The Yankees—who until eight weeks prior had been called the Highlanders—were playing at the Polo Grounds.
Judge ripped three home runs, center fielder Harrison Bader had two hits and starter Luis Severino scattered one hit and two walks over 6 2/3 scoreless innings. Severino’s performance especially marked a bright spot: He was booed off the mound earlier this month and entered the game with a 7.98 ERA. On Wednesday, the crowd gave him a standing ovation and he tipped his cap. If you squinted, you could almost see the club the Yankees envisioned before this season began, when, as Cashman said, “I don’t think there’s anybody on this planet that felt that the New York Yankees as constructed entering spring training—entering or leaving spring training—wasn’t a playoff-contending team.”
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But if you opened your eyes wide, you saw the truth: Among regulars, only Judge and second baseman Gleyber Torres have hit better than league average. (Judge is fifth in the American League in home runs, with 27, despite missing a third of the season with a torn ligament in his toe.) The Yankees are hitting .229, second worst in the sport. Even a revived Severino, and a Gerrit Cole season that just might capture him the American League Cy Young Award, can’t save this group if someone other than Judge doesn’t start hitting.
The Yankees are too old and too homer-dependent and too right-handed, and they will spend the rest of the season trying to determine which of those problems they can fix easily and which ones can be solved only by a complete overhaul. Cashman acknowledged that owner Hal Steinbrenner could decide he and manager Aaron Boone are not the people to oversee that shift. They already fired hitting coach Dillon Lawson at the All-Star break, the first time in nearly 26 years helming the Yankees that Cashman has made such a move during the season, after his charges produced a .231 batting average and .410 slugging percentage. Since Sean Casey took over, those figures have been .225 and .370.
“The numbers haven’t changed,” Cashman acknowledged. He said he felt that players were no longer connecting well with Lawson and were connecting with Casey, “and hopefully we can get some better results. But [I] acknowledge that obviously, [we] see something wrong, try to fix it. But if it doesn't get fixed, I understand why the question is coming, because our job is to find a way to get better.”
He did not seem to know what that way would be. “Everything I've been trying to do from my end, whether it's promote from within, whether it's make a coaching change, whatever it is, nothing’s worked,” he said. “It’s failed. So we'll keep trying.”
For one game, something worked. Unfortunately, the Yankees still have 36 more.
