It’s been a challenging month of July in Yankee Land. Since the calendar flipped, the Yankees have gone 5-9, including back-to-back heartbreaking walk-off losses against the Colorado Rockies and Los Angeles Angels on Sunday and Monday.
At 50-45, the Yankees currently sit in last place in the American League East, marking the latest into a season they’ve had sole possession of last place in 33 years.
But despite all of those negatives, manager Aaron Boone isn’t ready to just fold and give up.
During his weekly appearance on the “Talkin’ Yanks” podcast, Boone said the ultimate goal of making the playoffs is still within reach, and he believes in the players this team has in the clubhouse to get the job done.
“Absolutely confident, and especially in a stretch where you’ve had a month where it hasn’t been great,” Boone said. “We haven’t consistently put a lot of runs on the board, and then in the midst of that you have three losses going back to the final one of the Cubs series where you’ve got leads late and you lose them, especially with how good our bullpen’s been.
“When you’re kind of in that snapshot of time, those are tough ones to certainly swallow in the moment, but you’ve got to keep pressing forward, knowing that not only are we going to get some people back, but [Carlos] Rodon being back [Luis Severino] having a good outing last night, [Oswald] Peraza coming up and looking like that in his first full game. It’s still about unlocking a couple other guys that we’ve really got to get rolling.”
While it feels like nothing but doom and gloom around the Bombers at the moment, they are just 2.5 games back of the final Wild Card spot in the AL.
No Yankee fans were focused on being a Wild Card team heading into the season, but at 9.0 games back in the division, with four other teams in front of them, it very well just may be Wild Card or bust for this New York squad.
Boone said he still believes the Yankees can turn things around and make a postseason push, and he cited several teams as reasons for his optimism.
“I am confident that that can happen. The game is littered with – because obviously all of our guys are getting the questions every day and I’m certainly getting those questions every day of ‘You’re in last place.’ The context is important there,” Boone said. “We are, but we’re not 10 games under, we’re not 15 games under, we’re not 10 games out of the playoffs. We have to climb, and we understand that, and we have to play solid baseball here for the next two-plus months to give ourselves a chance.
“It’s not overwhelming. Like, if we go play well we’ll get to where we need to go and where we want to go. You look at teams, even recently, the game is littered with teams you thought were dead and buried way worse than we are right now, whether you go back a year and look at the Phillies, or the Braves the year before, whether it’s the Nationals, like all of these teams that were either under .500 or even skidding at the finish line, have been able to go on runs. We understand that we haven’t put ourselves in position yet to be one of those teams.”
The Yankees have 11 games left in the month of July, so if they want to turn things around and come out of the month with a winning record, the switch will need to be flipped pretty quickly.
And with Aaron Judge getting “close” to a return from his toe injury, perhaps Boone’s faith in his club can still be warranted.
“It’s there for the taking. It’s there for us to do,” Boone said. “I do feel like we have the people to get it done. Obviously, it’s going to be important to get some more people back… but now is not the time to get caught up in the noise. We’re in the fight.”