Home Teams with Howard Megdal, September 9, 2020
The baseline for the Yankees remains high — Must-click New York sports links
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The baseline for the Yankees remains high
Brian Cashman, longtime general manager of the New York Yankees, flew to Buffalo Tuesday to address his team prior to the game against the Toronto Blue Jays.
“I don’t do it often, but I do it when I feel it’s necessary,” Cashman told the media following the meeting. “I’m known for speaking my mind, and I usually run to confrontation.”
He pointed out the urgency in turning things around. Then the Yankees went out and lost again, 2-1, wasting a strong pitching performance from J.A. Happ. As Cashman put it, there’s no one thing that needs fixing.
“When you find yourself as a team, struggling, there’s going to be a ton of answers,” he said.
Cashman is right — look no further than the night before, a 12-7 loss, to see that there’s been no template for failure as a 16-6 start gave way to a 5-15 run over the past 20 games.
But in just the ways the Mets, as we addressed yesterday, do not plan for contingencies, the Yankees do precisely that. The marveling at how the team weathers injuries, year after year, is in actuality a baseball organization that socks away depth at all positions. It sometimes takes time, though, to fully understand how and where to utilize that depth.
Time is the one thing missing from this baseball season. A 60-game campaign means that 5-15 is 1/3 of the season, instead of the 1/8 it typically would be. The worst organizations in baseball have a puncher’s chance in 2020, and the best don’t get to flex their advantage to nearly the same degree.
The Yankees are still likelier than not to make the playoffs in 2020. And the last time Cashman flew to address the team, according to longtime Yankees scribe Bryan Hoch, was 2009 — the last year New York won the World Series. So maybe this wasn’t a panic move. Maybe it was an omen.
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