The nightcap was something of a buzzkill, sure. The Angels showed the Yankees what they showed the Mets over the weekend: A lot of the time they look just as bad as their record, which was 49-64 after the Yankees won the first game of this soggy doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, 5-2.
And sometimes they’re walking off the field, congratulating each other, as they did after the 8-2 Angels win in the second game, and you ask yourself: How’d they do ?
So the Yankees wound up even-steven for their long day in The Bronx, and crossed another day off the calendar, another two games. The Orioles snuck back into a first-place tie by coming back at Toronto. As the Yankees retreated to the clubhouse, pending the result of the Phillies-Dodgers game, they did so carrying a regal title:
Tied for the best record in baseball.
They don’t give out trophies for that, no. No banners are hung. No parades are scheduled. There are still a lot of games left to play — 47 of them, to be exact — and if this season has shown us anything, with the Yankees and with just about everyone else in the sport, it’s that this week has nothing to do with last week and even less to do with next week.
That said …
The Yankees look like the Yankees again. This isn’t just a small surge, this is a pattern now. Ever since they were a strike away from losing in Fenway Park 12 days ago, ever since Trent Grisham dinged one off The Wall off Kenley Jansen and got the Yankees tied, ever since they finished off the Sox in extra innings that night, the Yankees are now 8-2, and that’s certainly something.
More: They look far more like the team we saw in April and May, less so the team that spent more than a month in baseball purgatory in June and July.
And it’s interesting. Aaron Boone had a lot to say after both ends of this doubleheader, a lot of good words about the surging cleanup man, Austin Wells; and his go-to guys, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto; and Luis Gil, who grinded his way through five sweaty innings in the opener, pitching smartly, going to the fastball when he lost his breaking stuff.
DJ LeMahieu is looking like a new player again. Clay Holmes looked ultra-sharp. And the offense, despite taking a month off, remains the most accomplished in baseball.
“We’re doing a lot of things well right now,” Boone said.
You know what he didn’t say?
He didn’t say what we heard him say so often during the bad times, what he said so often that it began to annoy Yankees fans every night the way gnats on a steamy summer night are annoying.
He didn’t say, “It’s all there in front of us.”
Because he didn’t have to. Because he probably won’t have to again, regardless how the next 47 games go. Because however else that regular mantra might have been interpreted while he was saying it every day like some kind of secular novena, all he was doing was stating the truth.
It’s a little too easy for the rest of us to treat 162 baseball games the same way we treat 17 football games — present company included. The very best managers aren’t affected by this syndrome, don’t even consider it. The very best of them might not always repeat it every day, as Boone did at the depths of the slump.
But they do espouse it. Boone simply did it publicly, and regularly, probably as much to show his players the faith he still had in them as anything else. And now the players have paid him back. The Yankees look like the Yankees again, regardless of what the scoreboard said at the end of close to six hours of soggy baseball Wednesday night at the Stadium.
And it’s still all there, out in front of them.
