No need to panic, but some concern is welcome for the Bronx Bombers

Last night was a game that George Steinbrenner would personally address the team, Michael King and Nick Nelson would receive the first bus ticket out of the Bronx, and Aaron Boone and Brian Cashman would be in the papers with their jobs hanging in the balance.

I have watched every single Yankee game this season, I’ve watched about 80% of the action in the games (sometimes forgetting the time the game started or the YES app buffering for an inning and a half), last night I turned the game off after the bottom of the 5th. I had enough. The fans also had enough when they started throwing balls back onto the field in the 8th inning with the collective asking the same question the Bombers themselves are asking: “why is this happening and how can it be fixed?” Like the balls returning into the field of play last night in the bottom of the 8th, blame has been thrown around in every direction. The offense is anemic with little to no ability to drive in runs without hoping to run into a ball that can be hit 450 feet, the pitching aside from Gerrit Cole and Aroldis Chapman has been lack luster, and the man in the managers chair has been scrutinized every day for how he’s been conducting his ball club. Aaron Boone said postgame “we just gotta be better.”

The message from the skipper after last night’s dreadful performance is seems crystal clear: Enough is enough, we know who we are, let’s start playing like it. “We have to come to the ballpark tomorrow ready to go” said Clint Frazier after the game addressing the April struggles and the team meeting following the game last night. Every person that went in front of a microphone following the game last night took accountability for the slow start to the season and the way the fans reacted last night, Frazier would go onto say “moving forward we play well enough to where that does not happen again.”

The reason the fans reacted the way they did is because this emotion has been pent up inside for a season and a half. This feeling of frustration from Yankees fans has dated back to the slide from 2020 where they looked like they look in last night’s 8-2 drubbing: like the worst team in baseball and to sit here and say that the fans are overreacting from 13 games is not true, it’s been 73 games dating back to last June. The same outrage has been there since the Yankees had a similar night like this last summer in Buffalo where the Yanks looked like a glorified tee-ball team.

The Bombers sit at 5-8 through 13 and have sole possession of last place in the AL East for the first time since 1998. Let that sink in for all the Yankee fans that feel the way we all do right now. The last time the Yanks were this bad they went on to set baseball’s record for most wins in a season and win the first of three consecutive World Series. You know what also happened in 1998 after a slow start out west where the Bombers did the same thing they did tonight, Joe Torre held a team meeting getting on his talented roster for a slow start, and they played to their potential. “Over the long-haul I’m very confident in this group” said Aaron Boone about getting things right over the course of 162, which sounds oddly like Chuck Knoblauch in 1998 after that team’s slow start “it’s not happening right now, but it’s going to. When it does start to happen, the floodgates are going to open.” There are still 149 more games before the playoffs start, so this is by no means a call for panic, the red alert bottom can be safely tucked away for now, however in a division that is shaping up to be the most competitive it has been in a long time, the Yankees can still lose this division in April, their season however, still has time to straighten out this tortoise-like start. 

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