Here is what Yankee fans saw this week in the latest edition of the Subway Series: They saw this season’s $280 million production for Yankee baseball. It happens to be about the same budget they had for “Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.” Now the Yankees move up on another reckoning, one about how this particular movie ends, and which characters survive, and that doesn’t just mean the manager but also the general manager, Brian Cashman, whom Hal Steinbrenner allowed to spend all this money on a team that currently sits in last place in the AL East.
The only consolation for the Yankees, as the Trade Deadline approaches, is that they’re much better off than the Mets. The Mets’ general manager, Cashman protegee Billy Eppler, spent even more money on players this season and is now as far away from a wild card in the National League as the Yankees are from first place in East.
We all hear that Cashman is going to be a buyer at the deadline, at the same time we hear the Mets may throw in the towel on what would be the greatest financial disaster in baseball history and be sellers. Or maybe Cohen tells his general manager to figure it out, and the Mets somehow make a crazy run to a wild card from the outside the way they did seven years ago.
For now, though, the Yankees have a much better shot to do something the rest of the way. That’s just because every team in a volatile AL East seems to be in play from the Orioles — this weekend’s Yankee opponent — in first place to the Yankees in last. You don’t think so? A month ago the Red Sox were 15 games out of first. After they just took two at Fenway Park from the Braves, the best team in baseball, they’re seven out and have the best record in the sport in July.
The Yankees are about to make the most important Trade Deadline acquisition they’ve ever made, because they are scheduled to get Aaron Judge back, maybe as soon as Friday. We have seen what they look like without him: “Mission Impossible” without Tom Cruise. Now we see what they can look like over the last two months of the regular season with him back in the lineup.
“Everything [with Judge] is moving in a good direction,” Aaron Boone said at Yankee Stadium.
But considering the talent around Judge, or lack thereof, even before he got hurt almost two months ago at Dodger Stadium, Yankee fans ought to be wondering exactly how big a difference No. 99 can make depending on whom Cashman might acquire over the next several days. Please remember the way Judge hit over the second half of the last season on his way to 62 home runs, as he was turning himself into an even bigger baseball attraction than Shohei Ohtani. Despite everything he did, however, and despite the way he did his level best to carry the Yankees, they were a .500 team the second half of the season and nearly lost to the Guardians in the first round of the playoffs before getting swept by the Astros in the American League Championship Series.
And guess what? That Yankee team was better — and a year younger — than this Yankee team. Now you look out at the field, without any of them having Judge for cover since June 4, and the problem with our Bronx nine is how many of these players are on the back nine. It makes you wonder exactly how close the Yankee baseball people, from Steinbrenner and Cashman on down, thought the team was just because it got past the Guardians last October before once again running into the varsity from Houston.
Anthony Rizzo is past his prime and so is DJ LeMahieu. You wonder if we’ve already seen the best we’re going to see from Gleyber Torres, at least at Yankee Stadium, even if he’s still only 26. Maybe Giancarlo Stanton, who signed the same kind of $300 million contract with the Marlins that his teammates Gerrit Cole and Judge signed with the Yankees, can finally rise up like All-Rise Judge the rest of the way. But for the time being, all we see is Dave Kingman 2.0. With a .200 batting average.
Their hot kid is the kid at shortstop, Anthony Volpe, who may turn out to be a great Yankee. For now, and even with the way every triumph of his turns everyone half-giddy, Volpe is hitting .212. But compared to what the Yankees have gotten from other young products in their farm system, it does make Volpe look like a young Jeter. Just about all the teams that have won the World Series lately have been a combination of farm system and veterans. The Yankees are mostly just loaded with back-nine veterans.
Can they win August and September? I keep saying this: It’s silly to write them off until you see what kind of team they turn back into with Judge. They still have a third of the regular season still to play. It means there is still time for them to justify the faith that Cashman had in his own front office team, and the team he has put on the field.
“Don’t give up on us,” Cashman said a few months ago.
Nobody gave up on the Yankees then. Nobody should be giving up on them now, despite the dreary and uninteresting team they too often are without Judge. It is too soon to declare them the second biggest big-budget flop in town. They know what their own mission is. We’re about to find out just how impossible it is. And what kind of dead reckoning there will be if a World Series-or-bust team doesn’t even make the postseason this time.
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