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NY Post
New York Post
15 Jun 2023


NextImg:Veteran bats not doing enough for Yankees in Aaron Judge’s absence

The song is not going to change all that much for however long Aaron Judge is sidelined with his toe injury.

The Yankees are in survive, not thrive mode right now and it is going to be impossible to do even that unless their high-salaried veteran position players compensate.

Manager Aaron Boone said soon after Judge was lost for weeks that, “Technically, you have less margin for error when you take the best player in the sport out of your lineup every day.”

That margin for error all but vanishes when Giancarlo Stanton, Josh Donaldson, Anthony Rizzo and DJ LeMahieu start and throw up a combined 1-for-14, as they did Wednesday night at Citi Field.

It goes away when the Yankees go 1-for-15 overall with runners in scoring position, as they did Wednesday even as the Mets gave them a greater margin for error with all of their errors.

The Yankees are now 4-5 without Judge and all five losses have been by one run. In four of those, they scored two runs, two runs, two runs and three runs.

The Yankees lost to the Mets 4-3 in 10 innings Wednesday, despite a strong start by Gerrit Cole and their first steal of home in seven years.

They lost though the Mets got booed off the field after the top of the seventh due to play that conjured memories of the 1962 expansion club.

There is no crying in baseball, of course.

The Mets are missing their main power source, Pete Alonso. The Yankees’ modern nemeses, the Astros, know they will be minus their best hitter, Yordan Alvarez, for weeks.

Giancarlo Stanton, who went 0-for-4, walks into the dugout after striking out in the first inning of the Yankees’ 4-3 Subway Series loss to the Mets.
Corey Sipkin for the NY Post

But removing Judge too often feels for the Yankees like the equivalent of the Nuggets suddenly trying to win without Nikola Jokic.

That is only compounded when there is one empty at-bat after another from one-time stars, and when the best Yankees at-bats come from Jake Bauers, Billy McKinney and Anthony Volpe.

Cole and Justin Verlander faced one other for just the second time in their long careers.

The other time was June 30, 2015, when Cole was a Pirate and his cleanup hitter was Starling Marte and Verlander was a Tiger and one of the relievers behind him that day was Joba Chamberlain.

McKinney produced the lone Yankees hit in the first five innings against Verlander, a leadoff double in the third.

But the motif was set. The Yankees did not drive him home.

Cole was perfect for four innings. He began all of those 12 hitters with a four-seam fastball. Francisco Lindor then led off the fifth with a double and scored on a two-out double by Tommy Pham.

Both doubles, clocked to right field, perhaps would have been home runs at Yankee Stadium.

Dominic Leone celebrates after getting Josh Donaldson (left) to ground out to shortstop to end the top of the 10th inning of the Mets' win.

Dominic Leone celebrates after getting Josh Donaldson (left) to ground out to shortstop to end the top of the 10th inning of the Mets’ win.
Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post

Jose Trevino then led off the sixth with a double. Volpe battled from 1-2 to a full count and lifted a fly out to right field. Trevino raced back to the bag, tagged up and reached third because Marte airmailed a throw beyond Eduardo Escobar.

Verlander had thrown 52 pitches through just three innings, largely because Bauers had forced him to throw 19 combined in his first two at-bats.

Then, in the sixth, Verlander seemed to be attempting to work around Bauers, with Trevino on third and Stanton on deck. He fell behind 3-0, but the Yankees are in the kind of place in which Bauers gets the green light on 3-0. He fouled it off, but he then darted a tying single to right field.

The Yankees are 4-5 without Aaron Judge this season.

The Yankees are 4-5 without Aaron Judge this season.
AP

Stanton then had the green light at 3-0 and smashed a ball 118.3 mph.

But it was on the ground and the Mets made their best defensive play of what was for them another inelegant fielding performance — an around-the-horn double play in which Escobar, Jeff McNeil and Mark Vientos all made sharp plays.

In the seventh, the Yankees capitalized on that poor defense. McNeil, with no chance, tried to complete a double play on an Isiah Kiner-Falefa grounder. Vientos should have come off the bag, but didn’t.

The throwing error gave the Yankees the go-ahead run. Before the inning was complete, Kiner-Falefa produced the Yankees’ first steal of home since Didi Gregorius on Aug. 27, 2016.

But that is how the Yankees have to score runs right now — gifts and daring. From there to the finish line, they went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position.

The Yankees got to three runs and couldn’t go any higher. They began this Subway finale hitting .199 in eight games without Judge. They are now averaging 3.4 runs in nine games without their best player.

They are trying to survive, not thrive. But how can they do that with so much money for nothing in their lineup?