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The Yankees won a game Thursday afternoon and they really needed to do that. They needed to end their longest losing streak (six games) since a nine-gamer in August 2023 that wiped them from playoff contention. They needed to avert being swept in a four-game series against the Angels for the first time ever in the teams’ 44th set of at least four games. 

Yankees 7, Angels 3 felt bigger than a June 19 victory and it was not only because it was their first win in a week. It was about how they played the last week, which is to say how much it resembled the bad baseball that nipped at them all last season and then crescendoed in a World Series loss, notably a fundamental nightmare of a fifth inning in the eliminating Game 5. 

“It was just a bad week,” Aaron Boone said in a one-on-one moment after the game. “We’re much more equipped, especially athletically [to be a fundamentally sound team].” 

Maybe it was just a week. But it was about at this time last year that the Yankees got flimsier with the details, as if it was too mentally and physically exhausting to do the A, B, C’s of the game correctly over and over rather than just count on Aaron Judge and Juan Soto and a bad American League to camouflage their inability to be consistently sound.