Brief Trip Above .500 Ends With Series Loss For Yankees

After scoring at least six runs a game during their four game sweep against the Angels, the Yankees managed just six across the three game series against the Detroit Tigers. It was deflating to watch. Especially after the team put together a strong surge to get to .500, before CC Sabathia went 7 strong scoreless innings on Friday to finally get the team over .500 for the first time since early April.

In the Saturday and Sunday games, Masahiro Tanaka and Michael Pineda couldn’t match the mastery of their much older rotation mate but, as has been said too many times this season, it wouldn’t have mattered if they could because the offense was virtually silenced. In discussing the relatively soft schedule the Yankees have coming up, the Tigers were considered a bit of an outlier. They are a solid team that is just performing poorly (kind of like the Yankees) so there was no expectation that the Yankees would rollover them. Still, there was certainly the hope that they’d put up a fight.

Even in Friday’s game, however, the Yankees struggled to get hits. If not for a questionable defensive play in the 1st and an error in the 3rd, the Yankees might have only scored 2 runs. That would have looked just as bad as the one run they were able to score in the final two games of the series.

The past week has shown that the Yankees are good enough to beat the bad teams but it is still an open question as to whether they are quite good enough to beat the average to above average teams.

That’s the question that needs to be answered because, if they aren’t (and I’m not yet conceding that fact), then where does that leave this team for 2016? Looking at this team and witnessing their inconsistency, it’s fair to question whether they’ll even be on the fringes of contention. 

This weekend's series loss could just be an older team exhausted from playing 40 games in 41 days. In which case, they’ll take a breather today and then continue their upward climb. That’s certainly the hope anyway. The reality will have to wait until tomorrow.