The expanded Major League Baseball playoffs and the presence of the parity obvious to everyone except Rob Manfred and his lockout- and salary cap-starved owners lends a certain air of uncertain desperation to the postseason.
Everyone in the 12-team field could be eliminated without winning a game. Everyone in the 12-team field could win it all (except the Houston Astros or Texas Rangers, one of whom has to represent the American League West because that’s unfortunately in the rules).
And yet even acknowledging everyone (except the Astros or Rangers) is facing the same all-or-nothing equation, no one has a bigger variance of outcomes or more at stake starting Tuesday night than the New York Yankees.
Aaron Judge and/or Giancarlo Stanton could return from their lengthy injured list stints and provide thump and balance to a lineup that alternates between powerful and punchless. The Yankees lead the majors with 223 homers but their .311 on-base percentage is ahead of only the Atlanta Braves — by one hundredth of a percentage point — amongst playoff teams.
Yet Judge and/or Stanton don’t have to come back in order for the Yankees to ride their pitching staff to a championship. No team matches the Yankees’ rotation, which is headed by likely AL Cy Young Award winner Cam Schlittler with Max Fried, Carlos Rodon and former Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole — a trio that combined to post a 3.08 ERA in 58 starts — lining up in some order thereafter.
Will Warren, who ranked second on the Yankees with 29 starts, will shift to the bullpen, where he could provide length or team up with revelatory set-up men Paul Blackburn and Brent Headrick (a combined 1.93 ERA in 163 1/3 innings) to man the fifth through eighth innings ahead of closer David Bednar, who has 35 saves in 39 chances.
It’s not hard to envision a Knicks-like championship march that is as a month-long justification of the approach longtime general manager Brian Cashman has fashioned over the past two decades.
George Steinbrenner would have been apoplectic over the Yankees losing the AL East to his hometown Tampa Bay Rays, but Cashman understands the regular season does not consist of 162 Game Sevens in the wild card era — especially for the Yankees, whose budget and player development pipeline all but guarantees a trip to the playoffs every season. If the Yankees keep getting to the playoffs, eventually they’ll break through.
Except that hasn’t happened since 2009, and it’s just as easy to envision the drought extending through a 17th consecutive season.
The Yankees are averaging 4.3 runs per game since June 1, a span in which Stanton hasn’t played at all and Judge has appeared in just seven games. Five of the eight pennant-winners since 2022, when the playoffs expanded to 12 teams, averaged more than 4.3 runs per game in the postseason.
The rustiness for Stanton and/or Judge means their hypothetical presence doesn’t guarantee anything for the Yankees — and presents scenarios in which one or both players aggravate their injuries, thereby endangering their status for whenever the next season begins.
Fried has battled elbow woes all season while Cole and Rodon didn’t debut until May while recovering from their elbow surgeries, which serve as reminders of the durability issues surrounding an otherwise supreme rotation. There is little set-up depth behind Blackburn and Headrick, who have been overworked this season and may not be ready to emerge as the Mike Stanton and Jeff Nelson of this era.
The Yankees’ fundamentally unsound ways caught up with them in October 2024, when they won the pennant with Judge, Stanton and Juan Soto at the peak of their powers. Two years later, the Yankees aren’t any better at the small things, which might not matter at all in a wide-open tournament — or might leave them much more vulnerable to the emptiest worst-case scenario in all-or-nothing endeavor.
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