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NEW YORK — During the worst six weeks of baseball the franchise has seen in 27 years, the Yankees tried everything they could think of between the lines. They tried to hit better. They tried to pitch better. They tried to make the field better. Nothing worked. They are 14–25 since July 8, and their lead in the American League East has shrunk from 15.5 to 8.5 games.
So they moved outside the lines—in some cases, well outside them. Ace Gerrit Cole experimented with his outfits: undershirt, no undershirt. (Loss, loss.) Catcher Kyle Higashioka rotates through all three pairs of his spikes. (Loss, loss, loss.) Third baseman Josh Donaldson burns a bundle of sage in the clubhouse. (Loss.)
“We have a good thing with rain delays,” says Relief Lucas Luetge. “We circle and play video games together, and we won both times.” The players expressed joy when they learned bad weather was in the forecast for the first game of the Subway Series on Monday, but the clouds cleared in time for them to win 4-2 anyway.
One day they greeted each other with hugs, and they won that night, but then they did it again and they lost. They tried different tactics throughout the game, “to no avail,” says Cole: “Standing in different places; rubber, no rubber; [equipment manager Rob Cucuzza’s] office, this office, that office. And? Cole sighs. “We have intermittent success with positions in the dugout and collective buy-in for chewing gum or something like that,” he says. “But I would say, no, there hasn’t been one thing that’s really worked.”
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If it had, they certainly would have continued. All to break out of a sudden, baffling team-wide slump, especially among the hitters. The pitchers slightly underperformed, with a 4.17 ERA over the 39-game stretch, but the real culprit was the offense. Over the past two weeks, the Yankees have an OPS+ of 64, meaning they have been collectively just a little worse at the plate than pitcher Ty Blach was for the Giants in 2017.
“It feels a bit like the dog on the racetrack,” says Cole. “He never gets the rabbit.”
Even the normally even-tempered manager Aaron Boone was reduced to his fist on the table at his press conference after Saturday’s loss, the sixth in seven games. And that performance actually qualified as an improvement: After being shut out three times in six games, New York managed to score two runs.
Boone says he tries to stay away from superstition, if only because if a small change seems to have an effect, he has to incorporate it for the rest of his life. (So maybe he doesn’t actually stay away from superstition.) Nevertheless, Donaldson brought the sage into his office. The team won the next day, Boone points out, on a walk-off grand slam by Donaldson himself. “It’s slow,” he says.
Very slowly. The Yankees have gone 2-4 since that game. The single finger José Trevino seems unfazed by the daily drops. “I wouldn’t say it’s frustrating,” he says. “I think we’re just learning our team.” And what do they learn? “That we are tough,” he says. “We’re super tough and every time everybody’s going to give us their best shot. Every time, no matter who they are, they’re going to come in and everybody wants to beat the Yankees.
For the most part, of late, they have been. New York hasn’t won a series in nearly a month as it swept the fourth-place Royals. As fans boo Boone and general manager Brian Cashman, the players look for answers in the cage. But if they don’t find one there, they look elsewhere.
Relievers regularly rearrange their chairs in the bullpen, sure they’ve found the right configuration, only to see a hitter come out at a key moment. But Higashioka points out that all that work now — undershirts and spikes and sage and rubber and chairs — will certainly pay off as the calendar turns to October and the players identify the key combination. “That will be important down the line,” he says.
They are joking, of course. “We try to keep everything as light as possible,” says reliever Ron Marinaccio. “We all know that none of this stuff really matters. It’s just trying to keep a positive mindset. He adds: “We feel like we’re pretty close to getting back on track. … As much as it has been in the last couple of weeks, if we can shake off two good weeks and then we can find ourselves 13 games back in the division, then these bad weeks don’t really matter anymore.
But if he doesn’t see some changes soon, Luetge has a plan: Forget sage. He will get his hands on holy water.
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