The Yankee offense made it sound like 2020.
Which in 2021 is particularly offensive – although these Yankees certainly cannot be accused of being offensive during the first weekend of the season.
There were 10,066 spectators in the stadium on Easter Sunday – a house filled with rules of 20% capacity – and if you closed your eyes, it would have been easy to believe that this was another game like that of 2020 without fans. Such was the weak effort of the Yankee team. Such was the silencing effect of one fruitless hit after another.
“We didn’t get together much,” said Aaron Boone.
In losing the rubber game in this series 3-1 to Blue Jays, the Yankees offered a story of two inadequacies. During the first six entries, they hit only once, but went 1-to-10 with the men at the base and no strikes in five strikes with the runners in the scoring position. The Yanks then went up nine, up nine with five puffs in the last three innings.
So, while maintaining what was expected to be a fierce Toronto lineup with just three races in each game, the Yankees lost two out of three to the 2021 opening because their expected fierce formation arrived in April more like lambs than lions. They lost two of three to a Toronto team that played without their main off-season acquisition, George Springer, who was out due to an oblique injury. And they lost two of three with little offense, although Toronto used the replacement holders on Saturday (Ross Stripling) and Sunday (TJ Zeuch) with injured Robbie Ray and Nate Pearson.
“We had a slightly cold weekend,” said Boone.
If this were just a “little bit” from a cold weekend, no Yankees fan would like to see a deep freeze. Even winning on Saturday with five races, the Yankees did not hit the ball very well.
This provided three more games of proof that, when the Yankees do not pass the ball over the fence, they will have difficulty generating races. Gary Sanchez hit two home runs to produce three runs. The Yanks’ other five runs over the weekend were on RBI infield singles by DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Hicks, a two-race bloop single by Jay Bruce and a groundout by Brett Gardner.
Some timely strokes and the Yankees could have really finished off this series. Instead, they had 4-to-24 (0.167) without extra base strokes in the three games with runners in the scoring position and 10-to-47 (0.213) with the men at the base.
The culprits were many. One of them, Giancarlo Stanton, was released on Sunday because, Boone said, he did not want the often injured DH to play five days in a row at the start of the season. But the biggest problem of all was the Aarons – Judge and Hicks – in numbers 2 and 3 of the lineup. They went 0 to 8 on Sunday and 4 to 26 in the series. The referee made another double play with the runners in the scoring position. But he also burned an ocean liner at 176.6 mph right on the second man on the base, Marcus Semien, on his first hit.
Hicks had a weekend of flabbiness in the beat after another. He hit a hit in 12 strokes and it was a single drop out of a diver’s Semien’s glove.
Boone likes Hicks in hole three for his skills at the base and for offering the diversity of lefties rare in the lineup. But while the hikes are valuable, the third-place hitter must also be able to hit at a high level and Hicks’ batting average has gone from 0.266 to 0.248 to 0.235 to 0.225 over the past four years. He’s 1 to 12 this season.
When asked if he would consider taking Hicks out of hole three, Boone said, “I’m always willing to mix things up.” But he added, “Over time, Aaron Hicks will be fine.”
Boone felt that way about the entire schedule, citing the “good records” from top to bottom in the order and a refusal to overreact to a series. Clint Frazier said, “It’s just a matter of time with the schedule that we have. … will click. There is no need to press the panic button. “
Yes, it was just one series – the first to get fans back after a pandemic season. The Yankees extinguished the enthusiasm of the return with one silent attack after another. The silence produced at the stadium was a strong indicator of a lost weekend.