Playing in the midst of a neck-and-neck playoff race for the final postseason spots with just two weeks left to play, the Yankees have been outscored 22-4 in the past two days by a Cleveland Indians team with no chance of playing baseball this October.
But Aaron Boone says he still likes the effort he’s seen in his team, which has now lost three of four in the softer part of their home stretch schedule before the Blue Jays, Red Sox and Rays finish out the regular season slate.
“I know the guys are locked in,” Boone said after Sunday’s 11-1 loss. “I know they’re preparing. I know how bad they want it. sometimes that can get in your way a little bit…as far as where they are and what their mindset is, and as far as the energy, when you’re getting your teeth kicked in again, I never felt like the fight wasn’t there. The compete is there. we just gotta get the production now.”
The production has been nowhere to be found the last two days. In a fitting microcosm of the season as a whole, the Yanks exploded for five home runs in an 8-0 win in Friday’s series opener, and have scored four runs over the next two games, with a potential breakout game instead being another tease, and another landmark in what has been a wildly inconsistent season.
“It’s obviously been the thing that’s puzzled us the most this season,” Boone said of the lack of offense. “We gotta get better in a hurry. Period. It wasn’t good enough today.”
The Yanks had the comfort of their ace in Gerrit Cole taking the mound for Sunday’s finale, but instead, he was bombed for seven earned runs over 5.2 innings of work, while a Gio Urshela solo home run was the only source of offense.
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But as many of the Yankees’ struggles from the season as a whole still remain, Boone isn’t losing hope that the team can still turn it around and get hot again as the schedule gets a lot tougher.
“The important thing is to remember that we’re not far off from where we were a couple weeks ago when we were running them up, but we gotta do better than this,” Boone said. “That’s an awful couple of days out there, and we gotta get past it in a hurry.”
Boone has no problem with his team’s effort, but the execution has been unquestionably poor the past two games. In what should have been two very winnable games the Yanks were instead steamrolled out of their own ballpark, surrendering 11 runs in each of the last two games to a Cleveland team that ranks 21st in the league in runs scored this season.
It’s these losses against inferior teams that could wind up dooming the Yankees’ playoff hopes, unless they turn things around immediately.
“We gotta play well,” Boone said. “We gotta play a complete game like we did Friday night, but we can’t do that every two or three games. We gotta play really good baseball if we’re gonna even think about where we want to be.”
Follow Ryan Chichester on Twitter: @ryanchichester1
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