ANAHEIM, Calif. — One final time this summer, the Yankees’ charter crossed the Continental Divide, traveling eastbound overnight Wednesday to deliver the players home snugly into the stretch run of September.
As for traversing the mountain range separating their current wild-card status from an A.L. East title, well, after fumbling away the good graces of their longest winning streak since 1961 over the past few days, that is going to be far more problematic.
In many ways, the three-city, nine-game, 10-day trip encapsulated their season: For a stretch that included the last four games of a 13-game winning streak, they were blindingly fearsome. Then, for the four games that followed, they were inexplicably feeble. They battled injuries (setup man Zack Britton was deemed done for the season on Tuesday, third baseman Gio Urshela missed Wednesday with a sore hand and will have a precautionary M.R.I. on Thursday’s off-day, shortstop Gleyber Torres is expected to return when the homestand opens Friday against Baltimore). They welcomed back others (Cory Kluber returned to the rotation on Monday).
They trail first-place Tampa Bay by seven games with 29 to play. They face the Rays only three more times, in Yankee Stadium for the final three games of the season. The calendar now leaves little room for losses, and the Yankees must rely on the help of others to win what would be just their second division title since 2012.
The aid of others is required because, for one thing, Gerrit Cole cannot pitch every day. Cole on Wednesday did what an ace is supposed to do and stopped the Yanks’ four-game losing streak with a masterful performance in a 4-1 win over the Los Angeles Angels, striking out 15 batters, walking none and scattering just four hits over seven innings and 116 pitches.
Cole was needed to stop a losing streak that had erased the gains of an exuberant two-week run in which the Yankees looked unbeatable. With Wednesday’s win, they finished 5-4 on the trip.
“Human beings aren’t linear, but it’s about as linear a progression as can be so far,” Cole said during a conversation on the field a day earlier. “You can’t say now that we aren’t playing better baseball than we were in April. And you couldn’t have said in June that we weren’t playing better baseball than we were in April. Now, there are some of those undulations along the way, but we keep getting better.
“We’ve got a fight in the division, and in any given week I feel like there are four teams playing over .560 ball, which is ridiculous. And we’ve got the best record in the American League that we’re chasing. As a competitive player, you wouldn’t want it any other way. Those are issues specific to us that we’re trying to overcome.”
Upon finishing his thought, Cole smiled knowingly. His point that the Yankees are chasing the best record in the division and not the best team, in his opinion, was subtly driven home.
Left-handed hitters Anthony Rizzo and Joey Gallo, acquired at the trading deadline, have added balance and length to the lineup, but it still seems the Yankees’ offense is trying to sort itself out while growing accustomed to its embarrassment of riches. Gallo in particular seems to be pressing. In 10 at-bats during the Angels’ series, he hit the ball out of the infield just twice. He struck out three times.
“I just think guys don’t ever have to try to hit the five- or six-run home run,” Rizzo said of players learning to rely on each other. “I think the more we play and gel together, guys are realizing that a leadoff walk, a two-out single, a one-out double … you don’t have to try to drive in all the guys out there. You can just let the next guy do it. You wear that pitcher out, he’s going to make a mistake.”
As that process sorts itself out, Giancarlo Stanton has been carrying far more than his fair share of the load. He was given a day off Wednesday, but had spent much of the road trip feasting on the mistakes that Rizzo mentioned. He has hit home runs in five of his past eight games, seven in his past 13 and eight in his past 18. On the trip, he punched a go-ahead homer in Atlanta last Tuesday, a go-ahead homer at Oakland in the second inning last Thursday and another in the fourth inning on Friday. He pulled the Yankees into a 7-7 tie in Monday’s loss here with a two-run, 457-foot smash in the seventh inning in what would become an 8-7 loss.
From afar, his hot streak reminds former infielder Dee Gordon of what Stanton did all summer during 2017, when Stanton won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award. Gordon, who was teammates with Stanton in Miami, distinctly remembers a Texas pitcher showboating late that season after striking out Stanton, only to have Stanton crush a high fastball from the same reliever deep into the seats the next day practically out of spite.
“It was so savage,” Gordon said in a telephone conversation this week. “That was the moment I knew he was going to win the M.V.P.” Then Gordon explained that Stanton had shifted into hitting-angry mode that day in Texas and that it was what he is seeing from his former teammate now.
Sitting in the dugout before Wednesday’s game, Stanton grinned when the story was relayed to him.
“He’s right,” Stanton said. “For sure. That is a mode of mine, respectfully to everyone else, but that’s a place I need to go. When things are clicking, things are in sync.” He described the mode as nothing personal to anybody but, simply, blocking out “all distractions. The more distractions, the faster that little seamed ball comes at you.”
His homer that nearly turned this series around on Tuesday came on an 84-mile-an-hour slider from Junior Guerra. Stanton appeared to both slow his bat speed a tick and adjust his angle after starting his swing.
“Had to make sure I got under it,” Stanton said. “I hadn’t seen a slider from him that day, so sometimes they drop a lot, sometimes they hang up. I just had to make sure to get underneath it to scoop that one.”
“It’s not Manny Ramirez’s swing, it’s not Ken Griffey Jr.-type slow,” Cole said of Stanton. “But the quick twitch is second to none. And the ability to adjust to pitches like that and still have something behind it is special.”
But even behind Stanton and Cole at their best, a healthy and productive Aaron Judge (5 for 11 with a homer and three R.B.I. in the three games in Anaheim) and a lineup turbocharged at the trade deadline, nearly every night comes down to what Manager Aaron Boone described as a “razor-thin” margin.
A total of 75 of the Yankee games this season have been determined by two or fewer runs (tied for second in the majors with the Mets). The Yankees’ 48-27 record in these contests is the best in the majors.
“It can be taxing, even the winning streak, 13 wins over two weeks, we played a lot of really close games, high-leverage, high-stress games,” outfielder Brett Gardner said. “We’ve got a good, resilient group that’s able to handle adversity really well, and we’ll see how we play this last month.”
Every night is a grind, and with the loss of Britton, and given Aroldis Chapman’s periodic inconsistency, Boone has had to ask others to answer high-leverage situations. In particular, Jonathan Loaisiga, Clay Holmes and Wandy Peralta have stepped up for the most part and will continue to be leaned on. But potholes have appeared, too: Without Britton, it was Holmes who surrendered the go-ahead run in the eighth inning that led to Monday’s loss.
“I feel like in a lot of ways, we’re deeper down there,” Boone said. “We still want to get some guys to where we need them to be, but I feel pretty good about the stable of guys we have.”
The final test begins at Yankee Stadium this weekend, where the Yankees will start a stretch of 20 games in 20 days. The team will be looking to find an extra gear to push it past the competition, relying somewhat on the mystique of being a team whose 27 World Series championships can make their success feel inevitable to the competition.
Or, as Cole said: “It feels like September. The weather is starting to change around the country. Starting to smell October baseball in the air.”
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