On Aug. 1, after the trade deadline had come and gone and the Yankees had finished sending away Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, Carlos Beltran and Ivan Nova, manager Joe Girardi said he still believed the team had a chance to make the playoffs.
“Some people are probably going to think I’m delusional,” he said.
The Yankees were a .500 team when Girardi made his statement. They were seven games out of first place in the AL East and 5 1/2 games back for the second wild card.
Since then, the Yankees have said goodbye to Alex Rodriguez and downgraded Brian McCann and Mark Teixeira to part-time status. They have hitched their wagons to rookies Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge and Tyler Austin and also have two rookies (Chad Green and Luis Cessa) in the starting rotation.
Still, Girardi still believes making the postseason is a realistic goal.
“I think it is, to make the playoffs,” Girardi said on Wednesday. “I like what we have here. I know that there’s a lot of inexperience and we’ve had some injuries to our pitching staff and we’ve had some players traded away, but we’re going for this. That’s what we’re doing. I think you see the fight in the guys. We believe.”
The Yankees woke up on Thursday in Anaheim, California, with the Pacific Ocean out their windows and the playoffs no closer to reality.
Going into Thursday, the Yankees had improved to two games over .500 at 61-59. But they were 7 ½ games back in the division and the same 5½ games out of the second wild card.
According to Fangraphs.com, the Yankees went into Thursday with a 2.4 percent chance to make the postseason. Baseball Prospectus had it at 3.4 percent.
Still, even a pair of defeats to the first-place Blue Jays before the Yankees headed across the country couldn’t dull the sense that the team did the right thing in jettisoning or de-emphasizing their veterans and giving the kids a look.
The kids — most notably Sanchez and Judge — have so far proven to be all right.
“They’ve handled whatever we’ve given them so far,” Girardi said. “Obviously, these are two young men that have the ability to be very productive.”
They have been more than that so far. Sanchez, who has supplanted McCann as the No. 1 catcher, is 18-for-50 (.360) with five home runs and 11 RBIs in 13 games.
Judge, who has taken over rightfield from the traded Beltran, is 7-for-18 (.389) with two home runs and four RBIs in five games.
Even owner Hal Steinbrenner has gotten caught up in Baby Bombers fever. When Judge and Austin became the first players to homer in their first big-league at-bats in the same game in baseball history — and did it back-to-back, to boot, last Saturday — Steinbrenner almost jumped out of his padded seat.
“I was emotional,” he said on Wednesday at the owners meetings in Houston, according to the Associated Press. “It doesn’t happen often. I’m very excited about this.”
Steinbrenner also denied the Yankees had given up on this season, saying it’s not in his Steinbrennerian DNA.
“There’s no white flag here for me,” he said. “There was no surrender. If you had seen me get rid of [Michael] Pineda and [Nathan] Eovaldi and [Brett] Gardner, then you could probably make a case.”
..... - Newsday