The nightcap was certainly a letdown. The Angels showed the Yankees what they showed the Mets over the weekend: They looked as bad, often as they did, at 49-64 after the Yankees won the first game of this damp doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, 5-2.
And sometimes, as you congratulate each other as you leave the field, like after the Angels’ 8-2 win in Game 2, you ask yourself: How did they do? that?
So the Yankees finished a long day in the Bronx with a 1-1 record, wiping another day and two more games off the calendar, the Orioles returned to Toronto tied for first place, and the Yankees returned to the clubhouse to await the result of the Phillies-Dodgers game, with the title in their hands.
Tied the best record in baseball.
So there will be no trophies handed out, no banners raised, no parades planned. There are still many games to go — 47, to be exact. And this season has shown that for the Yankees and just about every other team in the sport, this week has absolutely nothing to do with last week, which has absolutely nothing to do with next week.
That being said…
The Yankees are being the Yankees again. This isn’t just a blip, it’s a pattern now. Since they were one strike away from losing at Fenway Park 12 days ago, since Trent Grisham hit Kenley Jansen off the wall to tie the game, and since they beat the Red Sox in extra innings that night, the Yankees are now 8-2, which is impressive.
Plus: They look a lot more like the team we saw in April and May, rather than the team that spent more than a month in baseball purgatory in June and July.
And it’s interesting. Pitcher Aaron Boone had plenty to say after both games of the doubleheader, with plenty of praise for rising cleanup man Austin Wells, his go-to pitchers Aaron Judge and Juan Soto and Luis Gil, who pitched five sweaty innings in the opener but was a skilled pitcher and relied on his fastball when his curveball ran out.
DJ LeMahieu is looking like a rookie again, Clay Holmes looked very sharp and the offense remains the most complete in baseball despite missing a month.
“A lot of things are going well right now,” Boone said.
You know what he didn’t say?
He didn’t say what he often said at the wrong time, what he said so often that it irritated Yankees fans every night like a gnat on a muggy summer night.
He didn’t say, “It’s all before our eyes.”
Because he didn’t have to. Because no matter how the next 47 games go, he probably won’t have to do it again. Because whatever other interpretations may be given to the mantra he recited every day like a secular novena, all he was doing was stating the truth.
It’s a little too easy for us mere mortals to treat 162 baseball games the same as 17 football games, including the current company. The best managers don’t suffer from this syndrome. They don’t have to think about it. Even the best managers don’t repeat the same thing every day, like Boone did in the depths of a slump.
But they stand by it. Boone simply did it openly and regularly, perhaps as much to show his players that he still had faith in them as anything else. And now the players have returned the favor. No matter what the scoreboard says at the end of nearly six hours of damp ballgames at the Stadium on Wednesday night, the Yankees look like the Yankees again.
And it’s all still right in front of them.
