Yankees Early Struggles
By Lucas Bolduc
The New York Yankees have gotten off to a historically bad start, although things look to be on the up and up. As of the time I am writing this article, The Bombers are 9–12, sitting at 4th place in the AL East. The biggest concern so far has easily been the Yanks offense, but not too far ahead of their lackluster defense. Currently, the Yankees rank 29th in team average, 26th in runs scored, 28th in hits, 21st in OBP, 30th in slugging, and 14th in home runs hit. No need to sugarcoat anything, those numbers are horrible. Those are not the numbers of a world series team. The Yankees also have 6 batters hitting under .200, in Clint Frazier, Aaron Hicks, Giancarlo Stanton, Brett Gardner, Rougned Odor, and Gary Sanchez. 4 of those 6 names are supposed to be huge parts of this offense. As a fan, you can only hope this is a stretch that will soon end and we will return to watching the monster powerhouse offense we all know this team to have.
While the Yankees offense has been downright horrible, the pitching has not been so much of an issue, especially the bullpen. The Yanks have the 5th best team ERA at 3.20, the 6th least amount of hits given up, 2nd most strikeouts at 217, and the 6th best in opponents batting average, at .211. So you can only imagine the things this team would be capable of with a top tier offense like they are supposed to have. One flaw the pitching staff has though, is 4 out of our 5 starters have been failing to pitch more than 4 innings. Gerrit Cole of course has been phenomenal, we know he is one of the leagues top pitchers.
But Corey Kluber, Jordan Montgomery, Jameson Taillon, and Domingo German NEED to step up their games, and stop getting in trouble so early, and running up their pitch counts. Overall, this team needs to step it up in order to reassert themselves into the championship conversation, or else we may be heading for dark times in the Bronx.
