Yankees follow the recipe beating up on teams like the Royals

The Yankees continue to follow the recipe for, at least, making the Playoffs. Beat up on the second division teams on your schedule and hold your own against all the others.

The Yankees, for the second time in two nights, beat up the Kansas City Royals scoring eleven runs in a game that was never contested. That’s the way it’s drawn up on the schedule and all the team is doing is coloring in between the lines. Hiccups, like the series against the Astros, are bound to happen when the crayon spills over the lines

Hiccups, like the series against the Astros, are bound to happen when the crayon spills over the lines making things look a bit messy, but overall the Yankees are maintaining a consistent hold on their schedule, with a pace that shows them winning two of every three games they play.

The Yankees are not the Astros, who are going to continue to have the kind of year the Chicago Cubs had last season. The Astros will beat up on anybody and everybody who happens to appear on the schedule. They don’t care who they’re playing, just bring ’em on and let’s do it quickly, please, so we can get on to the real business of the season – the Playoffs.

The Yankees lunch pail crew

The Yankees, though, are more of the carry your lunch pail to work everyday variety of teams who need to plod their way through, day after day, hoping to pick up that weekly paycheck that pays all the bills.

To further illustrate, where is the Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Buster Posey, or Jose Altuve in the Yankees lineup? Unless you want to go out on a limb and say that the Sports Illustrated cover boy falls in the category of those players. Not yet and the same goes for Gary Sanchez.

But when you put it all together, this of guys are a pretty good team up and down their lineup. Aaron Judge, Sanchez, Matt Holliday, Starlin Castro, Didi Gregorius are good enough. And that’s all you need, at least for now, to stay at or near the top of the AL East.

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That all changes, of course, the minute you start those playoff games, and you’re facing the premier pitchers in the league successively, and none of them pitch for the Royals.

But that’s for another day in the fall, at a time when we have yet to see the first day of summer on the calendar.

What we have with this group in 2017 is a well-crafted team that is built to last over the long haul of a six-month 162-game season.

Do you like your gifts from the Yankees in 2017?

Do we have anything beyond that? Probably not, at least for this year. By next year, or indeed, by 2019, the Yankees should be the Houston Astros of 2017, flying through the season with that old Derek Jeter mentality, which is that you haven’t won anything unless it’s a World Championship.

For now, though, the Yankees only need to follow the recipe by sweeping the series in Kansas City today, beating up on the Rays in Tampa this weekend, followed by a rematch with the Royals at the Stadium, and finally the Oakland A’s who come in for a three-game set.

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The lunch pail crew needs only to stay and play within themselves to maintain what they have now. And that should be all we need in 2017. It works for me.