Yankees: Four Reasons Why They’ll Make The Playoffs In 2017

Contributions Are Coming From Everywhere

There should be no mystery as to why or how Joe Maddon‘s Cubs won a World Championship and Terry Francona‘s Indians came close to beating the Cubs in the World Series.

No matter the professional team sport in question, confidence, and cohesiveness play a vital role in a team’s success, or failure for that matter if either or both of these ingredients are missing.

These are intangibles and they can’t be measured. And it’s like when a Supreme Court Justice was asked to define pornography and he just shook his head, “I don’t know, but I know it when I see it.”

And so it is with the feeling you get when a team is on the cusp of gelling together and they become a steamroller with no chance of stopping them.

The Yankees have been that way this spring. Every day, it seems like someone else is stepping up the plate to carry the team to a win. Sure, there are some like Gary Sanchez and Gleyber Torres who have risen above the rest to make contributions almost on a daily basis. But for the most part, the parts have been interchangeable.

Jordan Montgomery stepped in out of nowhere and threw four perfect innings in a no-hit victory over the Tigers. On the same day before it was Rob Refsnyder and Torres and not Sanchez or Greg Bird that provided the offense with two seeing eye ground balls through the infield leading to Yankees runs.

And more than anything, the guys are having fun. There can nothing worse for a player like, for instance, a Joey Votto, who comes to work 162 times a year knowing that his team, the Cincinnati Reds, are destined to lose two of the three games he’s playing in that weekend.

They say that hitting breeds hitting and when two or three players get hits in an inning, two or three more are sure to follow. The same thing can be said about winning.

The only hole is this argument, though, is that half the team we’re seeing now in Spring Training will be gone by Opening Day. Gleyber Torres and Aaron Judge, he of the 525 ft.home run a few weeks ago, will be in the minors honing their skills waiting for a call-up that is not guaranteed to come.

Which means that there will be a slight adjustment necessary for the 25 players who do make the team. But the core of cohesiveness will remain and that’s all that matters.