Yankees Keep Rolling, On A Pace Now For 96 Wins In 2017

The Yankees record of 6-4 after last night’s win over the Cardinals doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to put them on pace to win between 96-97 games this season. Think it can’t be done, think again.

The Yankees are rebounding from a 1-4 start to the 2017 season that drew everyone’s concern. Today, though, they own a five-game winning streak that puts them two over .500, which doesn’t sound like much until those two games project out exponentially over the course of a 162-game season, and suddenly, the team finishes with 96 wins.

Surprised? Fantasyland? Hardly. The 2017 Yankees are proving to be the well-balanced and scrappy team that wins pennants. And there are some reasons to believe that this version of the Yankees is more than capable of getting the job done.

Here are just a few of those reasons:

One-Third Of Their Regular Lineup Is Calling In Sick

The climb back from the team’s 1-4 start has occurred without the services of Didi Gregorius, Gary Sanchez, and for all practical purposes, Greg Bird.

Gregorious has been out of the lineup since day one and could return in a few weeks, but his loss has hardly been noticed because Ronald Torreyes, all 5 feet 8 inches and 150 lbs of him, has stepped into the lineup without causing a ripple unless you want to count his team-leading 8 RBI.

Sanchez, who was expected to be the Yankees run producing machine this season suffered a hand injury last weekend and there no guesses as yet as to when he will be ready to play again.

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But again, without missing a beat, Austine Romine steps in to become the regular catcher batting a credible .313 with only two strikeouts in 20 plate appearances, potentially saving the Yankees from having to grab some hand-me-down catcher in a trade or waiver deal.

And Greg Bird, who has appeared in six of the ten games, has yet to “play” in any of those games as he remains a phantom presence in the lineup. His .043 batting average and team-leading eleven strikeouts are alarming, but we’re probably not talking about a head case here.

Bird has been hampered by an ankle injury he suffered in the latter days of Spring Training, and then he came down with a case of the flu that added insult to the injury. So, for all practical purposes, he gets counted as “injured,” even though he has yet to go on the DL.

The Starting Rotation Has Completed A Full Cycle – Successfully

With last night’s return of Masahiro Tanaka‘s to his pure form, the Yankees have now gone through their full five-man rotation with no hiccups.

And while the rotation is still not anything anyone would point to and say it’s one of the best in baseball, because it isn’t, it’s still an indication that these guys can put something together that results in a 6-4 record over the next 150 games when broken down into ten game stretches.

CC Sabathia looks like he is determined to prove that even at the age of 37, he’s not yet willing to give up his title as the ace of a pitching staff. And beyond that even, he’s not ready to give into his expected retirement when his contract expires at the end of this season.

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Michael Pineda and Luis Severino both turned some heads this week with masterful performances that depicted all that they are capable of, and it’s just a matter of them putting together a string of three quality starts (six innings allowing three or fewer runs) without a chain of two clunkers in a row before that perfect game comes along again.

And then, you have the kid, Jordan Montgomery, who while not dazzling in the way the Yankees know he can be in his first start, certainly pitched well enough to earn the nod from Joe Girardi as the permanent fifth starter in the rotation.

The Yankees Are Showing The Resiliency It Takes To Win

Last night, the team came from behind for the third consecutive game. Power came from unexpected places with Austine Romine and Starlin Castro each hitting a home run.

Chase Headley collected two more hits raising his average to .400. But more importantly, and mostly unnoticed except by Girardi perhaps, he saw 23 pitches in his four at-bats, which, of course, is the tried and true method of wearing down a pitching staff.

You don’t need a nine-game winning streak during a season as long as you don’t have a bunch of three-game losing streaks.

In one sense, it’s a miracle the Yankees are doing this because, for the second consecutive game, the team failed to hit with runners in scoring position making them 0-17 over the span of two games.

This was a bane of the team last season and needs to be corrected before they face the Red Sox, with Chris Sale and company at the end of the month at Fenway.

The gist of it is, though, that no one on the team is hurting them, with the exception of Bird, who eventually will replace Sanchez as a run producer while he’s out, and contributions are coming from everywhere on any given night. And that is a formula that is hard to find in baseball.

From Here On In, Count ‘Em In Fives

Joe Torre used to say that he liked to break down each season into fives, meaning that the first goal of any season is to get to five over (.500). And then, the next goal becomes ten over, then 15 over, and so on.

And since you can’t reach the second phase of being ten over until you stand at five over, attaining that first goal becomes the all important lift-off point.

And once again, if you stay within modest ten-game stretches in the schedule, the goal of five-over is not only reachable but very doable. It means, for instance, that the Yankees need to reproduce their 6-4 record to be four over, and if they can stretch it to 7-3, they’ll be five-over.

This could mean, as an example, that they split the remaining two games with the Cardinals, take two of three from the White Sox who come in next and follow that up with two of three against the Pirates when they visit PNC Park.

This would mean entering the series with the Red Sox at 11-7 and a chance to break the barrier against their arch-rivals at Fenway by winning that series as well.

And that’s the other thing Torre always emphasized, which is winning series. You don’t need a nine-game winning streak during a season as long as you don’t have a bunch of three-game losing streaks.

The Yankees Can Do This

This team was always built to surprise. And they entered this season as favorites to win nothing.

But having said that, the core of their fan base and the team itself expects more than a look pointing to 2018 as the breakout year for the Baby Bombers and Co. to take hold of the AL East again.

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And so, that modest record of 6-4, which has been attained without one-third of their regular lineup, and needing a five-game winning streak to get the pump working, can transform itself into 96 wins this season. Just count ’em in fives. And from there, well who knows?