Yankees: Hey, no kidding, it’s getting late early out here

The Yankees and their current slide out of first place and their losing ways have a way of waking a team up from their slumber. But, the front office needs a kick in the butt too that suggests maybe they haven’t given the team enough to win (it all). Are you feeling it, Brian?

The Yankees are not as good as they were in April and they are certainly not as bad as they’ve been in June. And in baseball, you expect that teams will encounter slumps just as hitters and pitchers do over the course of the season. And rarely does a team go wire to wire in capturing a title.

But having said that, when a team hits the doldrums as the Yankees apparently have, you expect that the front office, or in rare cases when the manager has the players at his disposal, will be in the process of drawing up Plan B to counter the team’s struggles.

Let’s be clear. The Yankees are not the Baltimore Orioles who have a starting staff that’s given up at five runs a game in their last seventeen starts. Seventeen! Now that’s something to worry about as you look ahead to next 90 games of the season.

This is not a Yankees Armageddon

Compared to that debacle, the Yankees only see a blip on the radar chart. But still, Yankees fans have a right to know that the front office, number one, has noticed, and number two that they have a plan underway to launch a counter attack to stop the bleeding.

Video courtesy of the YES Network

So far, though, nothing. As far as we know now, Masahiro Tanaka will take his regular turn in the rotation, and Chris Carter will man first base for the foreseeable future or at least until the team can figure out what’s really wrong with Greg Bird.

A (permanent) starter has yet to be announced to fill the void created by CC Sabathia‘s hamstring injury, and there is no decisive word as to when Jacoby Ellsbury will be fully recovered from the concussion he suffered.

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These are a lot of questions to have no answers for when the Boston Red Sox, sensing blood on the tracks, are digging in and making the move they were destined to make in the “first place.”

And just behind the Sox are the Rays, whose power lineup scored another eight runs in a win over Cincinnati today. And please, don’t ever wake up the Blue Jays.

Sometimes, and this may well be one of them, a general manager will be working quietly behind the scenes to either makes some trades or add pieces through the farm system.

At other times, they’ll come out vocally and in the media as a way to let the rest of the teams know that we are “Open for business,” so come a calling.

Brian Cashman, by deeds, has been more of the former regarding his style. No one, for example, could have been thinking at this time last year that he was quietly making plans to trade both Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman.

But as Yogi Berra taught us, it sure gets late early out here and the time for Cashman to strike, if he’s going to strike at all, might well be now when the team needs a lift in knowing that the front office has their back, even if it means saying goodbye to some of the players on the team now.

It’s a two-way street

It’s a two-way street, and the one thing Yankees players don’t want to hear right now is that the front office is leaving them out there to dry, while still expecting some kind of a miracle to take place that puts the Yankees in the World Series.

It doesn’t work that way, and all you have to do is ask the players (if they would tell you) on the New York Mets how they feel about the job Sandy Alderson and the Wilpon brothers have done in the midst of a rash of injuries, year after year, that don’t get solutionized by management.

Still, if I were a player on the Yankees, I would want to see a front office that is interested, active, and decisive. At least, in doing what they can to help my teammates, who continue to play hard, out of this hiccup in a season that has seen two six-game winning streaks and one nine-game win streak.

Yankees: Five moves the team should make without blinking

By any means, the Yankees are not in dire straits, regardless of what the half-full people say. But at the same time, they need to make some moves.

It’s not Armageddon, but It’s still your move, Brian.