The Yankees version of schizophrenia will not cut it in 2nd half

The Yankees performance in the first half has been a tale of two teams with skewed up and down results. They cannot afford to do the same thing in the second half.

The schizophrenic Yankees have eighteen games remaining on the schedule in the month of July. All but six of them are against teams with records above .500, and the first four are against the AL East division-leading Red Sox in Boston.

The team is on the road until July 25 and sandwiched in between the road schedule is a trip to the far corner of the West Coast in Seattle.

All of which is to say that the Yankees have their work cut out for them and they can’t afford to skip a beat. It’s safe to say they are not the team that went 21-9 to open the season. Nor are they the team that went 7-18 to close out the first half.

The question, though, is which team are they closest to. We’ll know the bulk of the answer by the end of the month.

Starting off with zeros

Starting tomorrow at Fenway Park, Aaron Judge has no home runs, Masahiro Tanaka doesn’t have an ERA in the stratosphere, Chris Carter is no longer the punching bag, the team, minus Aaron Hicks who’ll be back shortly is fully healthy, and the Yankees are the defending Wild Card “champions” in the American League.

Everything now ties back to the age old baseball axiom, “What have you done for me lately?”. Poor performances can be erased with a good second half from a Tyler Clippard or Tanaka. Jacoby Ellsbury still has a chance to be Jacoby Ellsbury, and Aroldis Chapman still can earn a portion of the $86 million the Yankees doled out for his services.

Which team will we get?

More so than talent, the answer to this question is tied to the intangibles surrounding the team. The team that went 21-9 was a team firing on all cylinders with 25 players who were in sync with each other.

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There was always someone there to pick a teammate up, and the back pages seemed to feature a different player every day for doing something extraordinary. We missed that mark in the second quarter, save for Aaron Judge.

There was no stopper among the starters – the guy who’s supposed to come in and pitch eight innings of four-hit ball, winning a close game 3-2 for the sputtering offense, stopping a three-game losing streak instead of extending it.

The team we need to see is the one that begins to win series again. We need a team that finishes out the month at 12-6 or 11-7 and not the reverse we saw in the second quarter.

We won’t have to wait long to find out which team we get, and it all begins tonight at Fenway in Boston.

Next: Ten best prospects still playing in the minors

There’s no word as to Starlin Castro‘s availability for tonight’s game. He played last night in Trenton testing his hamstring. The team has also not announced a starting pitcher for this evening’s contest. We’ll get you word on both later in the day.