Yankees: NYY can’t be blaming shortened season for slew of injuries

The Yankees shouldn’t be blaming their rash of injuries on the shortened season.

Remember heading into the season thinking that the New York Yankees couldn’t possibly be bitten by the injury bug as badly as they were in 2019? That somehow turned out to be a pipe dream as the club has sent 10 players, many of whom are essential to its success, to the injured list through just 25 games.

This, of course, comes a year after they set the MLB record with 30 IL designations.

This has begged the obvious question: Who or what is to blame for the Yankees’ injury woes? Is it the overhauled strength and conditioning staff? A lack of working out during quarantine? Could the reshuffled medical staff be doing a better job?

We honestly don’t have an answer that would help make sense out of this narrative. What we do know, however, is that New York shouldn’t be blaming the shortened season. Unfortunately, some members of the team, including manager Aaron Boone, mentioned that over the weekend, but guess what? Everyone else is dealing with this too.

The likes of Zack Britton and starter James Paxton, both of whom are currently shelved with injuries, blamed the truncated spring training for the uptick in injuries both on the team and around MLB. The latter didn’t even think twice when asked what could be traced to the injury spike.

“Short spring training,” the 31-year-old southpaw told the New York Daily News. “We didn’t get enough time going at a lower speed to kind of build up. Now you’re seeing, a few weeks into the season, guys are not fresh anymore. The tiredness is building up. We don’t have that base we normally have.”

We’re not here to question or deny the benefits that come with a full spring training, especially for pitchers, but this year was quite literally an anomaly. If the excuse wasn’t available last year, it shouldn’t be used this time around.

“I think the ramp up of a shortened season has a lot to do with some of these soft tissue injuries,” added Britton. “I understand people are frustrated about last year and this year. We’ve done a great job improving our medical staff, our strength and conditioning staff is all new…So, I think the injuries, it’s not a reflection on those guys whatsoever. It’s more so just the circumstances.”

We understand the Yankees are frustrated, but grabbing the low hanging fruit and putting the brunt of the blame on the canceled spring training and expedited summer camp just isn’t good enough. We’re talking about professional athletes here who had the opportunity to maintain aggressive training regimens during the layoff between spring training and Opening Day.

Everybody else is dealing with this, so it’s especially a bad look for the Yankees to be citing this as the main reason when this is just more of the same from 2019.