Yankees prove they’re AL’s best with powerful statement vs Blue Jays

The New York Yankees destroyed the Blue Jays for 26 straight innings before a hairy ninth on Thursday. What a sweep.

Remember when Adam Ottavino and Chad Green “basically ended” the Yankees season in Buffalo last week? Man, what idiot wrote that?

Oh, it was…it was me? Gotcha. Yeah, I…I guess it was me.

Since that tragic sixth inning of a 6-2 game, the Yankees are now 8-1, with eight of those wins coming in a row after the team plummeted to .500 the night after that poorly-written Ottavino/Green article was published.

And when Aroldis Chapman exhaled furiously through his two outstretched nostrils, as an oblique-less Teoscar Hernandez delivered a futile swing at his hardest fastball, the working-on-all-cylinders Yankees proved that the oddsmakers were right on Opening Day.

There really is nobody in the American League better equipped to represent the circuit in the World Series.

This particular game was another excellent flexing of muscles in a series that can best be described as “complete domination”. Until Jonathan Holder took a battering ram to the ninth inning Thursday, the Yankees had outscored Toronto 43-11 after nearly torpedoing their season against them the previous week.

This particular game went from 2-2 to 9-2 in the blink of an eye, when an MLB record-tying five homers left the yard in the bottom of the fourth inning. This “launching pad” seems to only launch for one of the competing teams at a time.

But please, while we’re all blinded by the dingers, I will not allow you to ignore the starting pitching. Masahiro Tanaka’s three earned runs in seven innings Thursday equaled Deivi Garcia’s line from Tuesday night, in which he pitched most of the game with a 10+-run lead, as the worst of the bunch through the eight victories.

This team is hitting homers at an historic rate, and limiting damage against high-octane teams as well as any team in baseball. In essence, they’ve reversed course on every flaw they displayed over the three-week period that preceded this streak.

It’s an awe-inspiring combination of mojo and talent, and comes as a complete midseason reversal, but not according to the projections, which always knew what the Yankees had in their locker room.

According to FanGraphs, the Yanks once again have the highest AL odds to win the World Series, sitting at 8.1% before Thursday’s win.

And when they’re really humming, when Giancarlo Stanton is smacking 111 MPH liners the other way and Aaron Judge is just resting, it’s easy to recall why we all thought the sky was the limit in mid-July.

Nobody wants to face this team, but it’s not hyperbole. They’re all correct. The game is now officially on, after a three-week hiatus we all hope we can forget eternally.

Will the plan come to fruition in October? Nobody knows; a three-game series is the kind of disaster we should all get used to, unfortunately. But this is the best team, no matter what kind of muffled cries to the contrary you might hear from under the dome at Tropicana.

And this 27-inning sample against the Blue Jays is some pretty convincing tape.

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