Yankees: This 2021 stat goes against everything NYY planned to be

The New York Yankees entered 2021 with largely the same powerful offense they’ve relied upon in previous years, armed with what they thought would be enough pitching depth and lottery tickets to get by.

Jordan Montgomery seemed set to bounce back, with a low-ish ceiling, but Domingo German, Corey Kluber and Jameson Taillon were all somewhere between “wait and see” and worrisome.

Turns out, after taking a few weeks to round into form, Kluber and German have been largely masterful, and Taillon’s underlying numbers show a pitcher moving forcefully in the right direction.

The offense? Well, yeah. About that. So…no one’s hitting across MLB? But, still, the Yankees definitely aren’t hitting.

Sunday’s contest marked a golden opportunity for the Yankees to finally get back to sweeping instead of leaving the final game of a series on the table.

Instead, they leapt out to 4-0 and 5-2 leads, lost them, and never got the advantage back — which shouldn’t shock you if you’ve watched this team, but definitely would shock you if you missed the last two months trapped in a bomb shelter or Tropicana Field or something.

The Yankees cannot win slugfests where they allow five runs and it’s maddening.

And, after Monday’s loss in Texas, that total is now 0-11. Just…strange.

The Yankees have shown the propensity to come back from many different varieties of deficits this season, and they’ve also been remarkably solid from the mound basically all year long. The bullpen carried the day through the first 10 games or so, sure, but since then, they’ve been among the best-ERA staffs in baseball.

Is that what Brian Cashman intended to orchestrate, though? The goal here was to build a rotation that could juggle good days and bad, and those bad days would be by-and-large picked up by the offense, which theoretically was going to average between four and five runs per game.

Unfortunately, the offense hasn’t been able to pick up a struggling starter once. 

Some of this is bad luck. Some of this is bad offense league-wide. But that “0-10 when allowing five runs or more” really smacks you in the face as the complete antithesis of what the Yankees were supposed to be. Theoretically, that number should be 4-6 or so, with those extra wins making all the difference. Alas.

Every outlier statistic normalizes over the course of a long season, though. That’s something the Yankees should understand very well at this point after being smacked in the mouth by another kind of regression on Sunday.

You guys like never allowing two-out, run-scoring hits? Great. Here comes an avalanche of two-out, run-scoring hits.

At some point, the Yankees are going to have to outslug an opponent. While the league, as a whole, is struggling to catch up with the sterling pitching of 2021, teams like the Blue Jays, Astros, Red Sox and White Sox are all clicking offensively.

If the backwards Yankees intend to win three-out-of-five against any of those teams without allowing five runs or more in a victory, they’ll need to reevaluate their priorities.

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