Yankees' deflating offensive mess vs. A's pokes gaping holes in hot start

The first three batters of the Yankees' tilt with the Athletics on Wednesday night all secured singles against Luis Severino. By the end of the first, their opportunity felt somewhat squandered, but still ... two runs represented a nice start coming off a dramatic late-inning victory in the opener.

In the 17 innings that followed against Sacramento pitching, the Yankees mustered two hits. One of them came on Thursday afternoon, a seventh-inning single by Ben Rice against 91 MPH-painting Jeffrey Springs.

Springs, for his part, is significantly underrated; he's one of the better left-handers in the game, though his arsenal wouldn't make Randy Johnson blush. Unfortunately, that doesn't absolve the Yankees' offense, a unit that managed to survive its complete emptiness in slots 6-through-9 en route to an 8-2 start, but hasn't been quite so lucky lately, ending this series on a forgettably sour note.

Do the Yankees "struggle to beat good teams," or do they "play down to their competition"? I can't keep track of the angry fan narrative du jour, but I do know that this game absolutely sucked, and that it's awfully hard to see the Yankees' offensive vision right now.

If not for Rice, the Yankees would've been meekly no-hit. Aaron Judge left the tying run on base in the eighth with a grounder and two runners on earlier in the contest, swinging through multiple wheelhouse fastballs in the process. He's bound to be off sometimes, but there is absolutely no one in his immediate baseball family who can pick up the slack right now.

Randal Grichuk swings like a specialist who'll be gone by mid-May, if not sooner. Jose Caballero got his challenging prowess sucked out of his skull by the Monstars somewhere between San Francisco and the Bronx, and suddenly Anthony Volpe's return seems like an event to be celebrated. "Offense-first catcher" Austin Wells needs to find that offense somewhere. Trent Grisham seemed completely unprepared to pinch hit in the eighth, staring at a garden-variety breaking ball to end his abrupt at-bat. I forgot all about Ryan McMahon! Ryan McMahon was there. Looked pretty bad. It's hard to pin goat horns on any one player, but I'd like to try to do so on Cody Bellinger.

Cody Bellinger was Yankees' worst performer in offensive disaster vs. A's

It was Bellinger who approached a fly ball towards the wall with something less than aplomb; it banged off the wall, but could've been caught, ricocheting into no-man's land for the triple that all but sealed this sad game's fate. It was Bellinger who blew the Yankees' final challenge on a pitch that could generously be called "somewhere between the outside corner and the middle". And it was Bellinger who miraculously took a beautiful curveball for Ball 3 to lead off the ninth, then "protected the plate" with a circus swing on Ball 4, only to pop up the next pitch for a deflating first out.

The worst part? Ryan Weathers looked brilliant today, going eight strong innings. Thursday's preferred Yankees strategy involved asking their worst pitcher, midway through his own reinvention, to be utterly perfect. It failed.

On Friday night, this team will add a new worst pitcher when Luis Gil returns, debuting at the house of horrors that is and always has been Tropicana Field as this team, once 8-2 and riding the Amed Rosario wave, tries to stave off an 8-5 record without a single foundational piece to rely on in a batting order that showed up tired Thursday and left dead.

Anyone who watched the first 10 games felt like they were watching Thursday's version of the Yankees at least half the time. In their past five games, they've stolen two of them, gotten one thieved, and gotten entirely silenced twice. Maybe Friday in climate-controlled conditions will be better. But there are plenty of ways to lose a baseball game. Late-inning chokes. Blowouts. Tantalizing near-misses. This one? They weren't even there. It's hard to rank the varieties, but it's even harder to find anything to be proud of one-through-nine today.