Yankees' series loss to Blue Jays emphasizes slow burn without Aaron Judge

The nature of baseball is the frustrating ebbs and flows. Striking a balance between pitching, offense, defense, chemistry, and everything in between is incredibly difficult. But a winning formula has at least a few of those in unison, regardless of the personnel. The New York Yankees, while a talented baseball team, simply cannot put it together. We can argue they can't even put 3/5 together.

With each passing day, they continue to prove they are Aaron Judge's team. The Yankees will only go as far as Judge does. They will only be as good as Judge is. We know they have enough skill to merely get by, but they do not have enough to rise above the occasion.

The Yankees dropped their third straight game on Saturday and lost the series to the Toronto Blue Jays, effectively kicking the door wide open for their division rival to get back into the playoff race. At 61-64, Toronto is one game back of the final AL Wild Card spot.

Yeah, that's how bad the American League is. The Yankees, who cannot manufacture runs for 2.5 months without their best player, are leading the ALWC picture by eight games. They would need to completely collapse while watching a bunch of sub-.500 teams surge if they were to lose their playoff spot.

You might look to the Yankees' 68-55 record (second-best in the AL) and say, "well, what's the problem with that?" The problem is that every game they play requires maximum effort for nine full innings. They cannot win or lose a blowout. It's not in their DNA. They are exhausting themselves all the while continuing to lose close contest after close contest as they watch victories slip right out of their grasp.

Yankees losing series to Blue Jays with Gerrit Cole, Cam Schlittler pitching is unacceptable

The Yankees have now lost four straight games in which Cam Schlittler has pitched. He's among the frontrunners for the AL Cy Young award. On Friday night, they let 5.00 ERA Shane Bieber dice them up. On Saturday, they recorded just one run on four hits and two walks in a bullpen game for Toronto.

At this point, it's utterly ridiculous. Can't score runs consistently? Understandable. A lot of teams have trouble with it. But can't score runs on virtually any occasion? They've scored more than five runs in a game just four times in the second half. We are two days away from that being a full calendar month.

The Yankees' starting pitchers have been far and away the best in the league, and they've managed to lose notable ground to the Jays and Red Sox while watching the Rays pull further and further away. The offense has not figured out a way to adjust or show any semblance of consistency since Judge went down.

There is legitimately no excuse for this, especially after whatever they believed their trade deadline strategy to be. They went after veterans in Luis García Jr. and Heliot Ramos in an effort to improve their depth and get by with Judge still on the shelf. It's almost two full weeks and we're talking next to no difference. Ramos is 0-for-32 with 11 strikeouts while García Jr. has a .670 OPS and made a ridiculous back-breaking error that lost them Friday's game.

The Yankees are not getting stronger without Judge. They are not figuring out new ways to persevere without Judge. They are not developing a sub-identity or burnishing other skills without Judge. They are simply shrinking and swinging and missing over and over and over again.

It's far from the end of the road, but the Yankees rolling the dice for 2.5 months and winning games on the back of their ~$750 million pitching staff hardly inspires any confidence. This team's postseason failures have consistenly featured a disappearing offense and a penchant for fumbling the bag.

They're doing it again right now. It's just not magnified as drastically because it's still August. We're hoping these postgamers don't read the same in October, but it's hard to unequivocally say they won't.

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