The Yankees Are Proving the Math: Nothing from Nothing Means Nothing
This time can serve as a cautionary tale. This is what happens when the long ball is removed from the arsenal. The silence is deafening. It's not so much surprise as consternation. How do the Yankees find new ways to disappoint the fan base?
Joe Torre, a former four-time champion manager for the New York Yankees, once stated a truism. He pointed out that when you don't score, you usually don't win. The confirmation of this was never plainer to the eye than the performance of the Yankee offense recently. They are producing more zeros than a computer binary code.
The Yankees are not a smart team. They are one-dimensional hitters whenever they start hitting balls over the fence. They don't make good decisions in situational situations. They are bad base runners. They added another word to their play of late, futility.
It will take more than a single offensive explosion to remove the stench of not having scored a run in 29 consecutive innings. The losing streak stands at five, and for the first time in nine years, the Yankees played three games in a row without a single player touching the plate for a run. They did not have Aaron Judge when this last occurred.
We have come a long way from the Yankees being the third-best offense in baseball. The league complained about the dreaded torpedo bats, which gave them a competitive edge, the players insisted. It has since proven to be mostly a fallacy. The return of Giancarlo Stanton has not impacted the bats around him. The irony of this period is that the Yankee pitching collectively has been very good. It can be argued that the Yankees have wasted the opportunities to tack on wins by failing to post a marginal amount of runs.
The statistics that the Yankees live by should indicate numbers that reflect the reason the Yankee bats have grown cold collectively. The math says that when you leave 17 of 18 runners on base in one game, you will not win. If you have men on base and swing for the moon, you will lose. If you fail to read the field and aim where the defense is not, you will continue to kill rallies. If you fail to score in the first five innings on average game after game, it means your lead-off hitter, Trent Grisham, is not setting the table, and your cleanup hitter, Judge, has nothing to drive in. The results show that if one does the math, one sees that a thinking team will grab opportunities, not ignore them by going against the numbers. The equation is laid out in the Billy Preston song Nothing from Nothing Leaves Nothing.
