Yankees' 2023 Season Is Already Teetering on the Brink of Disaster

The New York Yankees are about to face the toughest test of their season with a roster in tatters, a whole bunch of limp bats and their playoff hopes stuck in dwindle mode.

You know, just in case anyone was wondering how it's going.

Oh, sure. There are positives to accentuate as the Yankees head into their first showdown against the history-making Tampa Bay Rays. They're at least over .500 at 17-15. And if a team must be in last place as they are right now, it might as well be in an American League East division in which everyone's a winner.

But such things are clearly no comfort to the Yankee Faithful. Manager Aaron Boone was even the recipient of "Fire Boone!" chants at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, so the fans either didn't hear or didn't care when general manager Brian Cashman had pleaded for patience earlier in the day:

To essentially rephrase what Boone was hearing on Wednesday, here's our counterpoint: no.

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The Injuries? They Hurt.

While over .500, the Yankees are further out of first place (9.0 GB) now than they were the last time they were in the AL East cellar this late in the season (6.0 GB in 2016). And whether we're talking about World Series championship No. 28 or a second straight AL East title, their odds of achieving their goals are down significantly.

The schedule won't provide handholds out of this hole. Difficulty ratings for the Yankees' remaining slate range from tough to very tough, and the tough customers aren't far down the road. Of the Yankees' next 29 games, seven are against the Rays and 13 more are against the Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles, San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers.

It's also not exactly a secret that the Yankees don't have the appropriate tires for the rough road ahead right now.

Indeed, really the only things the Yankees lead the league in are cumulative injured list days and $20.2 million spent on players while they've been on the IL. That's more than 11 teams spent on IL-bound players in all of 2022.

Though reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge and fellow MVPs Giancarlo Stanton and Josh Donaldson loom large on the Yankees' IL, just as consequential are all the pitchers they're missing out on right now.

Specifically sans Carlos Rodón, Luis Severino and Frankie Montas—whose returns aren't nigh. The three injured starters posted a combined 3.35 ERA last season. In their place are Clarke Schmidt, Jhony Brito and Domingo Germán, who have a 5.21 ERA between them.

Though Nestor Cortes' early struggles are also a factor, that figure helps explain why the Yankees are 7-0 on days when Gerrit Cole starts and 10-15 on everyone else's days.

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The Bad Offense? That Also Hurts.

Now more than ever, what the Yankees need is offense. And not just any offense. Offense worthy of the "Bronx Bombers" moniker.

Really, anything but the offense they have.

In going from 4.98 runs per game in 2022 to 3.94 this year, the Yankees are suffering through the most dramatic drop in scoring of any team in the league. They've scored fewer than five runes 22 times already, second to only the Miami Marlins.

The only real hope for the near-term can be found in the prospect of Judge returning from his hip strain as early as May 8. Undercutting this hope, however, is that he didn't look much like the Judge of 2022 even when he was healthy.

Whereas last year's Judge hit 62 home runs and led the majors in, well, everything, this year's Judge went on the IL with a good-not-great .863 OPS. Some sort of return to earth was probably always inevitable, but this is also the result of an updated scouting book.

Among right-handed batters, only Matt Vierling has seen pitches on the outer half of the plate more often than Judge has this season. With him hitting just .218 against those pitches, it's clearly working.

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That All This Feels Inevitable? That Hurts the Most.

It perhaps should inspire confidence that this is mostly the same team that won 99 games in 2022, but it takes a fool to take that bait.

Whereas that team got off to a 61-23 start, the Yankees are 55-55 in 110 games since then. And that's not even counting a playoff run in which they barely survived the Cleveland Guardians before getting unceremoniously swept by the Houston Astros in the American League Championship Series.

The way forward after that series was daunting, yet clear. The Yankees needed a big offseason centered around re-signing Judge, but also consisting of bringing on new blood.

We can't fault the effort in retrospect. Boosted by a $360 million contract for Judge and a $162 million pact with Rodón, the Yankees claimed the top of the free-agent spending leaderboard with $574.5 million in total expenses. Enough to make even Patrick Mahomes blush.

But the execution? Yeah, there's fault to find there.

Yankee hitters not named Judge batted a combined .232/.291/.360 (h/t Mike Axisa of CBSSports.com) in the second half of 2022, so re-signing him and Anthony Rizzo and leaving it at that was an unforced error. Ditto for merely adding the oft-injured Tommy Kahnle to a bullpen that really struggled under the weight of Clay Holmes' decline after the All-Star break—which, by the way, is ongoing.

Rodón's deal, meanwhile, was simultaneously impossible to hate yet hard to embrace. In equal measure with his supreme talent came a tendency for serious injuries, which the Yankees didn't need in a rotation where Severino and Montas already presented injury risks.

There is, of course, no going back for a mulligan. The only way the Yankees are going to get the overhaul they need is through a massive haul on the summer trade market, preferably through a deal for Shohei Ohtani. But of that, chances are said to be less than great.

As to what this current version of the Yankees is capable of, FanGraphs puts the team's expected wins at 87. That would mark the club's first foray below 90 wins in a full season since 2016, and the recent downward trend of that line and the upcoming schedule may well shift the target to 85 wins or even below.

Either way, sounds about right. Because while this is ostensibly another "World Series or bust" season in the Bronx, what's become of the Yankees makes it hard to see them as anything more than a mere wild-card contender. If anything, that's the generous outlook.

There's always a voice that starts whispering whenever we go public with doubts about the Yankees. "Don't do it," it says. "They're the Yankees. They'll be fine."

But that's just the thing, voice. They're not supposed to be just fine. The goal is always greatness. And right now, it looks out of reach.

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Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.