Yankees' blind spot has them facing elimination after ignoring years of defensive red flags
Monday night’s four-error defensive meltdown by the Yankees in Game 2 of the American League Division Series was simultaneously shocking and predictable.
Shocking in the sheer number of errors committed by any team at this level –at this time of year, especially.
But predictable because, for years, rival club’s advance scouts – whose job is to dig deep on any potential playoff opponent to find anything that might be exploited along the margins – have made what they see as a shaky Yankees’ defense a prominent part of their reports.
Predictable, too, because, defensive miscues, albeit not to the level of Monday’s train wreck at the Trop, have been a regular part of the script when Aaron Boone’s teams are annually ushered out of October short of the World Series (save for 2024, and more on that shortly).
The Yankees, down two-games-to-none to the Rays with Game 3 slated for Wednesday night at the Stadium, are on the verge of another such exit.
“It’s a must-win game, obviously,” Max Fried, Wednesday’s starter, said on Tuesday.
Of the Rays, the hardest team in the sport to strike out this season and a club that puts a premium on putting the ball in play, Fried said: “They make you play a clean game.”
That topic, naturally, was a major storyline heading into the series. Naturally, it came up in the visiting manager’s office at Tropicana Field a few hours before Game 1 when Boone met with beat reporters who cover the team.
One asked this question: “Does it bother you that it’s a part of pretty much every team’s scouting report (to) put the ball in play against you guys? Put pressure on their defense because they have questions about … ”
Boone, long sensitive to queries about his club’s defensive shortcomings, interrupted with an odd, and maybe a tad arrogant, interjection: “gotta beat us somehow.”
The reporter continued: “But implied in that is you’re not great on defense … ”
Boone: “I mean, at times we’ve been very good when people don’t acknowledge it, at times we have been bad. I don’t get caught up in it. It’s like, we’re trying to prepare as best we can to maximize our guys and our team. If you’re implying with that question, like, we’re a bad defensive team, no, we’re not. And there’s times I’ve pushed back over the years where in some years, like, no, we’re really good defensively. Bottom line is, in this series, we’re going to have to take care of the ball well and I think that’s going to be Tampa’s strategy … going into any series.”
Sifting through that bafflegab, most striking was: “if you’re implying with that question … ”
Because it wasn’t the reporter, or any reporter, “implying” anything.
As referenced, it’s the opposition.
As one veteran AL advance scout put it in summarizing a primary aspect of reports his club, and others, have put together on the Yankees: “Put pressure on their D, especially the infield, and take your chances.”
The scout added: “And that didn’t start with the Dodgers.”
Ah, yes, the Dodgers.
It was after the Yankees five-game loss to the Dodgers in the 2024 World Series that a driving element of the latter’s advance scouting report became public. It was something Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly, who did not pitch in the ’24 World Series, gave voice to, indelicate as it might have been.
And it had legs given the defensive implosion from the Yankees in Game 5 when, taking a 5-0 lead into the fifth inning, errors by Aaron Judge and Anthony Volpe, and Gerrit Cole failing to cover first base, led to the Dodgers tying and eventually winning the game.
“We were saying every single game, ‘Just let them throw the ball to the infield. They can’t make a play,’ “ Kelly said on his podcast shortly after the Series. “It’s well-known. We all knew. I mean, we’re the Dodgers, we know every little detail.”
Speaking of arrogance, it wasn’t just the Dodgers.
The substance of what Kelly articulated about the Yankees defense was a part of the advance reports filed by scouts from the Royals, overmatched as they were by the Yankees’ talent, before a four-game loss in the 2024 ALDS. Scouts from the Guardians, whom the Yankees also out-talented, in advance of that year’s ALCS expressed a similar sentiment in their reports.
But an advance scout from one NL club, in a text to Newsday on Tuesday, said “putting pressure” on the Yankees defense was a salient part of his club’s reports on the Yankees back in the 2022 postseason.
“That defense, especially the infield, has been a point of potential exploitation with them,” the scout said. “For more than a few years.”
Another NL scout said he recalled Red Sox scouts – when the Red Sox believed in scouting, meaning the pre-Craig Breslow-run Red Sox – talking about exploiting the Yankees’ defense before Boston played in the Yankees…in the 2018 Division Series.
Of the team’s performance in the field Monday night, Fried said: “It’s important to have a little bit of pride and to be able to say, that’s not us.”
Except, even as the players change year to year, it has been.
For a while now.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
