Erik Boland: Yankees' punchless bats are wasting strong starting pitching
Gerrit Cole at Yankee Stadium on Aug. 8, 2026. Credit: Jim McIsaac
With Cam Schlittler on Sunday becoming the latest Yankees starter to have a terrific outing all but wasted by the club’s pop-gun offense, it begged this question:
Are the Yankees on their way to wasting the collective efforts of what has been one of their best rotations in years?
Well over four months into the regular season, Yankees starters continue to do what they’ve done pretty much from Day One in, far more often than not, fulfilling the first commandment of being a starter: Give your team a chance to win.
Schlittler’s outing, in which he allowed one run and three hits over seven innings to lower his ERA to 2.21, made it 10 of the rotation’s last 12 starts in which it has allowed two runs or fewer, including one run or fewer in nine of those starts.
Expanding it out a bit further, Yankees starters have allowed two runs or fewer in 13 of their last 17 starts and one run or fewer in 12 of those outings, good enough for a 2.16 ERA in that stretch.
More?
The rotation has allowed three runs or fewer in 92 starts this season, tied for the most such starts in franchise history through the first 118 games of a season (also accomplished by the 2022 rotation).
Counting Sunday, Yankees starters have allowed three runs or fewer in 24 of their last 27 starts, including two runs or fewer in 19 of those starts, the group’s ERA 2.72 in that span.
The Yankees went 16-11 in those 27 games, hardly a disastrous record. But with even borderline decent offensive production in those games, the record would be much better. For instance, the Yankees outscored the opposition in that 27-game stretch just 95-93, averaging 3.5 runs per game while hitting .217 with a .670 OPS.
As catcher Austin Wells put it after Sunday’s 2-1 loss to Atlanta in 10 innings: “At the moment, those guys [the starters] have to be almost perfect for us to be in the ballgame. And they have been, which has been incredible.”
The offense, and this doesn’t qualify as breaking news for anyone who has paid a modicum of attention to the Yankees season, is the reason the club’s record the last month — and for the season — doesn’t reflect, as it should, the dominance of the rotation (and, for the all noise surrounding the bullpen, the work of the relievers, too).
The Yankees pulled into Monday’s off-day 66-52, 5½ games behind the Rays in the AL East. And though the Yankees currently aren’t in danger of missing the playoffs, their hold on the AL’s No. 1 wild-card spot, and the home-field advantage that goes with it, is suddenly tenuous as the charging Red Sox entered Monday just 1½ games behind them for that top slot.
General manager Brian Cashman’s top priority before the trade deadline was upgrading an offense that hasn’t been good since the last time captain Aaron Judge played on May 31. Bullpen help had been a priority but became less of one as the return of DH Giancarlo Stanton (calf strain) became murkier and Cody Bellinger was lost for 4-6 weeks in late July. That, in addition to the uncertainty surrounding Judge.
Cashman’s headline acquisition ended up being first baseman Luis Garcia Jr., who at the time led the NL in slugging (.560), from the Nationals.
He also added Heliot Ramos, who has a strong career track record of hitting lefties. And, in another move Cashman hoped might spark the offense, he promoted shortstop prospect George Lombard Jr.
Garcia homered in his Yankees debut a week ago Monday in what was a rare off night for Schlittler and Yankees pitchers in a 13-7 loss to the Cardinals. Lombard homered in his debut on Tuesday, a 2-0 victory.
Since Tuesday, when Garcia, Ramos and Lombard were all in the lineup for the first time, the Yankees are 3-2, averaging 2.4 runs per game.
That, of course, is far too small a sample size from which to draw conclusions on the “new look” lineup and its prospects for the stretch run of the regular season and into October.
But it’s also done nothing to alleviate thoughts that the 2026 Yankees — even with the impressive ability to throw some combination of Schlittler, Gerrit Cole and Max Fried the first three games of a given playoff series — remain on track to ultimately waste the kind of consistent high-level starting pitching most franchises aspire to have but rarely get.
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.
