Wallace Matthews, ESPN Staff Writer 8y

Home or away, Yankees need to wake up -- and fast

BALTIMORE -- When it comes right down to it, all the intrigue of the past few days is really just a parlor game.

Will the New York Yankees get to play at least one more game at Yankee Stadium this season? Should they be packing for Houston or Arlington, Texas? Should they be putting out a welcome mat for the Angels? These are just a distraction that obfuscates the true issue here.

Unless the Yankees start to play better than they have over the past week (and, really, since they reached their high-water mark July 28), it doesn't matter if they play that wild-card game at Yankee Stadium, at Minute Maid Park, at Tranquility Base or in my backyard.

Unless there is a drastic improvement in this team, and fast, the odds are that the Yankees are going to lose Tuesday, ending the 2015 season with the rather meager satisfaction of being able to say they "returned to the postseason," but knowing that in reality, they had barely dipped a toe into October and found they were in water way over their heads.

Saturday's doubleheader sweep by the Baltimore Orioles, who are battling only for the right to say that they had achieved mediocrity in 2015, is only the most recent evidence that this is a Yankees team that might have mathematically qualified for the postseason but otherwise barely resembles a playoff team. And it hasn't for more than two months.

The two losses, a 9-2 blowout in the first game and a 4-3 sleepwalk decided by a wild pitch in the second, were the Yankees' fourth and fifth defeats in their past six games. The other three were to the Boston Red Sox, who would have to improve by five games to have any claim even to mediocrity. It doesn't take a baseball genius or a SABR-geek to tell you that this is no way to begin a playoff run.

"We just have to take care of what we need to do and that’s play better," said Chase Headley, a voice of reason in an otherwise deathly silent Yankees clubhouse. "We’re not hitting with runners on base, we’re not pitching great, so we have to find a way to play better and not worry about what everybody else is doing. It’s not going to matter if we know where we’re playing right now or if we [don’t know] until tomorrow, we’re frustrated because we’re not playing the way that we want to. I’m not necessarily worried about where that game’s going to be.”

Nor should he be. Headley and his teammates should be more worried about what kind of game it is going to be. Because the way the Yankees have looked recently, they don't appear to be a match for any of the other teams in the postseason hunt, and maybe not even for the Orioles, and their starting pitcher, Chris Tillman (10-11, 5.05 ERA, and a longtime punching bag for the Yankees) in Sunday's regular-season finale.

After Friday night's game was rained out, I listened incredulously as Joe Girardi described his club's clinching of a spot in the one-game playoff as "rewarding." I couldn't let it sit, so I asked the Yankees manager how he could feel that way when his team had held a seven-game lead over the AL East -- the Orioles were the second-place team at time and the now-mighty Toronto Blue Jays in fourth -- as late in the season as July 28.

Here is his answer, verbatim, in its entirety, off my recorder: “Well, here’s the thing. Our team didn’t change. Our team was the same team. We basically played the same the first half as we did the second half, in a sense. We were eight games over at the halfway point. We’re 15 now. The other club, Toronto, played out of their minds, and that’s not something that you can predict that’s going to happen. As I said, we had a lot of challenges that we had to overcome. Now everything becomes a short series and anything can happen.”

On the surface, there is some truth to that. After picking up David Price, Troy Tulowitzki and Ben Revere at the trade deadline, Toronto did play over its heads. And the Yankees did face some major challenges, the most damaging of all being the loss of Mark Teixeira, with the loss of Nathan Eovaldi not far behind.

But to say that the Yankees were the same team from Opening Day to now is simply not true. In fact, since July 28, the date of demarcation for this team, the Yankees have been less than mediocre. In fact, their record from that date is 30-32. That is a much longer stretch than can be explained away simply by the injuries to Teixeira, who went on the disabled list Sept. 4, or Eovaldi, who was shut down Sept. 7. And in fact, it would have been difficult to expect much more out of Teixeira over the final month of the season than the Yankees have gotten out of Greg Bird, who has 11 home runs and 30 RBIs in 45 games (Teixeira has now missed 35).

And while the loss of Eovaldi has been costly, the Yankees replaced him with the just-as-effective Luis Severino, who once again pitched well enough to win in the second game Saturday.

No, the reason the Yankees have plummeted so drastically is because Jacoby Ellsbury stopped hitting, and Brett Gardner hasn't hit since the All-Star break, and Alex Rodriguez cooled off, and Chasen Shreve forgot how to get hitters out, and Dellin Betances started to show signs of overuse, and Michael Pineda's performance tailed off, and Ivan Nova never really got going.

In fact, a close look at the Yankees' season reveals that they were only a really good, playoff-worthy team for about two months right in the middle of the season, from May 24, when they were 22-22 and treading water in second place, up to July 28, when they reached their peak.

And it has been a steady decline ever since. Whether due to age, fatigue, overuse or simply no longer playing over their heads, the Yankees are not the team they became in late May, the team they played like through most of June, or the team they looked like they were at the end of July.

And now, their fate comes down to the final day of the season, with the Houston Astros winning again Saturday and the real possibility that the Yankees still might have to take their show on the road for one game that truly will mean everything.

It might work out, and the Yankees might rally to salvage a victory over the Orioles on Sunday, or the Astros will stumble and lose, and that one-game season will take place at Yankee Stadium, where the home team was nine games over .500 this season, and the roster is built to take advantage of those tantalizingly close right-field seats.

But unless this team can turn back the clock a couple of months, and fast, it really won't matter where they play that game at all, now, will it?

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