Twenty minutes or so before Max Fried took the mound at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, a Hall of Fame plaque sparkled in the center of the diamond. It told the story of CC Sabathia, noting how he “led (the) Yankees to (the) 2009 World Series title with (a) league-leading 19 wins.”
In the Bronx — sometimes literally — the championships always loom behind you.
Fans got a replica of Sabathia’s plaque as the Yankees honored the proud lefty six weeks after his big day in Cooperstown. Fried sent them home with a replica performance, too: seven innings, three runs and victory No. 16 in his debut Yankees season. He has time to win 19, like Sabathia, before the legacy stuff begins in October.
“You know what’s crazy?” Sabathia said, after bouncing his ceremonial first pitch before the Yankees’ 4-3 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays. “When I first signed, that first night, we had a party at the 40/40 Club, and I was sitting with Jay-Z and one of his buddies, and they were talking about: ‘You need to win right away.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I’m here for seven years.’ And they were like, ‘No, you need to win immediately.’”
Sabathia never understood the immediacy of New York until that moment. Even so, he said, the team was so strong that he felt no extra pressure. The Yankees, who had gone eight seasons without a title, raced to the best record in the majors, six games better than anyone else. They won the World Series without ever facing elimination.
CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte know all about the expectations that come with playing in the Bronx. (Mark Smith / Imagn Images)
It’s rarely that easy, as the drought since then has shown. Only one team has more victories than the Yankees since that 2009 championship: the Los Angeles Dodgers, who beat them in the World Series last fall. Before winning in 2020, the Dodgers had spent 32 years searching for another banner.
“When it comes to organizations like the Dodgers and Yankees, the expectations are to win — the history of the organizations have won, and that’s what you understand when you put on that uniform,” said the Yankees’ Cody Bellinger, who lost two World Series with L.A. before the 2020 triumph. “So it’s pretty similar. We had a few chances early on, and finishing off ’20 was huge.”
Bellinger singled and scored in the first inning Sunday, then doubled in the go-ahead run in the third. He has been the Yankees’ best player besides Aaron Judge in his first season in New York, as if he were born for the setting — which he was. His father, Clay, played three seasons for the Yankees, winning two titles and nearly a third, part of the dazzling aberration of the dynasty years.
“It’s hard, man,” Cody Bellinger said. “Baseball’s such a challenging game. In the postseason, anything can happen. You just try to play your best baseball every single day.”
The Yankees have been doing that for two weeks. Since the Boston Red Sox pantsed them two Saturdays ago, the Yankees have won 11 of 14 games. They are 80-63 now, a season-high 17 games over .500.
They’ve had troubling stretches — losing records in June and July — and Sunday was another discouraging day for shortstop Anthony Volpe, who struck out three times and made an error. But the summer slump is over. Since losing five in a row to start August, the Yankees have gone 20-9. It’s the best record in the majors in that stretch.
“There are times when we’re not playing well, and it’s frustrating, but it’s part of the 162-game season that we play,” starter Carlos Rodón said. “It’s not always going to be perfect. Obviously, we want to be great every day, but there’s days that the opposing team is better, and there’s days that we beat ourselves, and there are days that we just flat-out beat teams where it’s not even a competition. That’s the wave of baseball.”
Rodón has held hitters to an MLB-low .187 average this season. He’s had essentially the same year as Fried: both have 16 wins in 29 starts (even better than Mike Mussina’s win-half-your-starts standard), with ERAs in the low 3s. In this era of minimalist starting pitching, the Yankees are the only team with two pitchers, Fried and Rodón, who have worked 170 innings.
Fried wasn’t especially dominant on Sunday, but Judge helped him with a sprawling catch to end the fourth inning, and Ryan McMahon, as usual, made everything at third base look easy. “It looks like he’s slipping into a warm bath when he picks up a groundball,” manager Aaron Boone said.
McMahon was part of the Yankees’ haul at the trade deadline. The group hasn’t worked perfectly (where have you gone, Jake Bird?), but the roster is tighter with an elite closer (David Bednar), fielder (McMahon) and speedster (José Caballero).
All of those parts — and an offense with 33 more homers than any other American League team — have come together in the past two weeks.
“All parts of the game, we’re a lot sharper, whether it’s pitching, hitting, defense, just making the plays when we need to, getting the big hits when we need to,” Fried said. “It’s a long season, so to be able to put it all together, it’s really nice.”
It’s most important to peak in a month, of course. But it’s hard to say that any team is a clear favorite in the American League. Toronto has a two-game division lead on the Yankees. The Detroit Tigers — who visit Yankee Stadium this week — are a game and a half better. The Red Sox, Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners are formidable, too.
Nobody will march into the playoff field with the glow of Sabathia’s 2009 Yankees. But the Yankees look a lot more encouraging than they did two weeks ago. Soon, they must prove that is who they really are.
“The one thing I’ve maintained throughout is just I feel like we have a chance to be a really, really excellent club,” Boone said. “And the one thing that I know is we’re pretty healthy. I feel like we have a lot of guys that are in a good place, and we are in a position to go get it. Now, we’ve got to go do it.”
(Top photo of Cody Bellinger: Kent J. Edwards / Getty Images)