How the Yankees cleaned up their act

In the early going, the Bronx Bombers appear to be baseball’s most dominant squad once again

BALTIMORE The greatest team in baseball this season is also something of a paradox.

The New York Yankees can wow you with towering home runs and intimidate you merely by stepping on the field — yet their most impactful contributions often emerge from information passed from player to player, gleaned from a tablet, shared in a meeting room.

They feature the game’s greatest slugger putting on a power show against the backdrop of a dramatic salary drive — but their greatest steps forward have come not from Aaron Judge’s might but rather the decision to disregard offence altogether at two of the most important defensive positions.

They employ a dozen players earning nine-figure salaries — yet insist it is chemistry and selflessness and a heightened level of focus and intent that has taken this franchise to a new level.

It is rare air: The Yankees are 2810, similar to their 1998 team widely regarded as the franchise’s best in the last half-century or so.

They lead the major leagues in earned-run average but also OPS, hit more homers per game than anyone, but also feature the game’s greatest reliever.

Yes, it’s still baseball, and it all could go sideways soon or at some point this summer.

But when you’re nearly one-quarter through the season, and still on pace to win around 120 games, it’s more than fair to recognize a moment in time that seems like a harbinger for history.

“There’s no stopping this team,” Judge said on a night he smashed his 13th and 14th home runs and saw his club win for the 20th time in 23 games.

Largely, it is the same group that won 91 games last season, a lofty total in some quarters but in New York the evidence of a frustrating season that ended in a wild-card loss to Boston. For the Yankees, results are typically binary — you win the World Series, or you don’t — and off-seasons can operate in similar fashion.

Yet these Yankees have managed something altogether different: Cleaning it up without cleaning house.

In Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo, these Yankees feature three of the top eight homerun hitters in the game heading into Friday’s play, this in a season where the baseball is performing like a wet Nerf ball struck with a soggy newspaper.

Yet, as the Yankees swung from wild winning rampages to stultifying losing skids last season, it was easy to forget that Judge and Stanton were both healthy (148 and 139 games played, respectively) and highly productive (.916 and .870 OPS), keeping the Yankees afloat in spite of their shortcomings.

There was no shortage of consternation, then, when the world’s second-most valuable sports franchise opted to sit out of the high-end freeagent market and instead make a pair of transactions to define their new club.

No, the November trade for Texas shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa and the March deal that sent powerful but defensively deficient catcher Gary Sanchez to Minnesota did not mollify the masses. It merely created a potion that apparently hatched a super team.

Monday night, Jose Trevino looped a fly ball 318 feet down the right-field line and off Camden Yards’ foul pole. It was the first homer struck by a Yankee catcher this year.

Sanchez had four homers by this time last year, on his way to 23. Trevino and his catching mate, Kyle Higashioka, may not combine for 10.

Yet their collective commitment and brain power have meant much more.

Yankees ace Gerrit Cole says the pair “don’t take mental days off.”

They’ve each played in 22 games, but Cole says, “If Kyle’s not catching me, Kyle’s watching every pitch. If Jose’s not catching me, Jose’s watching every pitch.”

The results, says Cole, now in the third year of a nine-year, $324-million (U.S.) deal, are palpable.

“I see us making less stupid pitches,” he says.

“I see us pitching with a thought process throughout an entire game, throughout an entire series.”

The Yankees’ 2.76 ERA leads the majors, and the continuity from starters Cole, Jameson Taillon, Nestor Cortes and Jordan Montgomery has been startling: Yankee starters have given up three or fewer runs in 26 of 38 games.

Higashioka was drafted in 2008 and is now the longest-tenured Yankee. At 32, he’s never played more than 67 games. Likewise, Trevino’s 89 games played for Texas last season marked a career high.

The duo rank 25th in the majors in both average (.182) and OPS (.485).

Sanchez hit 53 home runs over 176 games in his first two seasons. The club came to expect production from behind the plate, just as it did from shortstop, when Derek Jeter gave way to Didi Gregorius and eventually Gleyber Torres, who slugged 38 home runs in 2019.

Yet, much like Sanchez’s occasional struggles behind the plate, Torres played his way off shortstop last season, when he committed 18 errors.

And, much like punting offence at catcher, the trade for Kiner-Falefa seemed curious. A light-hitting, nopower shortstop when the likes of Carlos Correa, Trevor Story and others were available merely by writing one more big cheque? Now?

“He’s our superstar shortstop,” says Cole, a former teammate of Correa’s in Houston. “He is a Gold Glover. And he is an elite contact hitter.”

With Torres shifting to second, the Yankees’ defensive rating has risen dramatically. Same at catcher.

It’s almost like the Yankees acquired three everyday players, what with Torres hitting the ball hard again and seeing his athleticism play up at second.

It doesn’t hurt that Torres just has to be another guy in a defensively gifted infield, with former Gold Glover Anthony Rizzo at first and DJ LeMahieu and Josh Donaldson sharing time at third. In the middle is Kiner-Falefa, who has yet to hit a home run and is batting .271.

It is nearly Memorial Day, and the Yankees have let to lose more than two games in a row. That will change, and so, too, will the club’s five-game bulge in the American League East heading into Friday’s action — for better or worse.

The Yankees know bad times are inevitable.

They also believe they’re far better built to withstand them.