Are the New York Yankees ever going to hit again?

New York Yankees fans are rip-shit angry at the offense and, honestly, who can blame them? Second place in the AL East, 4.5 games behind first-place Tampa Bay, AND the Red Sox’s recent surge now has them only a half-game behind the Yanks??? Madonn’…

The team ranks dead last in almost every major category since Aaron Judge went down with a rib stress fracture in June. Worse yet, Judge hitting the injured list coincided with Ben Rice and Cody Bellinger—Judge’s two biggest pieces of lineup protection—batting .196 and .228 for the month.

Both men got hot again and the team appeared to be turning things around…and then Bellinger strained his hamstring in Philadelphia on July 25. The Yankees are 5-6 since then. Rice has gone streaky and is batting .127 since July 22. New York traded for Luis Garcia Jr. and Heliot Ramos to give their lineup literally any raw power.

Meanwhile, Austin Wells is only just finding his swing again after sucking all season. Jazz Chisholm Jr. might have the streakiest bat on the team. Trent Grisham has fully regressed after overachieving last year, and his bad routes in center field cost the Yankees their home series with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Oh, and Giancarlo Stanton has been out since April with a calf strain and a subsequent setback. How is that even possible for someone who barely runs above a jog to begin with?

Not to sound like a broken record, folks, but this has been a chronic problem for the Yankees going all the way back to 2018. Right at the start of the Aaron Boone era. And no, we will not be calling for Boone to be fired. There’s only so much he can do with half a lineup and players he wasn’t responsible for acquiring.

For almost a decade, be it whenever Judge is injured or the top third of the lineup is slumping, the New York Yankees vanish as a team. Everyone starts pressing. Players swing in bad counts and seem overly cautious.

Tell me something, ladies and gentlemen, because I’m coming up blank on the answer nearly a decade later. How mentally weak is a fairly stacked lineup that it just completely crumbles whenever its best hitter goes down? Forget 2019 and the juiced baseballs of “Next Man Up” because this is a real problem.

It’s not as though the Yankees are a fringe playoff team with one standout great player, the big fish in a small pond. No, the Yankees have at least four future Hall of Fame batters on the roster: Judge, Stanton, Bellinger, and Paul Goldschmidt. All still highly talented despite all being over 30 years old. Goldschmidt is even pushing 40 and turns 39 in a month, and still has a solid 111 wRC+ on the year.

Let me put it this way, folks. This is not just a comically bad baseball slump. This is an institutional failure. The “Yankee Way” that has built so many winning teams collapsing on itself. What good is working counts and drawing walks if runs aren’t being scored?

Maybe it’s a scouting problem. It could be a coaching problem. Perhaps the worst is true and Yankees hitters are so hollow-headed that they mentally regress whenever a cold streak hits.

Nope. Absolutely not. Not on this fan base’s watch. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, no meaningless platitudes about “turning a corner” or a slumping bat “getting close.”

The fact of the matter is that these Yankees simply can’t handle adversity the way we thought. A team that performs so badly when one key player goes down—ONE—is simply that.

A bad team.

Yes. We’re going to say it out loud so everyone hears it. In their current form? The New York Yankees are a bad, bad team. It’s even hard to say they even deserve a playoff slot.

The season isn’t over, Judge says he’s coming back, and it’s not like the Red Sox can win forever (or can they?). Technically speaking, there is still time for the team to catch up and go on their own hot streak.

But we know they won’t. They’re a bad team and will continue to play like one until Judge comes back, and then it might be too late.

Bad team problems, bad team results. The only question now is what Brian Cashman will do to address it.

But given all of the team’s flaws, would it even matter?