By the end of this week—as they start a 10-game stretch with seven games against Baltimore—the Yankees will have played a quarter of their schedule. O.K., we’re not yet to Memorial Day and the great Sparky Anderson always considered 60 games a benchmark for where a team is headed. But with the way this team looks, it’s not too early to declare this team the best in baseball this year—with a chance to join the company of historic teams.
Here are the undisputed facts:
• The Yankees are 25–9 for the ninth time in their history. They won the pennant each of the previous eight times they started this well (with six World Series titles).
• They have allowed only 98 runs in 34 games. Only one other Yankees team was better at run prevention after 34 games, the 1958 team (95).
• They are 20–1 when they score more than three runs.
• You must go back to the Dead Ball years of 1904 and ’10 to find a Yankees pitching staff with a lower WHIP.
Any discussion of the 2022 Yankees must begin with Aaron Judge, who before Opening Day turned down $31.5 million a year for seven years, which is not crazy when Anthony Rendon, Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole will be pulling down more coin. Judge is better than ever. He is destroying fastballs, pulling home runs when the count works in his favor and playing a stout center field at a height never before seen. (Walt Bond played 11 career games there at 6'7". Judge has played 33 games there, including 11 of the first 34 this season, allowing manager Aaron Boone important lineup flexibility.)
“I mean, he was great when he got here,” Boone says. “I think he’s just more—the experience and every factor of how to prepare. He’s smart, he knows the league better, knows what to look for more, knows how to take care of himself more, knows how to prepare physically. He has become more of a leader, too.”
Everything that could go right has gone right. The team has been extraordinarily healthy. Gleyber Torres, with the help of hitting coaches Dillon Lawson and Hensley Meulens, junked his incessant bat waggle, which led to timing issues and his front hip leaving too early last year. Now he sets the bat on his shoulder and doesn’t move it until the pitcher moves. The result? The same guy who slugged just .352 against fastballs last year is slugging .538 against them. He is on time and on balance.
DJ LeMahieu is hitting the ball hard again after sports hernia surgery. Josh Donaldson, who last year had a better exit velocity than in his MVP season, is giving the team an edge as Boone protects him from the wear and tear of playing third base too much. Stanton is hitting the ball harder (97.4-mph average exit velocity) and finding the barrel more frequently (16.3% of his plate appearances) than in full any season since at least 2015. The team has cut down on its strikeouts.
That the Yankees can hit is no surprise, not with two MVPs and 10 All-Stars. The only possible knock is they field the oldest group of hitters in baseball (30.7 on average), though Boone’s “load management” policy seems to have that in order.
The bigger surprise is how well the Yankees have pitched. They have borrowed from the Giants’ blueprint: They have embraced power sinkers as hitters adjust to high fastballs, they throw strikes, they control counts and they defend the home run. The Yankees are fourth in strike percentage and second in fewest home runs allowed; the Giants lead in both categories.
Nestor Cortes Jr., Luis Severino, Clay Holmes, the depth of the bullpen … all of it is real. And the pitching plays up because of their enhanced defense and the exquisite work behind the plate by Kyle Higashioka and Jose Trevino. The trade with Minnesota that netted Donaldson was worth it to move on from the constant maintenance of Gary Sánchez behind the plate.
Don’t go putting these Yankees in the same category yet as the 1998 Yankees, one of the greatest teams of all time. Too much season remains to go there. But as we approach the quarter pole of the season, the Yankees, without an obvious flaw, are the class of baseball so far this year.
