Monday's game started out rough as Max Fried struggled to find his form yet again. The New York Yankees ace has struggled mightily in his past few starts after looking like a Cy Young contender early in the season; this time, he gave up eight hits and four earned runs in five innings of work.
Then, it looked like Fried's mediocre outing wouldn't matter as the Yankees took a 5-4 lead into the ninth inning against the Texas Rangers.
Then closer Devin Williams gave up the game-tying home run to Joc Pederson, who has a batting average of .132 this season.
Then, the Yankees failed to score a run in the top of the 10th inning — and kept Ben Rice on the bench.
Then, Aaron Boone elected to walk Wyatt Langford with two outs in the 10th inning and face Josh Jung instead.
Then, newly acquired relief pitcher Jake Bird gave up a three-run tank to Jung and the Yankees lose, 8-5.
Yankees loss on Monday puts them in dangerous territory
Even throughout most of this slide, it never felt like the Yankees were in serious trouble of missing the postseason. Even if the Blue Jays keep winning and capture the AL East crown, and the Red Sox keep a stiffarm on the top wild card spot, the Yankees have seemingly operated like a playoff berth was a shoo-in.
It kind of feels like they're in serious trouble now. After this loss, the Yankees are tied with the Mariners (with whom they own the tiebreaker) and have just a 1.5-game lead on the Rangers for the final WC spot. The last one! There's no more room to fall!
Aaron Boone deserves blame, but not all of it
Of course it's easy to blame the manager when a team bottoms out. And Boone isn't above reproach here. He's made questionable decisions in more than one of these games and those decisions have, in some cases, led directly to losses.
But he can only play the players he has on his roster. Jake Bird has had two rough outings in New York already, Jose Caballero and Ryan McMahon are probably being expected to do more than they're capable of and Aaron Judge is still out with an injury.
If you zoom out and examine the roster objectively... it starts to look like they're performing on par with the talent level. Without Aaron Judge, is this team that much more talented than the other teams competing for a wild card spot?