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<\/p>\nTwenty 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 \u201cled (the) Yankees to (the) 2009 World Series title with (a) league-leading 19 wins.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the Bronx \u2014 sometimes literally \u2014 the championships always loom behind you.<\/p>\n
Fans got a replica of Sabathia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know what\u2019s crazy?\u201d Sabathia said, after bouncing his ceremonial first pitch before the Yankees\u2019 4-3 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays. \u201cWhen 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: \u2018You need to win right away.\u2019 And I was like, \u2018What are you talking about? I\u2019m here for seven years.\u2019 And they were like, \u2018No, you need to win immediately.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte know all about the expectations that come with playing in the Bronx. (Mark Smith \/ Imagn Images)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to organizations like the Dodgers and Yankees, the expectations are to win \u2014 the history of the organizations have won, and that\u2019s what you understand when you put on that uniform,\u201d said the Yankees\u2019 Cody Bellinger, who lost two World Series with L.A. before the 2020 triumph. \u201cSo it\u2019s pretty similar. We had a few chances early on, and finishing off \u201920 was huge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bellinger singled and scored in the first inning Sunday, then doubled in the go-ahead run in the third. He has been the Yankees\u2019 best player besides Aaron Judge in his first season in New York, as if he were born for the setting \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard, man,\u201d Cody Bellinger said. \u201cBaseball\u2019s such a challenging game. In the postseason, anything can happen. You just try to play your best baseball every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve had troubling stretches \u2014 losing records in June and July \u2014 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\u2019s the best record in the majors in that stretch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are times when we\u2019re not playing well, and it\u2019s frustrating, but it\u2019s part of the 162-game season that we play,\u201d starter Carlos Rod\u00f3n said. \u201cIt\u2019s not always going to be perfect. Obviously, we want to be great every day, but there\u2019s days that the opposing team is better, and there\u2019s days that we beat ourselves, and there are days that we just flat-out beat teams where it\u2019s not even a competition. That\u2019s the wave of baseball.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rod\u00f3n has held hitters to an MLB-low .187 average this season. He\u2019s had essentially the same year as Fried: both have 16 wins in 29 starts (even better than Mike Mussina\u2019s 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 Rod\u00f3n, who have worked 170 innings.<\/p>\n
Fried wasn\u2019t 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. \u201cIt looks like he\u2019s slipping into a warm bath when he picks up a groundball,\u201d manager Aaron Boone said.<\/p>\n
\ufeff<\/p>\n
McMahon was part of the Yankees\u2019 haul at the trade deadline. The group hasn\u2019t worked perfectly (where have you gone, Jake Bird?), but the roster is tighter with an elite closer (David Bednar), fielder (McMahon) and speedster (Jos\u00e9 Caballero).<\/p>\n
All of those parts \u2014 and an offense with 33 more homers than any other American League team \u2014 have come together in the past two weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll parts of the game, we\u2019re a lot sharper, whether it\u2019s pitching, hitting, defense, just making the plays when we need to, getting the big hits when we need to,\u201d Fried said. \u201cIt\u2019s a long season, so to be able to put it all together, it\u2019s really nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s most important to peak in a month, of course. But it\u2019s 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 \u2014 who visit Yankee Stadium this week \u2014 are a game and a half better. The Red Sox, Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners are formidable, too.<\/p>\n
Nobody will march into the playoff field with the glow of Sabathia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe one thing I\u2019ve maintained throughout is just I feel like we have a chance to be a really, really excellent club,\u201d Boone said. \u201cAnd the one thing that I know is we\u2019re 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\u2019ve got to go do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Top photo of Cody Bellinger: Kent J. Edwards \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty minutes or so before Max Fried took the mound at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, a Hall of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":209185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1266,2228,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-209184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-new-york-yankees","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115166482539872551","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}