This past weekends Subway Series was highlighted by spectacular heroics and even larger swings at the plate.
Game one on friday was an all-out attack on Mets ace, Johan Santana, who pitched the teams first no-hitter in history just a week prior. The Bombers jumped on him though in this start. Robinson Cano hit two, two-run blasts over the wall, the second of which was followed by one from Nick Swisher and then Andruw Jones, for back-to back-to back bombs in the Yankees 9-1 win.
On Saturday, they started out playing slightly smaller ball in the Bronx. After scoring an early run off an A-Rod single in the first, the Yanks were stagnant for a few innings. Trailing 2-1 in the sixth, Mark Teixeira hit a two-run homer which wound up giving them the edge in the 4-1 victory.
Once again yesterday afternoon, the big fly was the difference in the win, as Russell Martin hit two in the game, his second coming heroically in the bottom of the ninth for a Yankees walk-off bomb.
Sweeping the Mets allowed the Yankees to move further up in the standings, they currently sit just .5 games behind Tampa Bay now in the AL East with a record of 34-25. Despite the roll they’ve been on, the only way the Yankees have won this year, is courtesy of the long ball. In every single win the Yankees picked up so far this season, they’ve hit at least one home run. In 12 of their 25 losses, they failed to produce that big hit.
A home run is possibly the most exciting moment in baseball, but it takes a collective effort in other aspects of the game to win consistently and make a championship run. If the Yankees continue to show that they can’t win without a homer, they’ll never endure this long season.
Leading the league in this category with 92 team home runs, you’d think the Bombers should be ranked highly in most other offensive statistics as well. This is not the case however, because they fail to come through with these big swings with base-runners present. When runners are on, the Yankees have only come through with 39 jacks, so the other 53 they’ve posted, only produced one run each. Hence why they’re so much further behind in the other stats like runs and RBIs, where they stand at 8th place in the MLB.
It’s a position the entire lineup has failed to produce in all season long, as they continuously strand runners on base. With runners in scoring position, the team full of sluggers is batting a wimpy .222 average, 27th in the league.
As huge of a role as the home run plays in the game of baseball, the Yankees can’t continue to rely on this one hit alone to win games this year. They have to dig deeper and work on spreading the ball around better when there’s an opportunity to score, because these big shots will be a lot harder to come by in October.
