2020 Yankees COVID Bubble Season

The 2020 New York Yankees played 60 games in empty stadiums in a season that started in July and ended in October with Mike Brosseau -- a backup utility player who'd been on the wrong end of a 101 mph fastball near his head five weeks earlier -- depositing an Aroldis Chapman pitch into the left-field seats at Petco Park. That's 2020 for you. Strange year, stranger ending.

It wasn't a bad season. Thirty-three wins and 27 losses in 60 games, a batting champion, an MLB home run leader, and a dominant Wild Card sweep. It also wasn't good enough. It never quite is with this team, and in 2020, the way it ended stings more than usual because of who hit the ball and who threw it.

The Weirdest Baseball Season of Your Lifetime

A few things to set the scene. The 2020 season started on July 23, three and a half months late. Baseball banned fans from every stadium. The National League used the designated hitter for the first time. Extra innings started with a ghost runner on second base. There was a three-batter minimum for relief pitchers. The regular season lasted 60 games, the shortest schedule since the 1994-95 labor stoppage.

And sixteen teams made the playoffs.

(I'm not kidding. Sixteen teams. More than half the league. The Yankees, who finished 33-27, entered the postseason as the fifth seed in the American League. They needed all of that.)

The games were real. The standings were real. But there was something fundamentally off about the whole thing, the way a good movie with no sound would be off. Aaron Judge crushed a homer in July and nobody cheered. Cole struck out 13 guys and you could hear the ball hitting the catcher's mitt. It was baseball, but at 50 percent volume.

LeMahieu and Voit: The Heist

The regular season belonged to two guys nobody would have predicted.

DJ LeMahieu hit .364. Not just good -- .364. The best batting average in all of baseball, in both leagues. He won the American League batting title, making him the first player in the modern era to win batting titles in BOTH leagues (he'd won one with Colorado). For a second baseman acquired as a utility piece who nobody in New York took particularly seriously when he signed, this was spectacular. He also finished third in AL MVP voting behind José Abreu and José Ramírez, which tells you how stacked the AL was that weird year.

Luke Voit led the majors in home runs. Twenty-two in 56 games. He was the seventh Yankee in history to lead the majors outright in home runs, a list that includes Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris. LeMahieu and Voit were also the first teammates on any MLB team to lead the majors in both batting average and home runs simultaneously since the 1959 Braves (Hank Aaron in average, Eddie Mathews in home runs).

Here's what makes it weirder: Giancarlo Stanton played 23 regular-season games. Aaron Judge played 28. The two biggest bats on the roster were barely on the field, and the Yankees still had the best batting average and home run total in baseball. You want to talk about roster depth? That's roster depth.

Judge's calf strain was particularly brutal because he started so hot -- five home runs in his first ten games -- and then the body gave out on him. Gary Sanchez batted .147, led all catchers in errors, and was benched by September. The team had real problems hidden underneath the LeMahieu-Voit glow.

Gerrit Cole, Year One

This was the first season of the nine-year, $324 million deal. Seven wins. 2.84 ERA. Ninety-four strikeouts in 73 innings. Finished fourth in Cy Young voting. Cole pitched his Opening Day start against the Washington Nationals at an empty Nationals Park in Washington and you've never seen anything more bizarre than a $324 million pitcher taking the mound while a TV production crew played artificial crowd noise over the speakers.

He was good. He was consistently good in ways this rotation had been missing for years. He wasn't unhittable in the way the offseason promise implied, but he was what you needed him to be -- a genuine staff ace who ate innings and struck people out and gave the team a chance on his days.

What his first season couldn't give you was a World Series. That would come later. Or not at all. We'll see.

Everything That Went Wrong Before a Pitch Was Thrown

Aroldis Chapman tested positive for COVID-19 on July 11, twelve days before Opening Day. He went on the COVID-19 injured list -- not voluntarily, just infected. DJ LeMahieu also tested positive during Summer Camp. So did Luis Cessa. Zack Britton became the Opening Day closer in Chapman's absence.

Then on July 4th, at a simulated game in Yankee Stadium with no screens protecting pitchers, Masahiro Tanaka wound up and delivered a pitch and Stanton hit it back at him at 112 mph. The ball caught Tanaka on the right side of the head and he went down. CT scan came back negative. The team put him in concussion protocol, he showed symptoms, eventually recovered and pitched in 2020. But it was a deeply unsettling moment that led MLB to mandate protective screens going forward.

(The thing that gets me: a simulated game. Not even a real game. A July 4th workout. Tanaka almost had his career ended by a batting practice exercise.)

The Wild Card: Cole and the LeMahieu Special

The expanded playoffs sent the Yankees to Cleveland for a best-of-three Wild Card series. Cole started Game 1.

He struck out 13 Indians. The Yankees won 12-3, with Judge homering on Shane Bieber's fourth pitch of the game. Gerrit Cole struck out 13 batters, delivered his best October performance to date, and made it look easy against one of the game's better young pitchers. This was the postseason we'd paid for.

Game 2 went sideways in the best possible way. The game was tied 9-9 entering the ninth inning with Brad Hand -- one of the better closers in baseball -- on the mound for Cleveland. LeMahieu came up and singled into center field to give the Yankees the lead. Yankees win 10-9. It was also, apparently, one of the longest nine-inning games in recent memory. Postseason baseball is something else.

Stanton in October

When Giancarlo Stanton actually plays, he's one of the scariest forces in baseball. The regular-season injury history makes you forget that sometimes. The 2020 postseason remembered for you.

Stanton had 6 home runs in 7 postseason games. A .308 average, 13 RBI, 1.426 OPS. He became only the second player in MLB history -- joining Nelson Cruz in the 2011 ALCS -- to hit for the home run cycle in a single playoff series, hitting a solo shot, a two-run homer, a three-run blast, and a grand slam all in the ALDS against Tampa Bay. Five consecutive postseason games with a home run, a franchise record.

The grand slam came in the ninth inning of ALDS Game 1. The Yankees won 9-3. Stanton was, briefly, the reason for cautious optimism.

The ALDS vs. Tampa Bay: Four Games Won, One Lost Too Many

The Rays were the AL's first seed, 40-20 in the regular season, one of the best-built rosters in the league. MLB staged the games at Petco Park in San Diego -- neutral bubble site, no fans -- which stripped the Yankees of whatever home-field advantage they might have manufactured if the series had come to the Bronx.

Game 1: Yankees 9, Rays 3. Stanton grand slam. Cole gets the win. Things look good.

Game 2: Rays 7, Yankees 5. Stanton hit another homer, but Tampa Bay's offense was real and their pitching was deeper than anything the Yankees could match in a short series.

Game 3: Rays 8, Yankees 4. Randy Arozarena homered again. (Arozarena was in the middle of the most absurd postseason by an individual player in modern memory -- he'd finish the 2020 postseason with 10 home runs and set about every multi-game hitting record imaginable. Against the Yankees in the ALDS, he hit .429 with 3 HR in 5 games. There wasn't a good answer for him.) Series lead for Tampa: 2-1.

Game 4: Yankees 5, Rays 1. A needed win. Series tied 2-2.

Then Game 5. The thing that still bugs me.

Brosseau

Cole started Game 5 on short rest -- the first time in his career he'd done it. He struck out 9 in 5⅓ innings, allowed one run, and left with the game tied 1-1. The bullpen held through the seventh.

In the eighth, Aaron Boone brought in Chapman. On the mound to close it out in the biggest game of the year.

Here's the backstory: during the 2020 regular season, Chapman threw a 101 mph fastball that sailed near Brosseau's head in a Yankees-Rays game. It was the kind of pitch that cleared benches. Manager Kevin Cash issued a public threat: "I've got a whole damn bullpen full of guys who throw 98 miles per hour." The league investigated. There were suspensions. Chapman was the villain of that particular chapter.

Mike Brosseau, backup utility guy for the Rays, stepped in as a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning of Game 5.

Ten pitches. After ten pitches, Brosseau hit a solo home run off a Chapman fastball into the left-field seats at Petco Park. Rays 2, Yankees 1. That was the game. That was the season.

The man who'd had a ball thrown near his skull by Chapman five weeks earlier beat the Yankees with a swing off Chapman in the eighth inning of an elimination game. You can't write it. It wrote itself.

Tampa Bay went on to the World Series. The Yankees went home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the 2020 Yankees season record?

The New York Yankees went 33-27 in the COVID-shortened 60-game season, finishing second in the AL East behind Tampa Bay (40-20). They entered the expanded 16-team playoffs as the 5th seed in the American League.

Who were the Yankees' best players in 2020?

DJ LeMahieu won the AL batting title with a .364 average -- the highest mark in baseball -- and finished third in AL MVP voting. Luke Voit led all of baseball with 22 home runs in 56 games. Gerrit Cole posted a 2.84 ERA in his first Yankee season. Stanton, limited to 23 regular-season games by injury, went nuclear in October with 6 HR and 13 RBI in 7 postseason games.

How far did the Yankees go in the 2020 playoffs?

The Yankees swept the Cleveland Indians in the best-of-3 Wild Card Series (2-0) and then lost to the Tampa Bay Rays in the best-of-5 ALDS (3-2). They were eliminated in Game 5 on a Mike Brosseau go-ahead solo homer off Aroldis Chapman in the eighth inning.

What was the Mike Brosseau-Aroldis Chapman situation in 2020?

During the 2020 regular season, Chapman threw a high fastball near Brosseau's head in a Yankees-Rays game, clearing the benches and triggering league investigations. Five weeks later, Brosseau came up as a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning of ALDS Game 5 with the season on the line -- and hit a solo homer off Chapman to end the Yankees' year. One of the more satisfying moments of narrative justice in modern Yankees history, if you're not a Yankees fan.

Did the 2020 Yankees have an Aroldis Chapman injury or COVID issue?

Chapman tested positive for COVID-19 on July 11, 2020 -- twelve days before Opening Day -- and was placed on the COVID-19 IL. He missed the start of the season. Masahiro Tanaka was also hit in the head by a 112 mph Stanton comebacker during Summer Camp on July 4 and was briefly sidelined with concussion symptoms. DJ LeMahieu and Luis Cessa also tested positive during Summer Camp.

The 2020 Yankees are a season you remember in flashes: empty seats, DJ LeMahieu's batting title, Luke Voit's home run crown, Stanton going absolutely berserk in October, Cole striking out half of Cleveland. And then Mike Brosseau.

You don't shake that image easily. Chapman -- who threw that ball near his head -- on the mound. Brosseau -- who stood in for it -- at the plate. Ten pitches. Gone. Season over.

That's baseball, and that's 2020, and sometimes the two of them working together produce something you couldn't script if you tried.