Yankees' offense owes a huge thanks to rocksteady rotation

The Yankees still don’t have Aaron Judge, they just got Cody Bellinger back from the injured list and it’s looking like Giancarlo Stanton might never come back this season. Max Fried is on the IL and now so is Ryan Weathers, who has been terrific for them. And guess what? They can still win the American League East this season. It is because they can pitch, even though they rarely have all their pitchers.

It is more than that, of course. This Yankees team, even with its slumps and inconsistencies and without No. 99 for months, has shown more fight than any Yankees team in years. It is why they came into this week’s games -- with the Red Sox coming to town this weekend for a rousing and old-fashioned Yankees-Red Sox moment -- just three games in the loss column behind the Rays.

Yankees fans know what they have at this point, and what they still don’t have. The kid at shortstop, George Lombard Jr., has provided some life, on offense and defense and even in the stands because of the way the fans have embraced him. David Bednar, one of Brian Cashman’s best bullpen acquisitions ever (2025 Trade Deadline) ever, has been tremendous, 30 saves in 33 opportunities.

But with all that, Yankees fans also know this: It has been starting pitching that has been the foundation of it all this season.

And that means even with the cracks their rotation has been showing lately, with Fried’s second visit to the IL this season, and Weathers joining him last week with a forearm strain. Even when the Yankees couldn’t hit much, they got one quality start after another. A deep rotation kept them in games and kept them right there in the AL East, trying to catch the Rays and stay ahead of the Red Sox. The rest of the way, we’ll find out if the rotation is healthy enough to go the distance.

Somehow the Yankees are where they are even with just one starter -- Cam Schlittler -- with more than 10 wins. He has a record of 11-6 with a 2.16 ERA and is a legit Cy Young Candidate. Schlittler has become the Yankees' ace, though he has now thrown more innings (158) than at any time in his baseball career. Gerrit Cole, who started the season late after his recovery from Tommy John surgery, has looked more and more like his old self, with a 7-6 record and a 3.11 ERA. He has made 16 starts in a season when Fried has only made 15 so far because of his elbow issues. Weathers, who came to the Yankees from Miami and was another great pickup by Cashman, only had a won-loss record of 5-8 before getting hurt, but he had been a horse for Aaron Boone, making 25 starts -- two fewer than Schlittler.

It is why it was a very big deal when Weathers walked off the mound the other day against the Blue Jays, before we got word that he was on his way to the IL. David Weathers’ kid has been that good, and that much of a find. There is the thought now -- provided nobody else goes down -- that he could come back and be part of the Yankees' bullpen in the postseason. The left-handed Weathers has been every bit as valuable as another young guy, right-hander Will Warren who has made 25 starts of his own and carries an 8-6 record into tonight's start.​

It looked for so much of this season, even with the first time Fried went down, that the Yankees really did have more starting pitching than they’d had in years, and that means over 20 years. And if everybody is back in September, they might still have more than enough to pitch them through any short series and all the way to another World Series.

Judge is supposed to be coming back soon. If he does, maybe he can resume jump-starting games with first-inning home runs which had become, let’s face it, kind of his thing. It would be a way of providing some breathing room for the starters, something that hasn’t happened an awful lot in his absence. Katie Sharp came up with a stat the other day about how many consecutive games the Yankees had gone without scoring a first-inning run -- 22 -- which happens to be two games shy of the longest streak in their history. Really: It seems for months, certainly since Judge went to the IL with a cracked rib and Bellinger followed him, that the starters have been asked to keep low-scoring games close until the Yankees figured something out in the late innings. Which they so often have.

Boone puts it this way: “The strength of our starting rotation and those guys in the 'pen is why we're in this position."

They are in position. They have given themselves a chance. Mostly it is because they can pitch. When was the last time you said that about the New York Yankees?