Around the Empire: Yankees news - 8/26/20

Yahoo! Sports | Alex Smith: The Yankees have an absurd schedule on the books for the remainder of the week. After last night’s rainout, the team will play a doubleheader against the Braves today, have a day off Thursday, a doubleheader against the Mets on Friday, a single game on Saturday, then one more doubleheader on Sunday. All this at a time when players are getting injured at an historic pace. Sounds bad!

Gerrit Cole will get the ball in game one this afternoon, then Masahiro Tanaka will pitch the night portion of the doubleheader. Or, as Aaron Boone says:

NJ.com | Brendan Kuty: The MLB Trade Deadline is five days away. Expect the Yankees to be involved in, well, almost everything. “I know they’re [the front office] certainly doing their due diligence and going through the process and having conference calls Zoom calls, and definitely exploring a lot of different options,” Boone told Kuty. The team has been connected to starting pitchers Taijuan Walker and Mike Clevinger in recent days. Buckle up, friends, it’s going to be a busy few days.

New York Post | Dan Martin: J.A. Happ knows the Yankees have used the days off to skip his place in the rotation, and he isn’t happy about it. The veteran southpaw implied to reporters that the team is trying to prevent his 2021 option from vesting. “You guys [in the media] are pretty smart. It doesn’t take too much to figure out, sort of, what could be going on,” he said. The problem here is that Happ doesn’t put the Yankees in any position to succeed when he pitches. Since the start of last year, he’s pitched to a 5.02 ERA (5.47 FIP). Ouch.