New York Yankees 2, Texas Rangers 15: I thought ennui would hurt less

This was a tough series to sit through, and if you watched all 36 innings you’re a stronger person than yours truly. I did get through all of today’s 15-2 drubbing at the hands of the Rangers, their third loss of the series, and the quicker we talk about it, the sooner we can all just move on.

It’s never a good sign when the offensive highlight of the game is an RBI groundout. We try to embed tweets or video into these kinds of things but there’s really nothing worth watching. The Yankees had runners at second and third with one out, for Oswald Peraza to bounce a ball to third, bringing Aaron Hicks in. They wouldn’t score again until there were two outs in the ninth inning, a bases-loaded walk to force Gleyber Torres home. By then, the deficit had been in the double-digits for what felt like ages.

Nestor Cortes had his worst start as a Yankee, charged with seven runs and allowing three long balls. A grand slam in the first inning from Josh Jung put the club behind the eight-ball almost right away, and two more dingers in the fifth ended up chasing Cortes from the game. The lefty did strike out seven Rangers, a continuation of strong swing-and-miss stuff, but four walks and obviously the home runs were too much to overcome.

Albert Abreu was also terrible, allowing a home run to the first batter he faced immediately after coming in to relieve Cortes. He ended up being charged with six runs on the day, walking the bases loaded then walking a run in, being swapped out for Nick Ramirez and watching inherited runners cross the plate. His once-deceptive 1.46 ERA inflated to a much more appropriate 5.40. That’s really all that’s worth talking about for now.

The Yankees take on the Guardians at home tomorrow, a showdown of 2022 division winners that haven’t gotten off to the start they would want. It seems unlikely the Yankee lineup will be all that different from today — the club will make an IL decision about Aaron Judge prior to first pitch, but you’d be forgiven for being on the skeptical side that the team’s best player will be back.

You’d also be forgiven, quite frankly, for just not watching if you don’t feel like it. One of the things I’ve learned the longer I’ve covered the team for SB Nation is that it’s OK to check out for a few days if baseball isn’t doing it for you. Gerrit Cole, Michael King, and Anthony Volpe are pretty much the only things that make the now-last place Yankees worth watching right now, and for me, that might not be enough to get all that interested in this Guardians series.

And I think that’s perfectly fine. It’s OK to not live and die with every game. It’s OK to not yell and scream like certain marble-mouthed YouTubers do after a loss. We want people invested in the Yankees because that’s what keeps this site running — and my cheques clearing — but this is not a fun stretch of baseball. It’s OK to just ... do something else for a bit, and then come back.

Domingo Germán starts tomorrow at 7:05pm Eastern. He needs to have a good start, because of how little offense we can expect from the club right now. He’s not someone that I have a lot of confidence in delivering a good start, which is why I’ll probably be focused more on my weekly Succession watch party than Yankees-Guardians. The nice thing about baseball is that you’ll see something new every day. The bad thing about baseball is that the new thing might be something awful, and the Yankees aren’t inspiring a lot of faith that their next outing won’t be an awful one.

Box Score