BRONX — Brian Cashman’s words on Wednesday won’t do much to quell the frustration of Yankees fans over the club’s 16-15 start to the year. The Yanks’ general manager took some of the blame for the circumstances the team finds itself in at the start of May while also pointing to the high number of injuries the club has had to deal with.
Injuries to some of the Yankees’ biggest names, including Aaron Judge and Carlos Rodon, have forced the Yankees to have to dig deep into the organization as they’ve tried to tread water in the first month of the season.
“It’s not the team that we’ve put together. We’ve had a lot of injuries,” Boone said before the Yankees’ series finale with Cleveland. “Then we turned our attention to some alternative choices and, obviously, we’re not playing our best baseball with what we currently have as healthy players. And we’re certainly missing the guys that we typically are used to seeing out there at the same time.”
Nothing seemed to go the Yankees’ way at the start of the year as the pitching staff was hit hard along with blows that quickly came to several position players. The offense struggled after Stanton, who has a history of injuries during his time in the Bronx, went down and then Judge was placed on the injured list this week as he dealt with a hip issue.
While injuries have long been a part of baseball as much as a Nathan’s Hot Dog or bag of Cracker Jacks, the Yankees’ lack of depth and offseason moves have become more and more glaring. Carlos Rodon, who is injured, was the Bombers’ big offseason addition despite comments from Hal Steinbrenner indicating during the winter that there were more deals to come.
“It takes two to tango. You engage other clubs, you try to make deals. You’re not going to make a bad deal for instance,” Cashman said. “(The) Comment was more like ‘hey, we’re not done. We know there are areas we want to get better at, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to just do something that’s not going to make any sense.’ So we had a lot of conversations that there were some optimism that if things went out a certain way, but it didn’t play out that way.”
The Yankees GM said that there had been deals they could have made that would have made the current situation that New York finds itself in much worse. Still, now when the Yankees could use some help there aren’t many moves to make at the current time.
“The time of year is tough, April, May, June. … Because trying to you know, go outside the organization to deal with that is pretty difficult in today’s game,” Cashman explained.
While Cashman weaved through the roughly 25-minute chat with reporters inside the Yankees dugout talking about injuries and what moves he didn’t make during the offseason, he remained consistent with his role in the whole thing.
“Injuries happen. And ultimately, we’re getting a lot of injuries right now. And that’s certainly killing us, but I have nothing I can convict others. Other than that if you want to convict somebody, convict me. It’s my responsibility,” Cashman said.
Still only a few days into the month of May, Cashman had another message for those feeling frustrated with the way the Yankees have played so far.
“Don’t count us out. Don’t give up on us,” he said, trying to convey some hope. “We got a good group of people, player-wise, staff-wise, support staff-wise. It’s a championship-caliber operation from that perspective, but we’re not currently (playing) at the level that we would have expected because we’re missing some really important pieces, which I think anybody would acknowledge. But in the meantime, it’s also part of it and you got to withstand it. Gonna find a way to continue to tread some water at the very least and not slide too far out of it while we’re waiting on some important pieces to come back.”
