Juan Soto and run prevention have been the constants in this Yankee season, and there they were again Sunday.
Nestor Cortes was familiarly brilliant at Yankee Stadium. Soto was once more indomitable in the clutch. And on a brutal day for baseball, the Yankees defeated the Tigers, 5-2, in a game finally halted after eight innings due to inclement conditions that had existed from the first pitch.
The victory moved the Yankees 10 games above .500 for the first time this season. They are there because Cortes and the rest of the staff have helped hold the opposition to three or fewer runs a MLB-high 23 times. And because Soto can spend most of a rainy, chilly afternoon frustratingly disputing balls and strikes with home-plate ump Edwin Jimenez, then in his final at-bat lock in to rip a tiebreaking, three-run double in a left-on-left, seventh-inning showdown against Andrew Chafin.
Soto has come up with runners in scoring position against a lefty 10 times this year. He is 5-for-7 with two walks, no strikeouts, a sacrifice fly and 10 RBIs.
“[I want him up] in any situation. He is as good as it gets, but I think there’s no question he loves being in that moment,” manager Aaron Boone said.
Soto’s offensive heroics and the run prevention help explain why the Yankees are tied for the most wins in the AL with the Orioles despite not having a pitch thrown this year by Gerrit Cole or much production from Aaron Judge. But if you were looking for reasons that the Yankees can do far better than 10 games over .500 this year and why they might be able to outdo the Orioles and why they can dream big, the silver linings this weekend came from Cole and Judge.
Cole threw off the mound for the first time since being shut down in spring training with nerve irritation in his valuable right elbow. He is still at baby steps with his arm, but a mid-June return is within reach. And, in the last week, Judge has looked like Judge.
“I think we are playing together as a group well,” Cole said. “There’s no denying we have been playing some good baseball.”
That begins at the start. Think about if Cole had a 2.99 ERA. We would consider that an excellent season from the ace. The entire Yankees staff, through 36 games, has a 2.99 ERA without the 2023 AL Cy Young award winner.
And the group has done another valuable thing — it has not blown up. Not once. Only the Yankees and Orioles have had every start this year last at least four innings. It has enabled the Yankees to keep their bullpen from getting overexposed despite playing a ton of close games.
Cortes was terrific on Sunday, no surprise because he was in The Bronx. In four Yankee Stadium starts, Cortes has 1.59 ERA, a .162 batting average against and one walk against 28 strikeouts in 28 ¹/₃ innings. And that walk came in the fourth inning against Riley Greene, when Cortes was near halfway back to the dugout thinking he had struck out Greene two pitches earlier.
Cortes needed to be brilliant because Tarik Skubal lived up to Boone’s pregame tout: “He’s about as good as it gets right now in baseball.” The lefty entered with a 1.72 ERA and struck out a career-high 12.
But Judge got to him in the first with a two-out homer. Before the day was done, Judge would add a double against Skubal and also walk against Chafin. The batting average is still just .220. But in the last nine games, Judge is 11-for-31 (.355) with three homers (and his first career ejection).
The idea with this Yankee offense was that Soto would be paired with Judge to form as fierce a left-right combination as there is in the game. But only in the last week has that become more evident. With Cole still needing to throw several more bullpen sessions before even graduating to live hitters plus some regression to the mean probably coming for the rotation, the Yankees need the offense to be more consistently threatening and that revolves around Soto and Judge being a 1-2 force at 2-3 in the lineup so the Yankees can open up some games.
For a MLB-high 27th time in 36 games, the Yankees had a game decided by three or fewer runs. Ian Hamilton allowed two runners put on by Cortes in the seventh to score and tie the game. That just set up Soto for the bottom-of-the-inning theatrics. And after the Tigers batted in the eighth and with the field a swamp, the game was halted then stopped.
The Yankees had won for familiar reasons — run prevention and Soto. That has helped the club survive without the best of Judge or anything from Cole. It has allowed the Yanks to dream about what can be if they get the best ultimately from the two stars.