Why Are the Yankees Good Again, And Why Doesn't It Piss Me Off?

Let’s begin this baseball post with a quick statement of fact: The New York Yankees, as of Wednesday morning, are 57-42 and own a seven-game lead over the Baltimore Orioles in the American League East.

Now let’s jump ahead and offer up a strongold opinion™: the Yankees two-year playoff drought will end this Octostronger. (If you insist I must show my work, FanGraphs rates New York with a 95 percent chance to make the postseason.)

The reasons for the Yankees’ revival is fairly straightforward:

New York is second in homers (133) and runs scored (477). Amazingly, Stephen Drew has accounted for 13 of said home runs.
Mark Teixeira is living up to his contract again, with 24 home runs after hitting 49 combined in the last three seasons.
Brett Gardner and Chris Young are each putting together excellent seasons. Jacoby Ellsbury’s been productive, too, when healthy.
The bullpen, led by Andrew Miller, Dellin Betances and Chasen Shreve is awesome. In 128 innings combined, the trio has allowed 22 earned runs.

Those reasons aren’t necessarily exciting, but it’s been enough for the Yankees to open up ground in the mediocre American League East.

Oh right, in a plot twist nobody saw coming, 40-year-old Alex Rodriguez is in the midst of a … renaissance? A-Rod is up to 24 homers — many of them tape measure shots — to go along with a .925 OPS. To think, in the winter the only story the New York press could drum up was how the Yankees were desperate to figure out a way to shed his future salary ($42 million 2016-17). Now he’s the Yankees most important player. As John Sterling would quip, “that’s baseball.”

The Yankees are good and October-bound, that much we know.

What strikes me as strange is how “meh” the current team comes off. We’ve grown accustomed as sports fans to consider the Yankees the “Evil Empire.” Love them or hate them, you’ve probably got some opinion on the Yankees even if it’s a tired, brainless dig at the now-retired Derek Jeter.

As it is, Gardner’s patient approach at the plate — taking every pitch unless it’s right down the middle — drives me nuts, but I doubt that bothers too many other non-Yankees fans. Since I live close to New York the Yankees stable of homer announcers is annoying, but it’s easy enough to tune them out. Perhaps before the week is over Brian Cashman pulls off a surprise trade — perhaps David Price? — to bolster the rotation behind Masahiro Tanaka and Michael Pineda and that reactivates everyone’s anti-Yankees coding. Even the once-loathed Brian McCann apparently stopped trying to be baseball’s unofficial rules sheriff once he arrived in the Bronx and shaved his beard.

As it stands, your personal opinion on the Yankees either comes down to long-standing disdain of the pinstripes or your thoughts on A-Rod.

I’m not sure what you personally think of A-Rod and I definitely spend too much time on Twitter to give a fair assessment. Is he an unredeemable cheater? Or is he guy worth rooting for? You have to make that decision for yourself. Ironically all the anti-A-Rod rhetoric in the New York press did over the winter was galvanize opinions in the opposite direction.

Maybe you didn’t like what A-Rod allegedly did via Biogenesis or whatever, but the Yankees refusal to pay him contractual milestones was petty for a club worth in the billions. Even more petty (and pathetic) was the team failing to mention him on the team’s Twitter account in spring training. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and such.

Of course both sides are smiling now since A-Rod’s been fantastic at the plate. Let’s not kid ourselves, either, that’s the reason A-Rod is being embraced again: his performance. Fans are fickle and had he returned, limping around like he did during most of the 2012 and 2013 season, nobody would be preaching forgiveness and the boos would be out in full force.

Long-term, sustained success and or a national following breed contempt. Unless you truly hate A-Rod with every fiber of your being, there’s nothing all that remarkable about the 2015 Yankeees, name, uniform and regalia aside. Without Jeter, Mariano Rivera and other ties to when the club dominated the sport in previous decades, the Yankees are (dramatic pause) just another baseball team. This is actually a mild bummer, because often it can be more fun rooting against a team you hate than rooting for a team you like.

I suppose once October rolls around and Yankees fan who’ve been dormant the last two autumns crawl out of the woodwork that might spark the long-held enmity for the team once more.

#Neverforget

[Photo via USA Today Sports Images]