New York Yankees Trade Deadline Moves Looking Worse and Worse

The New York Yankees beat their crosstown rival New York Mets last night by the score of 4-2, which is the best thing to happen in a while for the pinstripes by a large measure. The Yankees tore through their schedule in the first half but completely collapsed over the last month due to a combination of untimely, crucial injuries, natural regression, and a heaping of bad luck.

New York has gone 5-15 in the three weeks since the August 2 trade deadline. They've been bad since the All-Star break but for whatever reason the deadline marked the start of a dramatic slide. Yankees fans are very upset about this. And it's made all the worse by the fact that they jettisoned two players at said deadline who have been very useful for their new teams in ways the Yankees sure could use right about now.

The Yanks traded Jordan Montgomery to the St. Louis Cardinals on the day of the deadline, and their reasoning made sense-- he wasn't going to be part of the playoff rotation assuming good health, he doesn't project to be great out of the bullpen, and therefore they may as well get some assets out of him. It's worked out great for Montgomery and the Cardinals-- the lefty has been nothing less than stellar since he changed uniforms, giving up one earned run in four starts and most recently pitching a complete game shutout.

Then there is Joey Gallo. Oh, Joey Gallo. Even amidst a historic first half, no Yankee was hated more than Joey Gallo. The slugger spent months in perhaps the worst slump of his career, managing only 37 hits to match his 106 strikeouts in 82 games played. The Yankees basically gave him to the Los Angeles Dodgers for free, obviously hoping there would be addition by subtraction in exchanging Gallo's at-bats for anybody else. As you could probably have guessed by the direction this article is going, Gallo magically found his bat in L.A. and has so far hit three home runs in 12 games for the Dodgers.

As previously stated, the Yankees moved these guys at the deadline because it made sense. This isn't a "gotcha" article about how New York egregiously misjudged their roster and made the two worst moves possible. It's more indicative of how every single little thing has gone wrong for the Yankees in a very short amount of time. Their two biggest problems since the deadline have been run production and pitching, so of course the two guys they traded at the deadline would have been very helpful in masking those problems while the train got back on the tracks.

That's baseball for you, though.