Remember all those homers the Yankees lost? Well, they’ve been found.
The names have changed, but not the game. Like Saturday Night Live, the cast is constantly turned over, not the structure of the show. The Yankees have remained the Bronx Bombers against logic, common sense and what seemed the basic laws of baseball math.
Subtract roughly 200 homers from your active roster. Add only complementary pieces as replacements. Yet stay essentially equal to the pace of the greatest long-ball season in history.
“It’s amazing,” hitting coach Kevin Long said. “It’s really a good feeling for everybody. What is happening is guys are getting in good hitting counts and swinging at good pitches, and if you do that, you will hit some home runs.”
Some? The Yankees had 35 going into last night — the most in the AL, one fewer than major league-leading Atlanta. But, again, what makes it such a surprising total is the degree of difficulty.
The Yankees had 10 players reach double digits in homers last year and just one, Robinson Cano, has taken even a single swing for them in 2013. The missing nine totaled 194 homers for the Yanks last season. We could expect the Yanks to compensate for some of that total with a Travis Hafner here, a Vernon Wells there.
But not all of them. Yet, the Yankees are petty darn close. Through 24 games in 2012, the Yanks had 38 homers en route to the MLB-record 245. This year they were on pace for 236.
“I am somewhat surprised at the number of home runs,” Long admitted. “Did anyone expect us to hit this many? No.”
There was, instead, an anticipation that the Yankees would be forced to manufacture more runs, especially by incorporating the stolen base at a greater frequency. But nearly a month into the season, the Yankees’ nine thefts were tied for sixth fewest in the majors. That particularly reflects how little the speedy Eduardo Nunez and Ichiro Suzuki have reached base.
Meanwhile, the Yankees had remained addicted to the long ball. The 2012 Yanks were routinely criticized for being too homer or nothing. They derived 48.4 percent of their runs via the homer, which led the majors. This year the percentage (46.4) was similar. In fact, they swept a four-game series from Toronto over the weekend in large part because of their might.
In the opener and finale, the Yanks scored all their runs by homers. Three-run blasts by Cano in the first game and Hafner in the third did the major work to make 3-0 deficits go away. The only Yankee homer of the third game, by Brett Gardner in the eighth, made a 5-4 lead 6-4, providing insurance for Mariano Rivera, who ended up loading the bases in the ninth.
Obviously, part of the power success remains that the Yanks lean heavily left-handed and play in a home that favors that. But the Yanks actually were averaging a homer every 25.6 at-bats on the road this year compared to 26.4 in The Bronx.
However, eight of those road homers came on two bashing days against the pitching-challenged Indians. And another 12 homers have come in seven games against the reeling Blue Jays. That is 20 of the 35 right there. Opposition matters. They hit just one homer in three games in Tampa by comparison.
In other words, we are still dealing with small sample sizes that could be impacted by two games in Cleveland.
Still, it appears the worst fears — a total collapse of the Yanks’ long-ball abilities — has been averted. The makeshift group that was assembled mainly to try to weather the storm of injuries has flexed muscle.
That has much to do with the physical/performance revivals of Hafner and Wells. That duo plus Cano helped make the Yanks one of just three teams (Toronto and Colorado were the other two) to have three players with six or more homers.
And did anyone foresee Francisco Cervelli and Brett Gardner delivering three homers on the whole season, much less in April? In fact, the Yanks have had eight different players hit at least two homers and 11 hit a homer – both were the second-highest total in the majors.
That has allowed them to disperse the responsibility and hold on while Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira and maybe even Alex Rodriguez recuperate from injuries.
The names have changed, but not the nickname — Bronx Bombers.
