This evening, the White Sox are in the Bronx to kick off a three-game series. It’s not a weekend most fans have circled on their calendars; despite winning six of their last eight, the White Sox have the worst record in the American League and have shown every indication of staying in the AL Central’s cellar for the long haul.
Coming off a stretch where the Yankees matched up against playoff contenders, divisional opponents, and longtime rivals, it would be easy to gloss over this three-game set as a soft spot on the schedule.
But, in many ways, this series serves as a critically important bellwether for the season to come. While marquee matchups get more attention, a team’s ability to stack wins against minimally competitive squads may tell us at least as much about their chances to contend.
Last season, the Yankees had a losing record against last-place teams, going 16-18. The year prior, they managed a 21-10 record — good for a .667 winning percentage — despite missing the opportunity to face the 107-loss Nationals and 94-loss Rockies in the pre-balanced schedule era. If the Yankees had maintained that winning percentage against last-place teams in 2023, they would have won seven more games and finished with an 89-73 record. That happens to be the same record as the Blue Jays, who made the postseason via the AL’s third wild-card spot
For their part, the ‘23 Blue Jays managed a 21-14 record against last-place teams. But that pales in comparison to the patron saints of kicking teams while they’re down: the Tampa Bay Rays. The 2023 AL East champions coasted to that berth on the strength of a 27-9 record against cellar-dwellers. The disparity in their records against last-place teams accounts for more than half of the difference between the 99-win Rays and 82-win Yankees.
Of course, it’s important to be able to win against good teams as well. A frequent criticism of the Rays’ recent run of success is that, while their fundamentally sound brand of baseball allowed them to beat up on weak teams, they lacked the high-end talent to compete seriously in October. Whether or not that’s true, the first step is making the postseason, preferably with a division title and potential Wild Card round bye in tow. And it’s difficult to do that if you can’t make the layups.
When it comes to the connection between performance against poor teams and overall success, examples from recent Yankee history abound. How about the 2019 squad, who went 17-2 against the hapless, 108-loss Orioles, including a 16-win streak during the season? Circ*mstances got dire enough for the Orioles that Paul O’Neill was compelled to leave the Yankees’ booth to conduct a wellness check on O’s announcer Gary Thorne following Gleyber Torres’s 13th dinger against Baltimore that season.
That historic bludgeoning was the motor behind a 28-7 mark against last-place teams and a 103-win season that year for the Yankees, still their best record since the championship 2009 campaign.
Which brings us back to this season, and this weekend’s series at home against the White Sox. It’s difficult to gauge how well the Yankees are doing against the league’s worst teams, since we don’t yet know who those teams are definitively this early in the season. They went 6-1 against the Astros, but the Astros are hanging around the bottom of the AL West in part because the Yankees ran roughshod over them, and they could still certainly turn it around.
But we know these White Sox are bad. The South Siders’ manager, Pedro Grifol, has said their brutal start to the season is, “probably the hardest time I’ve ever had in the game.” After trading away Dylan Cease before the season, their only viable All-Star-caliber player is Luis Robert Jr., who’s been limited to seven games by injury.
Facing a team that vulnerable, at home no less, is a valuable opportunity. It’s only three games in May, and every team stumbles at times during a 162-game season, even against weak opponents. Still, if the Yankees end up in the heat of a division race at the end of the year, as seems at least plausible if not likely, they could look back on this gift of a series in May as a springboard to an AL East title, or as a winnable series that got away.
