CHICAGO — For five straight games, the Yankees have gotten close to the best version of their starting pitching. Zeros piled up. Strikeouts came in bunches. Opposing lineups went quiet. On paper, it read like a team pulling away in a pennant race.
The standings tell a different story. The Yankees arrived at Wrigley Field on Saturday night sitting second in the AL East, chasing Tampa Bay, with a lineup that has looked broken for weeks. The pitching kept doing its job. The bats kept refusing to help.
That collision of excellence and futility has defined the Yankees’ summer. A 21 mph wind blew straight in from center on Saturday, knocking down fly balls all night. In a tight game, one misplay could decide it. One eventually did, and it came in a spot the Yankees could least afford.
Max Fried gave his team exactly what it needed on Saturday. Through the middle innings, the left-hander looked like the ace the Yankees signed him to be. He handed the game to the bullpen with a lead intact. What happened next has become a familiar and painful script for this club over the past several weeks.
A rotation stretch with almost nothing to show for it
The Yankees lost to the Cubs 5-2 on Saturday, and the result carried weight beyond the scoreboard. Over their previous five games, New York’s starters had allowed just two earned runs across 31 1/3 innings. They scattered 15 hits and seven walks while striking out 33. The Yankees went 2-3 in those games.
Gerrit Cole opened the run with six scoreless innings. Cam Schlittler followed with 6 1/3 innings of one-run ball. Ryan Weathers fired seven scoreless. Will Warren then authored the longest scoreless outing of his career on Friday. Fried added the fifth gem Saturday. Almost none of it translated into wins.
The waste has reached historic territory. According to research from Katie Sharp, this marked the first time in franchise history the Yankees had a four-game span in which their starting pitchers allowed two or fewer runs and the team won just once. For a club built to contend, that is a damning line.
The offense has been the anchor. Since June 26, the Yankees have averaged just 3.5 runs per game while batting .201 as a team. They have scored two runs or fewer 13 times over that 31-game stretch. They entered Saturday with the worst average in the majors with runners in scoring position since June 8. The pattern held again in Chicago.
How the seventh inning unraveled
Fried set the tone after a shaky start. Pete Crow-Armstrong scored the game’s first run in the bottom of the first without a hit, walking and coming home on a pair of Fried wild pitches. From there, the left-hander locked in. He retired 16 of the final 18 hitters he faced.
The Yankees tied it in the fifth. Spencer Jones reached on a two-out error by Cubs first baseman Michael Busch, Ali Sanchez singled, and Jose Caballero delivered a run-scoring single to right. Caballero, a spark all night, added two stolen bases.
Jones then gave New York its first lead in the seventh. The rookie lined a solo homer off Cubs lefty David Peterson, a 106 mph drive that barely cleared the left-field wall against the wind. It was his fifth home run and his second in as many days off a left-handed starter. Jones went 2-for-4 and scored both Yankees runs.
The lead did not survive the bottom half. Fernando Cruz served up a game-tying homer to Nico Hoerner to lead off the seventh. Cruz recorded two outs, then walked pinch-hitter Pedro Ramirez. Aaron Boone went to lefty Brent Headrick. Crow-Armstrong ripped a line drive into the right-field corner that caromed off the wall and past Jasson Dominguez, scoring Ramirez from first for a go-ahead triple. Seiya Suzuki followed with an RBI single to make it 4-2.
Michael Busch tacked on an insurance run in the eighth with an RBI single off Yovanny Cruz. Fernando Cruz took the loss, his fourth blown save of the year. Trent Thornton earned the win, and Caleb Thielbar closed the ninth for his third save.
Boone and Domínguez own the decisive play
The go-ahead triple hinged on a ball that hit Wrigley’s angled right-field wall and kicked away from Dominguez. Boone did not hide from how thin the margin has become for a team scraping for runs.
“We don’t have a lot of margin for error when you’re not putting a lot of points on the board,” Boone said.
Dominguez, who went 1-for-4 with a double, refused to lean on the ballpark as an excuse, even as he acknowledged the tricky angle in the corner.
“Tough play,” Dominguez said. “I was trying to get close to the wall to stop the ball, and it kicked the other way. Definitely a tough play for us and for the game.”
Fried, making just his third start since returning from a bone bruise in his left elbow, framed the larger frustration as part of the sport. His final line read 5 1/3 innings, two hits, one run, one walk and seven strikeouts, dropping his ERA to 3.12.
“It’s baseball,” Fried said. “There are going to be times where guys are throwing really well and maybe the bats aren’t putting up as many runs as we need. But there’s also times where we’re going to put up five, six, seven, eight, nine runs, and then we’re giving up some too.”
A deadline that suddenly feels urgent
The Yankees have received elite starting pitching for a week and have almost nothing to show for it. The offense has vanished at the worst possible time. The bullpen, the best in the majors by ERA for much of the season, picked Saturday to falter. Add a costly defensive miscue in the outfield, and the result was a night that captured everything wrong with the Yankees over the past month. Two days before the trade deadline, the pieces are not fitting together, and the pressure on the front office is mounting by the hour.
The loss dropped the Yankees to 62-49, leaving them 3 1/2 games behind the Rays in the AL East. It also evened their weekend series with the Cubs at a game apiece before Sunday’s finale. New York has now lost three of its last four, and the offense has produced just 13 runs over its last five games.
The timing sharpened the stakes. The trade deadline hits Monday at 6 p.m. ET, less than 48 hours after the final out. The Yankees have played the last two months without Aaron Judge, Cody Bellinger and Giancarlo Stanton, and the lineup has cratered in their absence. Earlier Saturday, the club shipped reliever Camilo Doval to Pittsburgh, but the needs for a bat, a catcher and a swing-and-miss reliever remained unfilled.
Boone pointed to the traffic his team put on the bases, roughly 10 baserunners, as a faint sign of life. The Yankees stranded seven and went just 1-for-4 with runners in scoring position. Signs are not runs, and this club is running short on time to find them.
Gerrit Cole takes the ball Sunday afternoon against Cubs right-hander Colin Rea as the Yankees try to end a 10-game road trip with a winning record. The rotation has given them chance after chance. Whether the offense, or the front office, finally answers is the question hanging over the Bronx with the clock running out.
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