Nobody Runs Hot and Cold like the Yankees

Over the past few seasons — including 2024 — the Bronx Bombers have been all over the place.

Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees reacts after striking out during the seventh inning against the Boston Red Sox at Yankee Stadium on July 7, 2024. (Adam Hunger/Getty Images)

The New York Yankees started the season off hot. They were looking like the best team in baseball. At one point, they were even on pace to challenge the 1998 version’s franchise record for the most wins in a season. Then they fell off.

Wait, did you think I was talking about this year? I was actually referring to the 2022 Yankees, who inexplicably slipped from an all-time team to a .500 one at midseason. But here we are again: The 2024 Yankees are 5-15 since June 15, losing as many times in the past 20 games as they did in the previous 51.

Why do the Bronx Bombers keep doing this? If we add in last year’s team — which started 34-24 through May, went a combined 31-45 in June, July and August, then finished 17-11 in September and October — the current Yankees are constructing a Monument Park-level tribute to streakiness and inconsistency.

Here’s a look at the team’s games above or below .500 during each month since the beginning of that 2022 campaign, which started with the highest of highs and dipped to the lowest of (relative) lows:

To a certain extent, every team goes through its ebbs and flows during the long MLB season. (This is part of why rating systems like my beloved Elo ratings have an oscillating quality to them even in the absence of true changes in underlying talent.) The Yankees also have specific reasons for some of their ups and downs, such as injury troubles and/or the seemingly outsized importance of a star like Aaron Judge in the middle of their lineup.

But still, New York has the most schizophrenic team in baseball these past few seasons. We can see this if we take the standard deviation of each team’s month-to-month winning percentage since the beginning of 2022, capturing the teams with the widest variation in how they might be playing at any given moment in time:

Though the Yankees have a good average winning percentage overall — seventh-best among all teams — you never really know what you’re going to get from them. They have by far the highest monthly standard deviation in winning percentage over the past two and a half seasons.

Perhaps that’s why this year’s swoon shouldn’t even necessarily be all that surprising. I had thought the Yankees would be better suited to avoid their troubles in 2024 with added factors such as the extra star power of Juan Soto, the breakout of young SS Anthony Volpe, improved depth, a healthy Judge and Gerrit Cole returning from injury. But it turns out that you can’t take the chaos out of the Bronx, no matter how hard you try.

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Filed under: Baseball