Yankees nearing AL East title, playing best ball at right time

Maybe this is a season when the Yankees have once again saved their best ball until the end — the way they used to — and are finally ready to make it back to the World Series, and maybe even win one. It would mean that the third and final act of their season really does turn out to be their best.

Two years ago, the Yankees were 64-28, became a .500 team the rest of the way and got swept by the Astros — they’re 0-4 against the Astros in the postseason over the past decade — in the ALCS. A year ago, Aaron Judge ran into an outfield door at Dodger Stadium when it looked as if the Yankees were getting ready to roll into June, and the Yanks didn’t even make it into the postseason.

This year? The Yankees were 50-22 in the middle of June and looked to be the best team in baseball at that point, but they proceeded to turn around and play a stretch that saw them go 10-23; they looked even worse than the team that finished out of the money a year ago.

But maybe things will be different this time in September and October. The Yankees have turned things around as they turn for home, and now come home after a 5-1 road trip against the Mariners and A’s, with a chance to lock down the AL East during their upcoming three-game series against the Orioles at Yankee Stadium. At the same time, they can lock up the best record in the AL and continue a September that has seen them go 13-7 so far and get themselves the biggest lead over the Orioles in the East that they’ve had all year.

“A lot things have come together,” manager Aaron Boone said in Seattle last week when the Yankees celebrated punching their ticket to the postseason.

This week, they get the chance to celebrate an East title at home. They had played their best, nearly to the official halfway point of the season. Then they played as badly as they possible could across that 10-23 stretch, when just about everything that could go wrong seemed to. And the fact is, they are still just a .500 team exactly from the time they were 50-22, winning 42 and losing 42.

Still, at the best and most important time of their season, with the stakes as high as they could be for the simple reason that they could lose Juan Soto to free agency when the season is over, the Yankees have once again started to look like who and what they were into the middle of June before the wheels came off.

Judge, after a brief home run slump, hit a couple this past weekend in Oakland, getting to 55. Soto has reached 40, meaning that he and Judge have joined Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and then Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle as the only Yankees to both hit 40 or more homers in the same year. Gerrit Cole, who started the season on the injured list, has once again started to look like the guy who won the Cy Young in 2022 — at least around that weird game against the Red Sox when he intentionally walked Rafael Devers with nobody on in the second inning and blew up his own start.

Carlos Rodón, who was hired to be Cole’s wing man, has quietly gotten to 16-9. With all of Clay Holmes’ blown saves, Luke Weaver has closed some games for Boone recently, four of them in five chances. The Yankees’ bullpen, which has occasionally required name tags across the long season, seems to make sense again. And the team is as healthy as it has been in a while. Anthony Rizzo is back, Jasson Domínguez is back. They have gotten back Jon Berti, a valuable and versatile infielder who missed so much of the season with a left calf injury.

Boone talked about “better health overall” on the night when the Yankees did clinch a playoff spot, before adding this:

“We weren’t a great team last year, and this team has a chance to do something special.”

His team was 82-80 last year, and it was playing out the string by the time it reached this point in September. But this Yankees team didn’t stay down after getting knocked down. Despite the way they looked in the second half of June and all the way through July, they finally began to gather themselves in August.

They again have Cole as their ace, Rodón behind him and Luis Gil, healthy again himself and showing the All-Star form he showed across the first half. Judge and Soto have merely combined for 95 home runs and 242 RBIs. Gleyber Torres, in a walk year of his own, has settled into the leadoff role ahead of Soto.

Yankees fans aren’t planning a trip to the Canyon of Heroes. They have seen the Yankees fall short of the World Series again and again since 2009. For now, though, the Yankees are back on top of their division and their league. We’re about to find out over the next month if they are all the way back, at long last. The magic number in the East is one. But that’s not the number for Yankees fans. They want one more World Series.