Why it will get worse

As many have pointed out here, it would be difficult for the Yankees to hit or field worse than they have so far, and the team has already taken an inordinate number of serious injuries to day-to-day players, including young and usually healthy ones.

This should all point toward a general improvement in the season as it goes forward, right?

Wrong.

I, too, expect the Yanks to hit and field better, and if they get at least some of their fabulous invalids back, they should look better.

But if anything, the first tenth of the season shows them headed toward a total breakdown of the most vital element of the game, which is pitching.

This team cannot win if it's starters to continue to pitch so little, so badly. It's that simple. Yes, the bullpen has been bad so far, too—but it will only get worse if the starting staff does not pick it up.

Let's take a look at a little history, namely the best years of the last Yankees dynasty. The 1998 team's top five starters—Pettitte, Cone, Wells, Irabu, and El Duque/Mendoza—threw a total of 1,036 innings.

This really empowered the team's Big Five bullpen—The Great One, The Other Mike Stanton, Nelson, Moonlighting Mendoza, and Graeme "The Fighting Kangaroo" Lloyd—which needed to throw only 260.1 innings. Throw in the sixth reliever, the little-used Darren Holmes, and you were still up to only 311.2 innings.

No surprise, the team led the AL in complete games with 22, and was second in saves, with 48. The two stats ARE related.

All right, I know, I know:  the fabled 1998 team was pretty special in all ways. But even in 1999 and 2000, after Lloyd and Wells left for Clemens, the top five starters stayed pretty strong:

1999: 984.2 top five slot starter innings, 316.2 top five reliever innings (366 top six), 50 saves (1st in AL), 6 CG (6th in AL)

2000: 946.2 top five slot starter innings, 329.2 top five reliever innings (354.2 top six), 40 saves (7th in AL), 9 CG (5th in AL).

So based on the first tenth of this season, how are we looking? Well, it projects to:

2018: 833 top five slot starter innings, 383 top five reliever innings (456 top six), 20 saves, 0 CG.

Scary, no? Especially those 456 innings for the top six relievers. Obviously, the team will run up more than 20 saves in the end (right?)—but as is, those 20 would make the lowest total for the Yankees, a team that has traditionally thrived on good relief pitching, since 1946.

But of course, I hear you say, the game has changed a great deal, even since 2000.

Well, let's take a look at the Yanks' last championship team, then, in 2009. Even with a makeshift starting staff of CC, Pettitte, Burnett, Joba, and a No. 5 made up of Gaudin/Hughes/Wang/Sergio Mitre, it looked like this:

2009: 937 top five slot starter innings, 301.2 top five reliever innings (340.2 top six), 51 saves (1st in AL), 3 CG (11th in AL).

That's right: even a team that didn't really have a fifth starter managed to get over 100 more innings out of its top five than this team is projected to get now.

My friends, at its current rate, this Yankees' squad is headed for a complete pitching breakdown—and thus far, we have only had CC on the DL, in which time he did not even miss a start. Undoubtedly, he and Tanaka will miss more time—maybe go down altogether.

Who will pick up the slack?