Worst Yankees 90-Win Team Ever?

I was going to ask if this was the Yankees' worst ever 100-win season, but Mike Francesca beat me to the punch with his rhetorical question about whether this was the Yanks' worst-ever 90-win team.

And, let's face it, this Yankees squad is never going to be able to put together the 9-5 stretch that reaching 100 wins would entail.  Not unless the Boston Red Sox team plane crashes, and not even I would be crazy enough to wish for that to happen.  (Flight crew, potential ground victims.)

So...IS this the worst ever Yankees 90-win team?

Today's loss alone would almost be enough on its own to prove that it is.  The first three innings were a perfect reflection of just how bankrupt this organization's entire approach to the game is.

A 5-0 deficit behind an overaged pitcher, 7 strikeouts, 5 guys left on base, including a 2018 Yankees favorite:  bases loaded, nobody out.  No runs.

These stats hardly tell the whole story, though.  It was more the nature of the strikeouts, which tended to resemble the reactions of blindfolded, mentally challenged children in wheelchairs swinging at a piñata that is being cruelly held just outside their reach.

Swings at balls out of the strike zone.  Taking pitches right down the middle.  Swinging at balls right down the middle and not coming close to catching up to them.

If Toronto's rookie pitcher—a kid with 1 win and a 6.86 ERA who the Yanks had already faced and bashed this year—had not had to throw so many pitches, I think he might have had a real shot at breaking the major-league strikeout record.  Instead, all he wound up with was five, two-hit, shutout innings.

So...

Well, it's hard to say.

For as much as the Yankees have contended over the years, they have very rarely choked. Most of their 90-win teams that fell short of taking it all were simply too battered to win at the end, or beaten by teams that were just better.

Even the biggest choke job in franchise history, a certain 2004 ALCS against you-know-who, was mostly the fault of a GM who let the pitching staff crumble all season, and Joe Torre, bless his heart and honor his name, who did the very worst job of managing a short series that I have ever seen.

That 2004 team, whatever its faults, won no fewer than 61 come-from-behind victories during the season, something that was described at the time as a franchise and maybe an MLB record.  It had heart, and plenty of it—just no relief pitchers with a live arm remaining by the end of the season.

Not so much with this team, which stopped paying attention some time ago, and started mailing in the day's results from assorted beach vacation spots, golf courses, and Viking river cruises.

I suppose one could make a case that the 1983 or 1986 Yankees were worse 90-win teams.  But those were the days of the Mad King, when everybody was caught up in the Old George vortex, with Billy Martin either managing or hovering somewhere in a helicopter above the Stadium, ready to parachute in.

The 1983 Yanks faded in the stretch and came in 3rd, seven games behind a very good Orioles team that won it all that year.  It featured the likes of Willie Randolph, Graig Nettles, Dave Winfield, Don Baylor, Ken Griffey, Sr., and a rookie Don Mattingly,  and a staff that included Ron Guidry, Dave Righetti, and Goose Gossage.

It also, to be sure, had such 2018-style head jobs as Steve Kemp, Roy Smalley, and Shane Rawley.  But I think it would have outlasted this bunch, and just on the basis of those three pitchers alone, beat it in a short series.

The 1986 team finished 2nd, just 5 1/2 games behind that Sox team that had such a sad end in the World Series.

It featured much the same cast, only a Mattingly who was at his peak, Mike Easler swapped for Baylor, Pagliarulo instead of Nettles (a definite downgrade), and, oh yeah, a certain Rickey Henderson in centerfield.  

But...

Its pitching just couldn't hold up, with Guidry and Phil Niekro in final decline, and the best starter Dennis Rasmussen, with an 18-6 record.  Righetti did set what was then a major-league record with 46 saves...but there was little enough behind him.

So...I have to admit it.  Chances are, this is only the SECOND WORST, 90-win Yankees team in history,  probably able to just beat out the 1986 version, thanks to the pitching.

So there.