Between the injuries and the replacements, the Yankees have found an amazing new way to score runs: Singles

A sad but standard move for following the 2019 Yankees: 

When you hear we've scored, you pull up the box score to learn who hit the home run. 

During the horrible first weeks of April, that's all this team seemed to do: Swing away, directly into the teeth of defensive over-shifts, and try to swat the ball not just out of the park, but out of the city.

Lately - in what historians may label "the Brett Gardner Batting Third Era" - things have changed. Last week, we beat the Angels by scoring six runs - and not one homer. Imagine that. Six runs... not one homer. Yesterday, we swatted two, but in the previous pair of victories against lowly SF, we hit only one HR in each game. It's as if these no-name replacement players are content to score the old fashioned way, moving from base to base. Wow! You can actually score without home runs! Who knew?

Last year, the Yankees set an all-time HR record. That got us the Wild Card. Today, we sit 5th in MLB behind Seattle, Milwaukee, Minnesota and the Dodgers. (Fourth in runs scored and 8th in batting average, at .262.) Of course, this will change. It's happened without last year's top HR threat (Giancarlo Stanton, 38) and the four team runner-ups (Didi Gregorius, Miguel Andujar, Aaron Hicks and Aaron Judge... all with 27.) 

By this time next month, Stanton and Hicks should have returned. Judge and Gregorius should be in rehab. (Andujar? Who knows? He needs to play a few games.) And it's fair to wonder if, when the big hitters return, the team will abandon the ways that it just won five of six on the West Coast.

(By the way, one of the beauties of this last week is the compelling difference between us and the Redsocks, who suffered their early indignities on a West Coast swing. If we feared our own disaster on the road, that's now gone.) 

Aaron Boone was hired, at least in part, because of the easy going way he handles star players. To some extent - and I don't mean to diminish this, because some managers never learn it - Boone is paid to simply get the fuck out of the way. 

If the sluggers slug, the Yankees - at least on paper - should win enough games to make the playoffs. From there, it's a crap-shoot. But the other night, the Yankees won a game because replacement nobody Tyler Wade stole second base, and then scored on a single. In game after game, this team of forgettable names has strung together two-out singles and even sacrifice flies to score key runs. It's become fun to ditch the box score and actually see how the Yankees managed to score, rather than learn who clubbed the ball out of the park.

I wonder if Boone can, as Ken Singleton would say, "keep the merry-go-round moving," when the stars return. If so, this could be a great Yankee season. If not, and we revert to winning the team HR crown - well, we'll probably another Wild Card and a crap-shoot. But we all know what happens when home run hitters face playoff aces: They get shut down. The path to the World Series runs base to base. Will we remember the heroes of late April, back in the days when Brett Gardner batted third?