With the 2023 baseball season just around the corner, there’s lots of chatter about what kind of season the New York Yankees will have. It’s fair to say that they’re a great team with a good deal of decent players but recent troubling reports of the shoulder surgery that Frankie Montas needs, plus a bit of an underwhelming back lineup means that forging ahead things don’t look particularly safe.
What will it take for the New York Yankees to see a strong 2023 season?
A 2022 season of two halves…
It really was a year of two distinct halves for the team. During the first half of the season, the Yankees without a shadow of a doubt had the best offense in the game. Unfortunately, as the second half of the season progressed, things started to go downhill.
They had a team wRC+ of 122 to start, but from July to the very end of the season, their wRC+ dropped to 106. The problems seemed to really consolidate when Aaron Judge wasn’t at the helm – it was around this time that the team had trouble getting anything much going at all.
Judge had just been retained on a 9-year $360 million contract and so had a lot to prove – in total, he hit 62 homers and drove in 131 runs during the season. This year, will he be able to do it again? Some think he’ll have a tough time of it.
Are there flaws in the team lineup?
Many feel that the current lineup is lacking ‘something’ to make it shine. The pundits at NY sports betting reckon that the signing of San Francisco pitcher Carlos Rodon will help, but they’re also banking on Giancarlo Stanton being able to get back to his best after his poor showing last season.
Gleyber Torres is a great team player and a player worthy of any decent lineup but not someone who could be relied on for batting cleanup.
With the current team in place including Harrison Bader, Oswaldo Cabrera, Josh Donaldson, Aaron Hicks, Oswald Peraza, and Jose Trevino, it’s clear that there is definitely a lot of potential. However, some of these players are likely to only be batting fifth or even sixth, which will further highlight weaknesses in the team.
Have the Yankees done enough during 2022?
A lot of experts feel like there just hasn’t been enough improvement during the 2022 seasons to give the 2023 season the impetus it needs to get going and keep flying.
The lineup has weak spots and the offense has been sluggish at times. Basically, what we’re seeing here is a relatively unchanged team trying to stay ahead and struggling.
Given all this, the best-case scenario that can be hoped for is that it’s a steady season, perhaps with some more of the occasional rough stretches that happened during 2022. It’ll be interesting to see what happens as the season gets into full swing.
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