Yankees return home to agitated fan base with season hanging in the balance

The beaten and battered Yankees will be back home on Friday, trying once again to resuscitate a season they still believe is salvageable. 

But the Yankee Stadium “faithful” may not be as generous. 

Since the Yankees last played in The Bronx, they have lost seven of nine games, falling further out of the playoff race and under .500 for the first time in more than two years.

An agitated fan base awaits, especially if the Yankees are not able to quickly turn things around this weekend against the Red Sox. 

“I think we’re excited to get back home,” Aaron Judge said Wednesday night after the Yankees were swept by the Braves and shut out for the second straight game. “Get past this road trip. It didn’t go the way we wanted it to, but we got work to do.

“Have an off day [Thursday], time to reset and get back to it. We’re just a couple streaks away from being right where we want to be.” 

The Yankees have shown little signs, though, to indicate even one of those streaks is coming.

They are 1-9-3 over their last 13 series, the lone series win coming in a three-game sweep of the lowly Royals last month.

That series was also the only time the Yankees have won three straight games since winning four straight from May 27-30. 

Instead, the only streaking they have done lately is of the losing variety, including carrying a season-high five-game losing streak into Friday. 

Manager Aaron Boone has continued to insist that the Yankees are still capable of turning things around — why would he suggest otherwise? — but started to sound slightly more resigned to reality toward the end of the disastrous road trip. 

“I’ve been in this game my whole life and it doesn’t always go the way you script it or hope,” Boone said. ”You gotta keep fighting and that’s what we’ll continue to do.” 

In recent weeks, Boone has referred to other teams who went on unlikely late-season runs to make the playoffs.

He did so again on Wednesday night, adding the 1995 Yankees — the last team in franchise history to be under .500 this late in a season — to the conversation before adding a caveat. 

“I get it looks bleak,” he said. “I don’t want to even suggest we’re in a position to even talk about that [playoff run]. We gotta fix our own house and get it going. But there’s a lot of season left too and we gotta look at it that way.” 

The Yankees’ issues have been in plain sight for some time — led by their lineup’s maddening inconsistency, along with a rotation that has taken its hits especially of late — but they were especially clear this week during the three-game series against the Braves at Truist Park. 

The owners of the best record in baseball played like it, with their pitching staff shutting down the Yankees and their relentless lineup making life difficult for Boone’s pitching staff. 

“Right now, it’s big,” Boone said when asked about the gap between the Yankees and Braves. “That’s a really rugged lineup over there that’s really clicking.

“A lot of their big-time players are in the primes of their careers and in the middle of some pretty special seasons. It’s a good peek at what you want it to look like and what you want it to be.” 

The Yankees have a long way to go to get there.

In the meantime, the team right in front of them in both the AL East and the wild-card race arrives in The Bronx on Friday. 

“We’ve seen spurts of it throughout the year where we kind of get on a hot streak,” Judge said. “But we’re still looking for that long hot streak that we haven’t really gotten all year. No better time than now.”