Cashman on Yanks Recent Struggles

From Chad Jennings:

Before last night’s win put the Yankees back into sole possession of first place in the American League East, general manager Brian Cashman provided a pretty blunt assessment of what the Yankees had been doing for the past seven weeks and what they planned on doing for the next month.

“We’re just not playing up to the best of our abilities, that’s all,” he said. “It’s a collection of stuff like that. You can talk about it all you want, but it’s not about where we were, it’s where we’re going to be. We intend to win the American League East.”

...

“This stuff happens,” Cashman said. “It’s not easy when you’re going through it, but we’re better than the way we’re playing recently. We look forward to proving that out. I’m not embarrassed that we’re in a pennant race because there’s a lot of good teams here. We expected to be in one all year. I’m a little more surprised, to be honest, that we pulled 10 games up for a period of time.”

...

“When you’re talking about age, age implies veterans,” Cashman said. “We’ve got a lot of veteran leadership here. These guys have been through a lot over the course of their careers. A lot of them have tasted a lot of success, and certainly at times, they’ve had to deal with failure. All that stuff will serve you well when you’re running into struggles.”

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“The security blanket is over,” Cashman said. “The only way to do anything about that is to try to separate yourself from the pack again. We’ve done it once. Why can’t we do it again?”

Cashman calling it like it is, which is nice. The win yesterday was even nicer. Maybe it can be a start of a good stretch that can propel them back into form as the season comes to its close.