Without Giancarlo Stanton, Yankees' lineup doesn't match up with AL East-leading Orioles

While coaching at Notre Dame a generation ago, Lou Holtz uttered a line that has been passed down through the years in sports beyond college football: “You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”

The Yankees can relate.

On the receiving end of unrelenting and deserved plaudits as they ran roughshod over the competition to start the season — 50-22 as recently as June 14 after beating the Red Sox, which put them 3 1⁄2 games ahead of the second-place Orioles in the AL East — the Yankees have heard it 180 degrees the other way for the better part of the last month.

They have dropped 15 of their last 20 games and stand at 55-37, three games behind the Orioles in the division. The Yankees, who will start a three-game series against the Rays at Tropicana Field on Tuesday night before heading to Baltimore for three games, have not won a series in their last seven attempts.

“It feels terrible,’’ Aaron Boone said after the Yankees’ 3-0 loss to Boston on Sunday night. “You have to be a little sick to be in this game and you’ve got to be able to weather it. You’d like your stretch where it’s a bump in the road to not be this kind of stretch. You’d like to weather it a little bit better, which we need to do, obviously. But it’s all right there in front of us.”

That has been a go-to phrase of Boone’s over the years in trying times, the implication that there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

In the immediate future — based on the Yankees’ all-encompassing ragged play that has featured the unholy baseball trinity of an inconsistent offense to go along with volatility in both the rotation and bullpen — there could simply be more tunnel.

Though the Rays have been mediocre this season, series wins at Tropicana Field rarely come easy for the Yankees.

As for the Orioles, they entered 2024 as the prohibitive favorite to repeat as division winners and have shown no indications of being unworthy of that status. They may not have the one-two combination the Yankees do with Juan Soto and Aaron Judge, but Brandon Hyde’s young and athletic club features an overall deeper lineup.

“One to nine, it’s not really close right now,” an AL bench coach said. “Especially without Stanton.”

Indeed, multiple coaches and scouts have mentioned the impact of Stanton’s injury (left hamstring), which sidelined him on June 22, as a key reason for the Yankees’ skid. At that point, he had a 10-game hitting streak in which he was 14-for-37 for a .378/.439/.649 slash line with three homers and nine RBIs. He was having a bounce-back season with 18 homers, still the third-most on the club, and a .795 OPS, but still is expected to be out another two weeks at minimum.

“You’re still dealing with Soto and Judge, and obviously that’s the best one-two punch [in the game],” one NL evaluator said. “But Stanton, streaky as he is, you’ve got to account for him. Even if he’s in an 0-for-30, as a pitcher you know one mistake can go 500 feet. He scares you, especially hitting behind the other two. No one else in that lineup really scares you.”

As the trade deadline looms at month’s end, the Yankees have discussed adding at least one bat, and those conversations were occurring before the slumping Anthony Rizzo was lost mid-June for at least two months with an arm fracture. Early returns on Ben Rice are encouraging, but 18 games aren’t enough of a sample size for grand conclusions, positive or negative.

It is no secret that the Yankees want to add at least one lockdown bullpen arm, and bolstering their starting pitching depth can’t be ruled out.

The Yankees have the system and the resources to add, but the Orioles, finally out from under the dysfunctional ownership of Peter Angelos, have the same advantages.

“It’s never fun this way, but we all know about baseball,” Soto said. “It’s part of the game. It all depends on how you get out of it.”

The next week isn’t make-or-break; short stretches in July of the 162-game season generally aren’t. But the week ahead at the very least will show if the Yankees still maintain some of the muscle memory from the first two-plus months of the season when they looked as good as anyone.

Or the opportunity for things to go from bad to worse.