The New York Yankees had one of the worst starts to a playoff series. According to Katie Sharp on X, it’s the first time in their history that they have allowed more than ten runs in back-to-back postseason games. The organization, with 27 championships, has run out of positive history to create after all these years, and now it is cornering the market on disasters that are uniquely its own.

Despite such a bad weekend against the Toronto Blue Jays, manager Aaron Boone remains optimistic. He says that there’s still a shot that things can turn around.

“Baseball is a funny game,” Boone said, according to Gary Phillips of the Daily News. “I know we’ll show up and be ready to go, expecting to win Tuesday night. Obviously, it feels like the world’s caving in around you, you lose two games like that in their building where it doesn’t go right, but all of a sudden, you go out there and win a ballgame on Tuesday, the needle can change.

“There’s been a lot of weird things that have happened in baseball this year. This would not be the weirdest, us rallying. We’ll come ready to go Tuesday, expect to win, and then look to win again and push it back here.”

The Yankees have already faced two games on the brink of elimination against the Boston Red Sox in the Wild Card series. To even win this series, they will have to stave off elimination for three straight and not allow a single bullpen collapse. It’s not impossible, but it won’t be easy either. Not when Boone’s ace, Max Fried, can’t pitch into the sixth, and, at best, he’ll have to return to the place of his demise and hope to pitch again.

Making an American League Division Series comeback is something that the Yankees have done before. In 2001, the Yankees dropped the first two to the Oakland Athletics at home. Game three featured the famous Derek Jeter flip play, where Jorge Posada tagged Jeremy Giambi at the plate. They won that game 1-0. The Yankees blew out Oakland in Game 4 and went on to win at home in Game 5.

They did it again more recently in 2017. They dropped the first two to the Cleveland Indians. Just as they did in 2001, they won the third game 1-0, after a brilliant outing by Masahiro Tanaka. They won big in game three, with Luis Severino making up for his brutal Wild Card outing. Then, in game five, they won on the road in Cleveland.

The big difference between those Yankees and this one is that none of them had been blown out. All of those games were relatively close, and their worst loss was the one the 2017 Yankees suffered in game one, where they went down 4-0. Those series were largely competitive. There wasn’t a single implosion, let alone one in back-to-back games.

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