For all but one year of the Aaron Judge era, the Yankees have been pretty good. They’ve won at least 90 games in seven of the eight full seasons since he ushered in a new era of contention in the Bronx in 2017, with the lone exception being the 2023 season, where poor roster construction met Judge’s toe injury.
Most people would expect a team that consistently makes the playoffs to be steady throughout the season. Obviously, a bad week or two is to be expected here and there, but you rarely see such
teams have extended stretches of very bad play. Well, as we all know, that’s been a defining characteristic of the 2020s Yankees. It’s become so common that it’s even got it’s own nickname: The June Swoon.
Any time the Yankees lose back-to-back series or lose three games in a row, people mention the swoon. When the Yankees went 4-10 in a bad stretch in mid-May, the Swoon was brought up as starting a month early. So far, as we enter the final days of June, we’ve avoided the June Swoon. Even when the team has a down week or two, they bounce back with a strong stretch of play to negate it. They’ve looked a lot more like a sustainable contender than they have, even as injuries have mounted this month.
But, in looking back at the last few seasons and measuring when the supposed swoons have been happening, it’s not really in June. People just use June because it rhymes. The Yankees are actually pretty good in June since Aaron Boone became manager:
Since 2018:
NYY overall win percentage: .585
NYY June win percentage: .583
Now, the team has played approximately .500 baseball in the month since 2023, but average baseball isn’t what people refer to as the June Swoon. It’s the stretch of downright bad baseball. The Yankees have played nine sub-.500 months since 2018; only three of them are in June. The two worst, by far, are in August. None of them, as it turns out, occurred before 2021.
So we’ve drilled the swoon down to being a post-COVID thing, so let’s go back and look at when the worst stretch of baseball is actually occurring.
2021
Worst month: June (12-14, -10 run differential)
Worst 30-game stretch: 12-18 (May 28th-July 4th)
The 2021 season is kind of an outlier in this situation. This is a season that, objectively, saw a June Swoon. The Yankees went an exceptional 35-17 in July and August, including a memorable 13-game winning streak. The swoon actually started on May 25th, just six days after Corey Kluber’s no-hitter. The Yankees lost six of seven to end the month before stumbling through a June that included going 0-6 against the same Boston Red Sox that would eliminate them in October.
The meltdown of Aroldis Chapman was also a defining aspect, as the closer went from untouchable through mid-June (coincidentally, the beginning of the sticky-stuff ban) to horrendous. The swoon ended on the Fourth of July, when Aroldis Chapman blew his third game in about a week to the visiting Mets shortly after the infamous Jared Walsh game.
That night, the Yankees earned a split in the doubleheader and proceeded to go from 41-41 to 76-52 by mid-August. A few bad weeks towards the end of the season made the playoff hunt unnecessarily stressful, but the team finished 91-71.
2022
Worst month: August (10-18, -12 run differential)
Worst 30-game stretch: 10-20 (July 16th-August 20th)
The 2022 team is infamous for playing like the 1998 Yankees for about half the season before having one of the most miserable summers imaginable. For a very brief period in August, it seemed like they were actually in danger of blowing a 15.5-game division lead. The Rays got it all the way down to 3.5 games in early September.
After improving to 61-23 with a seven-run win at Fenway Park on July 8th, everything fell apart. It was a methodical collapse: the team still won series against the Red Sox and the Reds later in the month, but a miserable 3-14 stretch in early August sank them to 73-48.
What was behind this collapse? Frankly, a bunch of midseason regression. Josh Donaldson’s hot start fizzled into a miserable summer. Giancarlo Stanton was awful after winning the 2022 All-Star Game MVP. DJ LeMahieu broke his foot and struggled. Matt Carpenter’s Linsanity run ended with a broken foot in August. The offense went from all-time good to pretty substandard down the stretch.
They still won 99 games and remain the best team by record since the pandemic, but I’d comfortably take the 2024 and 2025 teams over them.
2023
Worst month: August (10-18, -20 run differential)
Worst 30-game stretch: 10-20 (July 17th-August 22th)
Judge’s toe injury defined this season. It was by far the worst offensive construction in the last decade, and they were nowhere near equipped to deal with his absence. After starting 36-25 following an early June series at Chavez Ravine, the Yankees slumped to a mediocre month, but only went 11-12 overall in June.
They were 10 games above .500 on the Fourth of July, but then the bottom fell out. Anthony Rizzo’s concussion didn’t help this struggling offense, either. They went 12-27 in their next 39 games, including a disastrous nine-game losing streak that tied for the longest in the last century. By the time Judge returned in August, the Yankees were dead in the water.
Despite falling to 60-65 and being in danger of their first losing season in three decades, they rallied to go 21-12 in their next 33 with a youth infusion to eventually finish 82-80.
2024
Worst month: July (11-12, +16 run differential)
Worst 30-game stretch: 9-21 (June 18th-July 26th)
Not even Juan Soto could stop a swoon. The Yankees started 50-22 in a memorable season that resulted in an AL pennant, but things changed after a series-opening win at Fenway on June 14th.
Despite getting Gerrit Cole back from injury and a fair amount of health, the Yankees proceeded to lose nine of 11 and eventually go on a 10-23 stretch that rivaled 2023-level bad. The Orioles took a two-game lead in the division as a result, but a strong September allowed the team to get back on their horse and finish the season in first place.
It really doesn’t make sense that this team had arguably the worst concentrated swoon of them all. They had two of the best hitters on the planet anchoring a strong lineup and good pitching, especially after Cole returned from his elbow injury. This was a semi-June Swoon, but it was more concentrated in July.
2025
Worst month: July (12-13, -13 run differential)
Worst 30-game stretch: 12-18 (June 30th-August 5th)
Last year’s team was pretty weird. Their swoon lasted from mid-June to the first week of August, going from 48-25 to 60-54. They went from a mind-numbing cold spell offensively in their six-game losing streak in mid-June to a terrible July for the pitching staff.
The funny part about this one was that it wasn’t a prolonged, gradual swoon. It was multiple terrible weeks of baseball, spread out over about two months. They had two different six-game skids and another five-game losing streak to open August before figuring things out after their deadline acquisitions settled in.
In summary, the Yankees are not a June Swoon team. The term is more like a Summer Swoon, which usually leads to 35-40 bad games of baseball. It’s not good to spend one-fourth of the season in the doldrums, but it’s become a real trend over the last half decade.
In fact, the only real trend I can find is that the usual catalyst for the start of any swoon is losing a series to the Red Sox, specifically in Fenway Park. The Yankees just so happen to be there for four games this weekend. I’d recommend not letting whatever happens here bleed over into July.
