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ATLANTA — As their season continues to spiral, the Yankees have hit .500 on the way down.
A team that has played mediocre baseball for most of the season finally has the record to match it after a fourth straight loss sank the Yankees to 60-60 on the year.
On another night when Luis Severino put the Yankees in an early hole, they could never recover as their offense hardly showed up in a one-hit effort while falling to the Braves, 5-0, on Tuesday at Truist Park.
The Yankees are now back at .500 for the first time since May 1, when they were 15-15, and fell to 6 ½ games behind the Blue Jays for the final AL wild-card spot.
It marks the first time the Yankees have been .500 this late in a season since 1995.
“We’re not showing up, that’s what it comes down to,” Aaron Judge said. “We’re not showing up when we need to, especially down the stretch right now. We got every opportunity to keep ourselves in the race. We’re not capitalizing when we need to.”
Besides being at risk of missing the playoffs for the first time since 2016, the Yankees could also soon be in danger of enduring their first losing season since 1992.
They have not dipped under .500 all season, but will try to avoid that and a sweep in the series finale against the heavyweight Braves (77-42) on Wednesday night.
“Forget October, forget September — that’s not the focus, and never is, frankly, when you’re in the driver’s seat,” manager Aaron Boone said.
“We’re scuffling our asses off and we need to do better. We need to take some personal pride and it’s not fun getting knocked down and getting beat up, especially when you wear this uniform.”
The Yankees had a miserable night all-around, recording more errors (two) than they had hits (one).
Severino showed some signs of progress but still gave up five runs (three earned) across four innings. The damage came on two home runs, including a three-run shot by Marcell Ozuna with two outs in the first inning.
Braves right-hander Bryce Elder entered the night with a 3.64 ERA but had a 7.94 ERA over his last six starts before Tuesday.
Still, he turned in seven dominant innings in which he allowed only four base runners (three on walks), three of which were erased by double plays.
Gleyber Torres was responsible for two of those twin killings — giving him six in his last six games — on a night when the Yankees grounded into four double plays in total.
After hitting their high-water mark at 36-25 on June 4 — the day after Judge tore a ligament in his big right toe, which would sideline him for two months — the Yankees have gone 24-35.
“It sucks. We’re just simply not playing well enough,” Boone said. “That starts with me and on down, we gotta be better. That’s a broken record, right?”
On the heels of their ninth-inning collapse to the Marlins on Sunday, the Yankees have been outscored 16-3 in the first two games of this series against the team with the best record in baseball.
“Feel like we [were] starting to gain some traction a little bit offensively and then after getting a couple early runs on [Max] Fried [Monday] night and being behind the eight-ball, we weren’t able to generate much and then just get shut down tonight,” Boone said. “We gotta be better than that. The reality is whatever’s ahead of us, there’s a lot of season left. We talk about being towards the end — there’s a quarter of the season left and we gotta do better than this.”
Boone said he still believes his players are competing.
Judge insisted that the season is still salvageable.
But the Yankees are beginning to run out of time to make that a reality.
“We gotta bring it,” Judge said. “As long as we still got games, as long as we still got guys showing up every single day, we always got a chance.”
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