Playoff Teams Beat Teams They Are Supposed to Beat

The series with the Baltimore Orioles is all but over but while beating up or losing to a team like Baltimore is huge either way it hurts or affects you even more if you don't beat the teams you are "supposed" to beat. The teams you are supposed to beat are the teams with lower records than you, the teams that have nothing left to play for this season other than to play spoiler for the teams still fighting for a playoff spot. It seems like every year if you really look at the head-to-head schedules of the teams who make the postseason and the teams that don't you can see the teams that didn't had stretches or certain teams that ultimately doomed them. You can't win a division after sweeping a lesser team in April and May but you can lose a division if you're swept by that same team in April or May. Let's see if the Yankees have beaten the teams they are supposed to beat and analyze whether they have a true shot at winning the Wild Card this season.

The teams on this list with a losing record this season are the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Chicago Whitesox, the Colorado Rockies, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Minnesota Twins, the Oakland Athletics, the San Diego Padres and the Tampa Bay Rays. As you can see by the list out of these eight teams the Yankees have losing records against or tied their season series with five of those teams. Only the Angels, Twins and Athletics have fallen on the Yankees sword more times than not this season which is not great if you're a team searching for the postseason.

This is especially compounded when you have lost so frequently to the Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles. Again, like many of these stats I bring you, all this and a buck gets you a Coke because this is a different team in the second half than it was in the first half and even the worst team could beat the best team on any given day in Major League Baseball but in the immortal words of manager Joe Girardi "it's not what you want" either.