Emmanuel Berbari On The Yankees At The Deadline | 'WFAN Daily with Pete Hoffman'

**Pete Hoffman** (0:00)
The trade deadline is now, what, three full days away.
Saturday, Sunday, then Monday at 6 o'clock is the trade deadline. So we're going to bring in Emmanuel Berbari here, who is locked in on the Yankees like nobody else. He's been in the clubhouse, he's talked to all these guys. Let me bring in Emmanuel Berbari right now, and you tell me, Emmanuel, and it's great to hear from you again, as we heard from you a few hours ago after the big win, the big tune-up, the win over the Cubs. What's the vibe like with this team right now? Especially the offense, because the pitching has been phenomenal, but 10 of the last 14 games, the Yankees have scored less than three runs. That is a problem.

**Emmanuel Berbari** (0:40)
Yeah, I think the best way I could put it, Pete, and great to talk to you, is they're in the trenches right now. The Yankees are in the trenches of the season, and they're just trying to find a way to, I don't want to just say keep themselves afloat, but just play good baseball during this time where their big boppers are still down, and that's really what I look to when you zoom out on the season and the calendar, you look at around Labor Day, and that's around the time you should hopefully have Judge coming back and Stanton back and Bellinger hopefully back in the fold. But for right now, you look up and down the lineup, and there are guys who can get the job done, but on a night in night out basis, your lineup just doesn't have the depth that you're accustomed to seeing. So today you get a couple of big blows, Salvi Managa the second time through the order, Rosario hits 1450 feet, and Spencer Jones has really settled in and got more comfortable at the major league level, and you're doing just enough offensively. But it's just enough. That's what we've seen in these victories. I think the Yankees are very fortunate in some of these narrow games. Yet they lost two heartbreaking extra inning games to the White Sox. But more often than not, they've been winning these close, low scoring games where the pitching has been elite, and the defense has been elite. They got to keep doing that over this time or else you're going to be on the short end because you're just not getting enough in the lineup right now.

**Pete Hoffman** (2:03)
Yeah. And it all takes, Emmanuel, is one bad play here or there.
And we could see that, you know, look at the World Series in game five. I mean, it takes a couple of bad plays for you to lose a tight game. And you can't afford that when the Yankees are so good. Like they still are one of the best teams in the league. They're still hunting down on Tampa Bay. You want that top seed, like we saw last year. That was a big problem with the Yankees. Not going further is they didn't have the home field advantage. You saw how that helped the Blue Jays out. You know, but the Yankees need that top seed. That means they need to win more games. And you got three days to really make some major changes to this team.
First of all, you made a statement that Labor Day for Aaron Judge, what makes you really think that Aaron Judge is going to be back in Labor Day? And are you 100% sold on that? Or is it like, you know, 50-50 that he's going to be back?

**Emmanuel Berbari** (2:55)
So I'm just a math guy, Pete, and I'm trying to ballpark it for the three guys. So for Aaron Judge, you hope that it could be Labor Day, but you don't truly know. Nobody, you, me, anyone sitting in their car at home listening, anyone with the Yankees.
The Yankees probably have a better idea than most, but no one truly knows until you image it again, and you see that Aaron Judge is fully in the clear. Because the last time they imaged him, they're hoping for improvement, and they got improvement, but not enough to get him back to upper body and baseball activities. So until you can do that, no one can definitively stand here and say, Aaron Judge is going to be back this season. They can say they expect it, and that's completely fair to say, but you can't say you expect him to be back this season. So I expect based on that judge is confident, the Yankees are confident that he'll be back around that range, which is around the time Bellinger will be back and Stanton should be back. So I think the Labor Day ballpark is good for the three of them as of right now, and that's probably best case scenario of what we're looking at. And then the rest of the time is really, okay, what reinforcements are you building in at the trade deadline? Is your starting pitching going to continue to give you elite level performance? Because if they do, you're going to be engaged more often than not, and you're going to compete with Tampa for the division, which you had alluded to is so important, because being the one seed versus being in the best of three wild card, maybe a rematch with the Boston Red Sox at this raid in the best of three wild card, even if it's at Yankee Stadium, you just don't want to be in that scenario because you want to line up your pitching in a five game series and hopefully a seven game series down the road. And that's the bedrock of this Yankee team. You don't want to put anything to chance in the best of three.