For the first several weeks of the season, everything was going right for the Yankees. Prospects were flourishing upon reaching the bigs, veterans like Starlin Castro and Aaron Hicks were achieving new levels of performance, and mercurial pitchers like Michael Pineda and Luis Severino were finding consistency. The only problem was the strangely awful play of their ace Masahiro Tanaka.
Now, of course, everything appears to be crumbling, except for Tanaka. Tanaka has just turned in his best three-start stretch in months, finally flashing the kind of play that made him a legitimate Cy Young contender for much of 2016.