There is a good article on The Ringer that puts the Yankees injury situation into perspective. The Yankees have 13 guys on the IL, the record is 16.
They do have Domingo German killing it.
Consider this:The Yankees stand out for two reasons. The first is that most of the teams with 13 or more players on the IL at once reached their injury peak near midseason, which makes sense—players’ bodies wear down as the season goes on. The Yankees are one of just two teams since 2002 to put 13 players on the IL in April.
The second reason is the quality of players they have on the shelf at once. Like Judge, their list of IL’d players is not only large, but quite productive. If the Yankees could put together the best 10-player lineup (eight position players, DH, starting pitcher), eight of those players, plus another member of their rotation (Montgomery) and their setup man (Betances), are currently on the IL.
That they are winning games despite this and are only a couple of games outside of first place is really quite impressive. But guys are stepping up and they are being kept afloat by the fact that the starting rotation throws someone of quality out there every day, even if they don't have their ace out there anymore.Before this year, the most previous-season fWAR any team had lost at one time since 2002 was 21.1. In August 2017, the Washington Nationals had Max Scherzer, Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, Adam Eaton, Trea Turner, Jayson Werth, and a handful of other players all on the IL at the same time.
The current players on the Yankees’ IL list combined to produce 32.8 fWAR last year, which blows away the previous record. Since 2002, only five other teams—including this year’s Indians, from when Mike Clevinger went on the IL April 9 through Jason Kipnis’s activation on April 15—had even half as much previous-year production on the IL at one time.
They do have Domingo German killing it.