1. After putting up a 10-spot on Thursday, the Yankees did the same on Friday, blowing out the last-place White Sox 10-2. It was the third straight game the Yankees scored double-digit runs, the fourth time in five games they have done so and the sixth time in less two weeks. If only under-.500 teams were part of the postseason the Yankees would be all set.

2. Yes, these wins against bad teams are needed and every one of the 162 games in a season are valuable, but again, the stench left from the Red Sox series and from series against teams currently holding a playoff spot as a whole throughout the season lingers like a skunk waiting for you when you open your garage door. It’s going to take a lot more than tomato baths to remove the smell of this Yankees team, and there’s nothing they can do this weekend to do so. It’s going to take winning games and series over the next two weeks against the Astros, Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox to change my perception of a team that pads its stats, run differential and win total against the league’s worst and is humiliated by the league’s best. I’m going to need see the offense show up against pitchers the Yankees didn’t put on waivers earlier this season. I’m going to need to see Jazz Chisholm get a runner in from third with one out against a reliever who will be pitching in October, not flipping his bat during a blowout of a bad team.

3. Again, these games against the lowly White Sox are important, just as the ones against the Nationals, Rays, Cardinals and Twins earlier this month were. But after the Yankees beat the crap out of those teams, they erased everything they accomplished by losing two games in the standings in a single weekend to the Red Sox. That can’t happen again. If the Yankees want to win the division like Chisholm talked about on Thursday, or even win home-field advantage for the wild-card series, they can’t poop their pants next week when they play the best competition in the American League.

5. While the Yankees were lighting up their former teammate in Yoendrys Gomez, the Red Sox lost a home game to the Pirates and the Blue Jays did the same to the Brewers. The Yankees are now one game up in the loss column on the Red Sox for the first wild-card berth and three games back of the Blue Jays in the AL East.

6. As I wrote yesterday, in terms of winning the division, the math is very bad for the Yankees. Possible? Yes. Likely? No. At least from a statistical perspective. But that perspective is based on the teams’ winning percentage to date and their run differential. If you look at the remaining schedules, I do think it’s doable.

If the Yankees are able to pull off a four-game sweep of the White Sox, there’s a very real possibility they could be one game back of the Blue Jays at the end of play on Sunday. (The Brewers have a starting pitching advantage over the Blue Jays on both Saturday and Sunday.) If the Yankees are one game back as of Sunday with 25 games to play, yes I do think they will win the division. Even if they are still three games back as of Sunday, I think they could win the division. I know that sounds crazy, and yes, it is, but hear me out.

Disclaimer: Winning the division isn’t possible if the Yankees’ 12 games over the next two weeks against the Astros, Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox play out like the 26 games against those opponents have so far this season: the Yankees are 7-19 against those teams.

7. For this exercise, let’s make it as hard as possible for the Yankees to win the division. Let’s say they are three games back of the Blue Jays after Sunday. The Yankees will have to go at least .500 in the 12 games against the Astros, Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox to have a chance. So let’s say they go 6-6, which is the floor of what they can do. Two of those six wins have to come against the Blue Jays and two more have to come against the Red Sox. That means 4-2 against the Blue Jays and Red Sox and 2-4 against the Astros and Tigers.

Let’s say the Yankees drop one of their two games this weekend and so do the Blue Jays. The Yankees would be 76-61 at the end of play on Sunday and the Blue Jays 79-58.

The Yankees then go 6-6 against the Astros, Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox and are now 82-67. The Blue Jays have lost two of three to the Yankees during that time, so they are 80-60. In their other nine games, the Blue Jays have gone 4-5 against the Reds, Astros and Orioles and are now 84-65. There are now 13 games left and the Yankees are two games back in the loss column (82-67 to 84-65), but they are really three games back from taking over the division because the Blue Jays already clinched the head-to-head tiebreaker.

The Yankees’ 13 remaining games are against the Twins (3), Orioles (4), White Sox (3) and Orioles (3).

The Blue Jays’ 13 remaining games are against the Rays (4), Royals (3), Red Sox (3) and Rays (3).

That Yankees series against the White Sox is crucial because with the Blue Jays and Red Sox playing each other at the same time, every win means the Yankees gain ground on one of the two and every loss means they lose a game on one of the two. The Blue Jays’ seven remaining games against the Rays are also crucial because they have struggled against the Rays this season, going 1-5.

If the Yankees go 9-4 in those 13 games (one loss in each series) and the Blue Jays go 6-7 in their 13 games, the Yankees win the division. If the Yankees go 8-5, then the Blue Jays need to go 5-8. Unlikely. If the Yankees go 7-6, the Blue Jays need to go 4-9. Very unlikely. I think 9-4 is the floor of what needs to happen, and that may not be good enough.

8. That is a not-so-far-fetched path to winning the division. It could be made a lot easier if the Yankees would just rip off 10 straight wins (like the Blue Jays and Red Sox have both done this season) and the Blue Jays and Red Sox both fall apart. That would be much easier with no math and scoreboard watching involved. Just a good, old-fashioned, double-digit win streak coupled with simultaneous collapses from the Blue Jays and Red Sox. But that’s an abundance of wishful thinking, considering a great deal of wishful thinking is already needed for the Yankees to play well against the league’s best and continue to beat up on the league’s worst. (All of this would be meaningless if the Yankees could have just not blown their eight-game lead over the Blue Jays.)

9. As of now, here is how the pitching matchups line up for the next two weeks:

Saturday: Cam Schlittler vs. Shane Smith
Sunday: Luis Gil vs. Martin Perez
Monday: Off
Tuesday: Max Fried vs. Jason Alexander
Wednesday: Will Warren vs. Christian Javier
Thursday: Carlos Rodon vs. Spencer Arrighetti
Friday: Cam Schlittler vs. Kevin Gausman
Saturday: Luis Gil vs. Max Scherzer
Sunday: Max Fried vs. Chris Bassitt
Monday: Off
Tuesday: Will Warren vs. Casey Mize
Wednesday: Carlos Rodon vs. Chris Paddack
Thursday: Cam Schlittler vs. Jack Flaherty
Friday: Luis Gil vs. Lucas Giolito
Saturday: Max Fried vs. Brayan Bello
Sunday: Will Warren vs. Garrett Crochet

Based on this, the Yankees do miss Framber Valdez, Hunter Brown, Shane Bieber and Tarik Skubal, but having to face Bello and Crochet is as bad as it gets, considering what those two have done to the Yankees this year (the Yankees are 0-5 in games started by those two). It could haven’t been Giolito, Dustin May and rookie Payton Tolle?! Pitchers get hurt and teams adjust their rotations around scheduled days off for important series, so this could all change, but as of now, it’s a better schedule of opposing starters than I figured it would play out to be.

10. Before I get too far ahead of myself and start planning for the strong finish, division title and best-of-3 bye, the Yankees can’t go out and lose on Saturday and Sunday with the Blue Jays winning both days to fall five games back. If that happens, the division is over. And because a Yankees extended winning streak into next week isn’t likely given the opponents and it’s less likely the Blue Jays implode, the deficit can’t go higher than three again. The Yankees have to maintain the deficit or gain on the Blue Jays from here on and out (and oh yeah, also have the Red Sox cooperate and not sneak in win the division themselves).

1. Another game against a last-place team and another bullying performance from the Yankees offense as they pummeled the White Sox 10-4 on Thursday.

Cody Bellinger gave the Yankees an early 2-0 lead in the first inning with a two-run home run on an 0-2 count and a Jazz Chisholm solo home run and a Ben Rice RBI single in the second had the Yankees ahead 4-0. But in the bottom of the second, Miguel Vargas hit a game-tying grand slam off Will Warren after an egregious Anthony Volpe fielding error extended the inning.

2. The game remained tied until the fifth when the Yankees scored twice to take 6-4 lead and they added three more in the eighth and one in the ninth. Trent Grisham homered again, Rice had a pair of hits, Bellinger had three hits and even Volpe had two hits to break up a 1-for-38 run in the second half of the month. Do I think this is the start of something for Volpe and he’s now going to go on a run to get his numbers back to respectability (if it’s even possible for him to get back to respectability with 28 games left)? No, I do not. I think it was the result of someone getting to play every day having a random day with a pair of hits and nothing more than that. I expect him to continue to struggle at the plate because that’s what he has done for three full years and expect him to screw up routine plays in the field because that’s what he does now.

3. None of the four White Sox runs were earned, so Warren’s ERA was unscathed by the second-inning grand slam as he went five innings. Fernando Cruz, Luke Weaver and Devin Williams combined to throw three perfect innings, striking out six of the nine hitters they faced and Mark Leiter Jr. managed to put up a scoreless ninth.

4. It was a rather easy win outside of the second-inning scare as a result of the Volpe error and grand slam that followed. It was the fifth time in the last 13 games the Yankees scored double-digit runs, though those games came against the Cardinals, Rays, Nationals and White Sox. The Yankees are now 12-4 in their last 16 games even if it doesn’t feel like it after the demoralizing series against the Red Sox.

5. “There’s real length to the order, and there’s places that can hurt you up and down the order,” Aaron Boone said.

Maybe you want to let Garrett Crochet and Brayan Bello know where those places are? Again, how about winning a series against a good team, an actual contender before talking about how good you?

6. “We want to win the division,” Chisholm said. “Right now, it’s just like, we’re going to go out there and win that and then we’re going to go and win the World Series.”

It’s comments like those that make it hard to like Chisholm. Chisholm said something similar back on June 25 when the Yankees salvaged the third game of a series in Cincinnati, saying, “I feel like we got a great team and I feel like we’re going to make the World Series again.” At the time the Yankees had lost nine of 12 and after that win they would lose 22 of their next 39.

7. Yes, the Yankees have currently won 12 of 16, but 11 of those 12 wins have come against the Twins, Cardinals, Rays, Nationals and White Sox. In the other four games, they went 1-3 against the Red Sox. I don’t know why Chisholm feels the need to run his mouth when the Yankees have been humiliated by the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Tigers, Astros, Phillies and Dodgers this season and blew an enormous division lead to the Blue Jays and an even bigger wild-card lead to the Red Sox. Maybe wait until you actually win the World Series before talking about it? Maybe wait until you improve upon your 10-for-55 performance from last postseason before you act like you were on the Dodgers last year and not the Yankees?

8. Let’s look at Chisholm’s lofty goal of winning the division and see if it’s possible.

The Yankees are four games back of the Blue Jays with 28 games remaining. If the Blue Jays were to go 14-14, the Yankees would have to go 19-9 to win the division since they can’t have the same record because the Blue Jays hold the head-to-head tiebreaker. The Blue Jays do have series left against the Brewers, Reds, Astros and Red Sox aside from their series against the Yankees, but it’s hard to believe they would play .500 baseball with 13 games left against the Orioles, Rays and Royals. Let’s say the Blue Jays go 16-12. The Yankees would then have to go 21-7. The math just isn’t there because for the Yankees to win 21 of 28, they would have to play exceptionally well against the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Astros and Tigers, which they haven’t done all year.

9. Maybe eight years of Boone telling everyone the Yankees’ best baseball is still in front of them will cash in. Maybe they will go on an unforeseen run and win 21 of 28 or something crazy and the Blue Jays will stumble and the Yankees can win the division and get a bye into the ALDS. It’s extremely unlikely, but I guess there is a small chance it could happen. It would have happened if the Yankees could have protected their eight-game lead over the Blue Jays earlier this summer.

10. Friday is another opportunity for another win against the White Sox with Carlos Rodon going against former Yankee Yoendrys Gomez. The Yankees’ goal right now should be to get out of the second wild-card spot and into the first to make sure they aren’t on the road for the entirety of a best-of-3. Once that is accomplished then they can worry about the Blue Jays and the division. The Blue Jays are hosting the Brewers this weekend with the Red Sox hosting the Pirates. Get ready for a month of scoreboard watching.

1. Three games against the last-place Nationals and three easy wins for the third-place Bronx Bullies in what was the most predictable series ever. After losing three of four at home to the Red Sox to fall to 5-15 against the Red Sox and Blue Jays this season and 7-19 against the Red Sox, Blue Jays, Tigers and Astros, the Yankees demolished the Nationals for three straight days, outscoring them 26-8.

That’s what these Yankees do: they beat up on the league’s worst and lose to the league’s best. It’s what they have done all season and it’s what has them currently in third place in the AL East and in the second wild-card spot, meaning all road games in the best-of-3 wild-card series at the moment.

2. It’s great the Yankees swept the Nationals. They have to sweep the league’s worst because of their inability to win series against the league’s best. But I evaluate the Yankees with the idea of winning the World Series in mind, so everything I write, analyze or criticize is under that premise. It’s hard to get excited about beating the crap out of the Twins, Cardinals, Rays and Nationals when the team gets humiliated by the Red Sox, Blue Jays, Astros, Tigers, Dodgers and Phillies since those are the teams that the Yankees will potentially play in October.

3. Despite the series sweep of the Nationals, the Yankees were unable to pick up a game on the Red Sox because they were busy sweeping the lowly Orioles and only picked up one game on the Blue Jays, who won their series against the Twins. The Yankees remain behind the Red Sox in the wild-card race because of the head-to-head tiebreaker, which the Red Sox clinched at Yankee Stadium last weekend, and 4 1/2 games behind the Blue Jays for the division with 29 games to play (though it’s really 5 1/2 games since the Blue Jays clinched the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Yankees as well).

4. Before Tuesday’s game I wrote:

Luis Gil needs to be as good (5 IP, 1 ER) as he was on Thursday because we all know first-half MacKenzie Gore — All-Star Gore — is going to be who the Yankees face or make him out to be.

And that’s exactly what happened. Gil gave the Yankees the same five-innings-and-one-earned-run performance as he did in his previous start and the best version of Gore showed up or at least the Yankees made Gore the best version of himself … except for Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton tagged Gore for a bases-clearing, three-run double in the third to give the Yankees a 3-1 lead and then hit a two-run home run off of Orlando Ribalta in the sixth to give them a 5-1 lead, which was the final score. Stanton 5, Nationals 1.

5. “It’s been fun being able to contribute on both sides,” Stanton said. “I’m just making sure I’m mentally prepared for all scenarios when the ball is hit towards me.”

Stanton went 2-for-3 with a double, home run and five RBIs and the rest of the Yankees went 4-for-27 with six strikeouts. Aaron Judge (who continues to play every day over Stanton) had another hitless game and the Development-Failing Duo of Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells went 0-for-7 with a walk (Wells) and three strikeouts.

6. The game was Volpe’s big return to the starting lineup after being held out of it on both Sunday and Monday. Volpe went 0-for-4 with a strikeout in what was another abysmal performance and things would only get worse for him on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Trent Grisham hit a leadoff home run to give the Yankees an early lead and then in the third, the offense exploded for nine runs in typical bully fashion en route to an 11-2 win. Here is how Wednesday’s third inning unfolded:

Ben Rice: single
Aaron Judge: home run
Cody Bellinger: home run
Jazz Chisholm: walk
Jasson Dominguez: double
Anthony Volpe: lineout
Austin Wells: catcher’s interference
Ryan McMahon: home run
Trent Grisham: strikeout
Rice: home run
Judge: single
Bellinger: walk
Chisholm: walk
Dominguez: single
Volpe: strikeout

The Yankees scored nine runs on three singles, two doubles, three home runs and three walks in the inning. Volpe made two of the three outs in the inning in what would be an 0-for-5 day with two strikeouts to drop him to 1-for-37 with 14 strikeouts since the first game of the St. Louis series on August 15. That represents a .027 on-base percentage, which is the lowest OBP by any non-pitcher Yankee in any 11-game span in the 103-year history of the franchise (stat from Katie Sharp). The “fucking elite” Volpe (which is what Aaron Boone referred to him as to Meredith Marakovits earlier this season) is hitting .204/.269/.393 on the season. He has the second-worst batting average in the majors (Oneil Cruz has the worst at .203), the worst on-base percentage at .269 and the 11th-worst OPS. It’s not a major-league bat, it’s an unplayable bat, and yet, he will continue to play every single day.

7. “You go through it as hitters, man. It’s hard,” Boone said when asked about Volpe. “What I’m excited about is he continues to play really good defense.”

Volpe has been going through “it” for three years since his first game in the league. And yes, hitting is hard, which is why you don’t pass on the deepest shortstop free-agent class in history full of proven players for an unknown with the team in a supposed championship window like the Yankees did with Volpe between the 2022 and 2023 seasons. As for being excited about him because he’s not booting ground balls and throwing the ball all over the field, all I will say is shortstop defense grows on trees. You can find yourself an all-glove, no-bat shortstop anywhere, and if that’s what the Yankees are accepting of Volpe being then it’s an organizational failure that it has gotten to this point.

8. Every Yankees starter reached base except for Volpe, as the offense did its usual stat padding against the 53-80 Nationals. Rice, Judge and Bellinger went 8-for-13 with three home runs, Chisholm walked three times, Dominguez had two hits, Grisham homered and even McMahon and Wells homered.

9. Max Fried had his second Fried-like start (7 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 6 K) as he was staked to a 10-0 lead before he took the mound in the fourth inning. After having just one quality start between June 25 and August 22, Fried has looked like his old self the last two times out, even if one of those two times was against the Nationals with a double-digit lead. Fried’s next three starts will be against the Astros, Blue Jays and Red Sox, so we’ll see if he is really fixed and back to being the first-half Fried (who was a Cy Young favorite and in line to start the All-Star Game before falling apart) or if these last two outings were just a tease.

10. The next four days is another series against a last-place team in the White Sox. The White Sox aren’t as bad as they were last year and when you look at how they have been playing of late, this isn’t the type of cake walk that many feel it is. The Yankees will have to play well to beat the White Sox and keep pace with the Red Sox, who host the Pirates. Based on what we have seen of late from the Bronx Bullies, expect one last impressive beatdown of a bad team before 12 straight games against the Astros, Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox begins next week.

1. Vacation is over and so is the vacation from the Thoughts. A vacation that started out with five straight Yankees wins over teams counting down the days until the end of the season fell apart over the weekend against a team the Yankees can’t seem to solve. Even though the Yankees won the last two days, what transpired from Thursday through Saturday negated the run before the Red Sox series and its stench has lingered into the Nationals series.

The Yankees are bullies. They beat the crap out of the league’s worst teams and the moment a team equal to or better than them comes around they run away and hide. Of course they had a 10-run lead over the Nationals until the ninth inning on Monday, the same way they hit nine home runs in a game against the Rays last week and hung 24 runs on the Cardinals the weekend before. That’s who the Yankees are. They are also the team that lost three of four at home to the Red Sox, lost eight straight to the Red Sox prior to Sunday’s win and are 2-8 against the Red Sox on the season. The Yankees are the team that is 6-19 against the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Tigers and Astros.

2. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if the Yankees win five or more games this week against the last-place Nationals and last-place White Sox. I’m expecting the Yankees to do exactly that. That’s what bullies do. I’m also expecting them to then get put in their place like bullies do when they go to Houston next week and follow that up with series against the Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox.

3. At this point, the Yankees are going to the playoffs. They lead the Royals by five games in the loss column, the Guardians by six and the Rangers by seven. Those teams aren’t capable of erasing those deficits with a month to play, and the Yankees have 19 games remaining against the Nationals, White Sox, Twins and Orioles to bully their way into the playoffs.

4. It took nearly three full seasons, but Anthony Volpe was finally “benched” earlier this week. It wasn’t a traditional benching since he entered Sunday’s game as a defensive replacement (which is beyond absurd) and was already told he will be back in the lineup on Tuesday. It was a fake benching to give Volpe time to rest as he’s mired in yet another ridiculous slump that has left fans booing him at the plate and in the field. Volpe has one multi-hit game in August and that came on August 1. Since then he’s 8-for-66 and hitting .121/.171/.242. Yes, he has a .414 OPS for nearly a month.

“It’s just been a scuffle offensively here over the past week, 10 days,” Aaron Boone said of Volpe’s performance.

Ah, yes, it’s only been a week to 10 days of no offensive production for Volpe. That must be why he’s at the bottom of every offensive statistic for everyday players in the league since the start of 2023. No other player gets to play every day with numbers like his over the last three years.

Volpe is a .222/.284/.380 hitter in 1,799 career plate appearances with an 84 OPS+. This is who he is. A fake, not-even-two-full-games benching isn’t going to change him from being the worst everyday hitter in baseball to the player the Yankees told us he would be when they passed over the deepest free-agent shortstop class in history for him. He will be back in the lineup now every game and continue to do nothing nearly every game.

5. Volpe has the second-worst batting average (.208) in the majors and is just one point off the lead. Ryan McMahon is third at .216. That’s quite the left side of the infield Brian Cashman has built. At least McMahon makes every single play and then some at third. Recently, Nathaniel Lowe was between the two with the third-worst average in the majors, but after a big weekend against the Yankees, Lowe is now only the fifth-worst hitter in the league. You have to love that a player the Rangers paid to go away and the Red Sox picked up off the scrap heap only so they could stop playing Abraham Toro at first base was responsible for two of the Red Sox’ wins over the weekend.

6. Monday’s win was enjoyable because it was a relaxing blowout win. Cam Schlittler was awesome, the Yankees hit a bunch of home runs and Volpe and Austin Wells didn’t play. What more could you ask for?

Schlittler is my favorite Yankees pitcher because he isn’t out there trying to fool anyone. Everyone knows his fastball is coming and no one is hitting it. In eight starts he has allowed three runs or fewer each time out and he has allowed one run over his last starts 22 1/3 innings with 25 strikeouts.

“It’s just important for me to do my job,” Schlittler said. “I try to get six, seven innings and put the team in a spot to win.”

Boone called Schlittler “a future staple of our rotation.” Umm, he’s in the rotation in the present and hopefully it’s not “your” rotation for much longer (though we all know it will be.)

If the playoffs started next week, he would be my Game 1 starter because even when he doesn’t have his best stuff, he can still get outs. Unfortunately, the Yankees don’t make on-field decisions based on performance. Money owed, name and reputation will always supersede actual results. 

7. Max Fried finally looked like himself on Friday and Carlos Rodon finally beat a good team on Sunday. But one start from each doesn’t make me feel better about either. I’m going to need to see it every fifth day for the rest of the season to believe they can win in October, considering the postseason histories for both aren’t exactly glowing.

8. It was just last week Boone was using Yerry De los Santos in the sixth inning of a tie game at home the Yankees would lose because he couldn’t retire a hitter, and then on Monday, Boone used him in a 10-run game and De los Santos couldn’t close that out. I laughed at the people who were upset I complained about De los Santos being used in the spot he was in the series finale against the Twins and I’m laughing at them again. De los Santos is fine as a last or second-to-last relief option. He should have been nowhere near that game last week and his season ERA (which the Boone Fan Club cited as a reason for him being in the Twins series finale) has more than doubled since he ruined the Twins series finale.

9. The best hitter on the Yankees doesn’t get to play every day in Giancarlo Stanton. He’s hitting .306/.383/.638 and is the best he’s been as a Yankee and since his 2017 NL MVP season. And yet, he didn’t play on Monday, didn’t start on Friday or Wednesday and got one at-bat in St. Louis. Stanton not being the designated hitter so Judge can is so perfectly the Boone Yankees. Judge is hitting .210/.380/.403 since coming off the injured list on August 5. In that same time, Stanton is hitting .441/.525/1.029.

Stanton has been hitting and hitting no matter who the opponent is, while Judge went 2-for-14 against the Red Sox and 2-for-9 against the Astros — the only two teams with winning records the Yankees have faced in August. One extra-base hit (a double) for Judge in this seven games. It’s a precursor of what to expect in the playoffs, which is what has always happened in this era in the playoffs: Stanton shows up and Judge doesn’t. When we look back on this era of the Yankees, one that is unlikely to include a championship, we’ll know it wasn’t because of Stanton.

10. MacKenzie Gore gets the ball on Tuesday and while he has been bad in July and August, any starting pitcher with a hint of ability is capable of stopping this Yankees’ offense, especially a left-hander with the ability of Gore who is one of the game’s best when he’s on. Here is what I think Boone will do on Tuesday:

Paul Goldschmidt, 1B
Aaron Judge, DH
Cody Bellinger, CF
Giancarlo Stanton, RF
Ben Rice, C
Amed Rosario, LF
Jazz Chisholm, 2B
Anthony Volpe, SS
Jose Caballero, 3B

It’s another big game for the Yankees as they are tied in the loss column with the Red Sox and need to finish one game ahead of them because of the head-t0-head tiebreaker to avoid playing a best-of-3 on the road in the playoffs. Luis Gil needs to be as good (5 IP, 1 ER) as he was on Thursday because we all know first-half Gore — All-Star Gore — is going to be who the Yankees face or make him out to be.

1. It’s no coincidence the Yankees’ starter pitched into the seventh inning and the offense scored six-plus runs in the first two games of the Twins series and the Yankees won both. Aaron Boone looks like a genius when he doesn’t have to think. Pitch well, hit well and play clean baseball and Boone doesn’t get to be a part of the equation. It’s the best kind of baseball there is.

That’s what I wrote after Tuesday’s blowout. Take Boone out of the game and the odds of the Yankees winning increase dramatically. Allow Boone to interject himself into the outcome with in-game decision making and you get the kind of result the Yankees suffered on Wednesday with a 4-1 loss. A complete missed opportunity to make up ground on everyone in the standings as the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Mariners and Guardians all lost.

2. Instead of pulling one game closer to the Blue Jays, Red Sox and Mariners and one game further away from the Guardians, the Yankees ran in place in what was a wasted game against an inferior opponent.

Prior to Wednesday’s game I wrote:

The Yankees will go for the sweep on Wednesday night, and in order to pull it off, they will need to beat the Twins’ best starter in Joe Ryan. The active Yankees have only faced him a couple of times in their careers and their numbers against him are weak. Cam Schlittler will need to match Ryan for as long as he can because after scoring 15 runs over the last two nights, Wednesday has a Yankees offensive no-show written all over it.

The Yankees had opportunities to get to and beat Ryan, Schlittler did his job matching Ryan for the five innings he was in the game and the offense no-showed, scoring just one run on five hits in the game.

The Yankees stranded Trent Grisham on second with no outs in the first when Aaron Judge couldn’t get him over for someone to get him in. (Judge was hitting .394/.490/.779 before Boone kept him out of the starting lineup for the only time all year on June 12 in Kansas City and he’s hitting .235/.373/.536 since.) Ben Rice led off the second with a single and was also stranded. Cody Bellinger took Ryan deep for a solo home run in the third, but Schlittler gave it right back in the fourth. The game remained tied at 1 until the sixth when Boone got his hands on it.

3. The Yankees couldn’t have asked for a better pitching situation heading into Wednesday’s series finale: They had won the first game of the series by four runs and the second game by eight runs to allow their bullpen and elite relievers to rest, and with a scheduled day off on Thursday they could unload their top arms on Wednesday and still have them all for Friday in St. Louis. So knowing all of that, why was Yerry De los Santos the first guy out of the bullpen in a 1-1 game on a night when all of the Yankees’ playoff competition had already lost?

“[Schlittler] set us up,” Boone said, “especially going into an off day with a rested-up pen and felt like we could get there.”

So Boone knew of the advantageous spot the Yankees were in after Monday and Tuesday and after Schlittler pitched five innings of one-run ball on Wednesday and he still made the choice to go to De los Santos.

4. De los Santos is a nice, back-end-of-the-bullpen arm, which is how he has been treated all year. In April, May and June he only pitched in blowout wins or losses. He was sent down in mid-June and when he returned in late July, he continued to be the last or one of the last options out of the bullpen. He was sent down again after all the moves were made at the trade deadline since there was no longer room for him with all of the new relief acquisitions. So De los Santos wasn’t good enough to be a Yankee on August 1, but now two weeks later, he’s good enough to pitch in the sixth inning of a 1-1 game with playoff position jockeying on the line. Not only that, but he was called on to face the 2-3-4 hitters in the Twins lineup.

5. Mark Leiter Jr. to Camilo Doval to Luke Weaver to David Bednar was how the plan should have unfolded. I would have even used Weaver in the sixth there with the scored tied and the 2-3-4 hitters due up. Not Boone. Boone went with De los Santos and it went about as well as expected. He faced three hitters, they all reached and they all scored and when the book was closed on him the Yankees trailed 4-1. Only after De los Santos didn’t retire any of three batters he faced and gave up a two-run double did Boone go to Leiter Jr. So Boone was willing to go to Leiter Jr. in the sixth inning, he just thought he would try to steal an inning with De los Santos before going to his best relievers. Not only did Boone turn to Leiter Jr. with the Yankees trailing by two rather than tied, but then in the eighth he went to Doval with the Yankees trailing by three. So he would rather have Leiter Jr. and Doval pitch with the Yankees trailing than in a tie game.

6. The Twins didn’t score for the rest of the game after getting to De los Santos because the Twins suck. If they were ever going to score it was going to be with their 2-3-4 hitters up. The Yankees didn’t score for the rest of the game either because that’s what they do against the league’s best pitchers like Ryan. And once Ryan was out of the game and the Twins turned to Kody Funderburk and his 5.73 ERA and Justin Topa, the Yankees had already given up as they had just one baserunner against those two in 2 1/3 innings of relief.

7. Boone had to manage one game in the series and he couldn’t even do that. It’s games like that for why he should have lost his job long ago. Not because he has never seen one of his players perform poorly in eight years, not because he exaggerates his evaluations and straight up lies about injuries. It’s because he has spent his entire life around baseball, and not just baseball but Major League Baseball, and still manages as if he were introduced to the game a week ago.

8. It’s hard enough for the Yankees to overcome their top-heavy offense, their shaky rotation, their inconsistent bullpen, their running the bases like drunks as John Sterling said during last year’s World Series and their defensive miscues, but to have to overcome their own manager in any close game too? It’s too much. It’s why no matter how well the team plays or how clean of a game they provide, it’s exceedingly hard for them to win big, close games. (Look no further than Games 1 and 5 of the World Series, the two biggest games of Boone’s managerial career.)

9. So instead of arriving in St. Louis feeling good after a series sweep and tied with the Red Sox in the loss column and two games behind the Mariners in the loss column and a game up on the Guardians in the loss column, the Yankees are in the same spot as they were before Wednesday’s game with one more game erased from the schedule: the third wild-card spot. And they are only in that spot because the Guardians have two games in hand. The Yankees and Guardians are tied in the loss column and if the Guardians win those two games in hand, the Guardians become the third wild-card team since they have a better record against their own division than the Yankees.

10. A missed opportunity in a season full of them. In an era full of them. The Yankees have lost that same game countless times under Boone in which he can’t properly utilize his bullpen because he’s always trying to steal an out or an inning to save an arm for a situation and a game that may never come. Keep managing for tomorrow and there won’t be a tomorrow after Game 162 for the Yankees this season.