1. You know what I want on Thursday afternoon? I want Fried to go out and pitch seven-plus dominant innings, the offense to put up five-plus runs and a nice, clean, easy win to end this series and send Yankees fans into the weekend happy. Remember nice, clean, easy wins? The Yankees haven’t had one since the home opener back on April 3 against the Marlins. And after these last two weeks, April 3 feels like it was from a different season.

That’s how I ended yesterday’s Thoughts: wishing for a nice, clean, easy win to end the series against the Angels. What did I get in return? Max Fried’s shortest outing of the season (5 1/3 innings) as the ace failed to go at least 6 1/3 innings for the first time, another blown lead to the Angels, another dismal offensive performance, another bullpen implosion and another loss.

2. “We obviously haven’t been playing to our standards, but we know the kind of club that we are, especially the way we started off,” Fried said. “That standard that we have, we’re going to get back to it.”

The Yankees have now lost Fried’s last three starts as he couldn’t make a one-run lead stand up for the second straight start. Fernando Cruz couldn’t strand the baserunners he inherited from Fried, Angel Chivilli proved why the Rockies were willing to part with a 23-year-old with his velocity and Ryan Yarbrough got blasted for four earned runs in 2 1/3 innings.

The offense decided to take another day off as they have nearly every day for the last two weeks. Aaron Judge provided a solo home run in the first, Giancarlo Stanton crushed a two-run home run in the third and Ben Rice hit a solo home run in the sixth and that was the entirety of the Yankees’ offense as they were outhit for the 10th time in their last 12 games, falling to 4-8 in that span.

3. When Aaron Boone’s daily plan of getting seven innings from his starter or a bunch of three-run home runs from his offense failed once again, he turned to the only move he knows: getting ejected. The Yankees were already trailing by three runs and the balk call had no impact on the game, but Boone needed to hang his hat on something.

Boone called the 2025 Yankees “the best team” he has had as manager of the Yankees. Yes, he thought the “best team” he had was the one that had to play in the Wild Card Series and lost in four games in humiliating fashion in the ALDS. Not the 2024 team that featured Juan Soto and went to the World Series or the 2019 team that won 103 games. So if Boone believes the 2025 team was his best team and the Yankees ran it back this season with the same roster then that means he feels the 2026 team is also the best team he has been given to manage. At 10-8 with losses in eight of 12, a struggling offense, a top-heavy rotation and a bullpen full of fringe major leaguers, things aren’t going so well.

4. The Law of Ex-Yankees was on peak display this week as Oswald Peraza returned to beat up on his former team. Peraza hit a first-inning, two-run home run off of Fried and hit a game-tying double in the sixth inning. He went 5-for-10 in the series with a double, two home runs, four RBIs, two walks and two stolen bases. It may take his replacement Ryan McMahon until the Fourth of July to achieve those stats.

“He looked like what we were excited about several years ago,” Boone said. “He absolutely hurt us.”

It’s possible it was just one series for Peraza, but it’s also possible he has figured it out and put it together in his age 25 season. With the Yankees, he was never given consistent playing time, was asked to play three different positions, and unfortunately, wasn’t born in New York City and raised in New Jersey as the organization’s Golden Boy Anthony Volpe was. Could you imagine if Volpe had the kind of series Peraza just had against any team? His eventual place in Monument Park would already be roped off.

5. Volpe started his rehab assignment in Double-A and he’s 1-for-5 with three strikeouts, so he’s right on track. Meanwhile, George Lombard Jr., who is Yankees fans’ way out of the Volpe experience is hitting .415/.478/.707 in Double-A with eight extra-base hits in 10 games. Lombard will turn 21 in June and then he will be the same age Volpe was when the Yankees made him their everyday shortstop despite having only played 22 games at Triple-A with just a .718 OPS there. Here’s to hoping Peraza goes on to have an awesome career and that Lombard Jr. is the real deal and the future at shortstop for the Yankees.

6. If it’s true that Judge is responsible for the in-between-every-pitch music and sound effects at Yankee Stadium then it tops his postseason performances, dropping the ball in Game 5 of the World Series and continuing to vouch for Boone as manager as the worst thing he has done in his career. The Stadium music and sound effects have ruined attending games. You can’t hear the person next to you, kids are covering their ears and I can’t imagine any elderly person enjoys it. I can’t imagine anyone enjoys it, other than Judge who wants Yankee Stadium to present a preposterous NBA atmosphere where music is played while the play is going on. Does anyone really want to hear the Backstreet Boys shouting “EVERYBODY! YEAHHHH! ROCK YOUR BODY! YEAHHHH!” while Trent Grisham waits for a 2-2 pitch?

7. Next up is a three-game series with the Royals, who are off to a horrendous 7-12 start, so for them, they are coming to the right place at the right time. Need to get your season on track? Come play the Yankees! The Yankees launched a five-game winning streak for the Athletics, a six-game winning streak for the Rays and let the Angels achieve a .500 record through 20 games, which is like winning the pennant in Anaheim.

8. The Royals have one player with an OPS above .747 and that’s their 9-hitter Kyle Isbel (.822) who famously hit the ball that was wind-aided in the Yankees’ favor to prevent Gerrit Cole from blowing Game 4 of the 2024 ALDS. Maikel Garcia is at .747 and Bobby Witt Jr. is a miserable .709 with no home runs this season. No home runs, Bobby? No problem! The Yankees just set a franchise record against the Angels for the most home runs allowed in a series, so the player who many believe can stop Judge’s MVP run is coming to the right place to fix his season.

9. The Royals arrive in the Bronx riding a four-game losing streak after being swept by the Tigers. The Royals can’t hit. Only the White Sox have scored fewer runs than the Royals in the AL this season. They can pitch though and that’s what scares me about this series because the Angels’ pitching is a laughingstock aside from Jose Soriano, and the Yankees missed facing Soriano in a four-game series and still had trouble scoring against the Angels outside of Monday’s 10-run outburst.

10. It will be Cam Schlittler against Michael Wacha on Friday. No Royal has ever faced Schlittler. The Yankees have seen Wacha a lot from his time in the AL East the numbers are ugly. No Yankee has an OPS higher than .778 against Wacha and Judge has a .393 OPS against him without a home run. On Saturday and Sunday, the Yankees will face back-to-back lefties, so get ready for a weekend full of Ben Rice sitting on the bench, Jazz Chisholm flailing at sliders low and away and Randal Grichuk enhancing his case to be designated for assignment the second a roster spot is needed.

1. After overcoming a two-run deficit to beat the Angels on Monday, the Yankees overcame a one-run deficit to beat the Angels on Wednesday for their second walk-off win in three games. A win is a win, but the reason the Yankees were trailing in those two games (and were shut down in the other game in the series) remains a disturbing trend for the Run It Back Bombers (who no longer hit bombs).

2. Again, a win is a win, and the Yankees need as many as they can get right now and all season. Their opportunity to build a massive early-season lead in the division when they were 8-2 has been destroyed and now they need to survive the muck and cluster that is the AL East. The entire division is separated by 3 1/2 games now and they are 0-3 in the division, which is reminiscent of how they played against the division last season.

3. “It’s a grind for us right now,” Aaron Boone said. “But I felt like there were a lot of tough, winning things that happened tonight for us.”

I’m not sure what “winning things” Boone is talking about? The Yankees scored three runs in the first two innings and didn’t score again until the ninth and needed the left side of the Angels’ infield to not catch a routine pop-up to give them a chance to win. Luis Gil blew a three-run lead and the offense let the starter with the highest ERA among all starters with at least 100 innings pitched from last season go 6 2/3 innings against them. But sure, “a lot of tough, winning things” happened!

4. Amed Rosario and Jordan Romano have single-handedly kept the last nearly two weeks from catastrophe. Here are the Yankees’ last 10 games:

April 5: Blow three-run lead with Max Fried on the mound for a loss
April 7: Rosario hits two home runs to carry offense
April 8: One hit over the final eight innings in a loss
April 9: One-hit for the game in a loss
April 10: Blow early two-run lead in a loss
April 11: Blow three different leads in a loss
April 12: One-hit through first six innings in a loss
April 13: Blow three different leads, thankfully Romano blows the game
April 14: Two-hit over the first seven innings in a loss
April 15: Blow three-run lead, thankfully Romano blows the game

The only thing standing between the Yankees and an eight-game losing streak is Romano. The only things standing between them and a 10-game losing streak are Romano and Rosario. There haven’t been signs of “tough” things or “winning things” from the Yankees of late and there certainly weren’t on Wednesday.

5. The offense remains the team’s biggest problem, but then again, who could have seen this coming? Who could have imagined Trent Grisham wouldn’t replicate his one outlier season and that Jazz Chisholm playing for a contract wouldn’t crumble and that Austin Wells wouldn’t take the next step in his development and that a bunch of right-handed bench bats who are grateful to still be in the majors wouldn’t turn back the clock? No one could have imagined any of this.

6. Aside from Ben Rice’s stunning .333 batting average, Giancarlo Stanton is the next highest at .274 as he’s in a 4-for-33 slump and still sitting on one home run for the season. There are eight Yankees hitting .191 or below and seven Yankees have an OPS below .652. Chisholm used the “It’s cold” excuse for his disastrous start last week, but since they the Yankees have played indoors in Tampa and in mid-80s weather in the Bronx and he’s still not hitting.

7. The Yankees were outhit again (7-6). Since April 3, the Yankees have been outhit in nine of 11 games. They outhit the Angels on Monday and were tied in hits with the Marlins on Easter. Giancarlo Stanton went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. His OPS is down to .709 and he’s still sitting on one home run, so I guess it’s true that poor hitting is contagious. Ryan McMahon also put up another 0-for as his OPS is down to an impossible .379.

8. The bullpen combination of Tim Hill, Fernando Cruz, Brent Headrick and David Bednar threw four scoreless innings after Gil laid another egg. Gil either throws non-competitive pitches outside the strike zone for easy takes or throws the ball over the heart of the plate. He couldn’t hold a three-run lead and allowed three home runs. For a pitcher whose career has been marred by injuries and a high walk rate, it’s still amazing the Yankees didn’t move him after his 2024 Rookie of the Year campaign when they needed offense and when his stock would never be higher.

9. The only good thing about Gil starting is it means Fried starts the next game. And after watching Will Warren fail to get through four innings with a four-run lead on Monday, Ryan Weathers get blasted for back-to-back-to-back home runs in the first inning on Tuesday and Luis Gil blow a three-run lead on Wednesday, I desperately need to watch a Fried start. The Yankees desperately need a Fried start.

10. You know what I want on Thursday afternoon? I want Fried to go out and pitch seven-plus dominant innings, the offense to put up five-plus runs and a nice, clean, easy win to end this series and send Yankees fans into the weekend happy. Remember nice, clean, easy wins? The Yankees haven’t had one since the home opener back on April 3 against the Marlins. And after these last two weeks, April 3 feels like it was from a different season.

1. If I were manager of the Yankees, I would want the major-league leader in on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and OPS+ playing every single game, but that’s just me. Instead, Aaron Boone has kept Ben Rice out of the starting lineup in three of the last five games. (He also was held out of the lineup completely in the second game of the season.)

“Having the ability to cherry-pick when I fire Benny Rice in a big spot, I like that,” Aaron Boone said before sitting him on Tuesday.

2. So Boone would rather have Rice for one plate appearance of his choice instead of four-plus plate appearances throughout the game. Why stop there? Why not have Aaron Judge do the same? Why not use Max Fried and Cam Schlittler as middle relievers? Not only is Boone giving potential Rice at-bats to players whose careers would likely be over if the Yankees released them today, but he also let Ryan McMahon start against a lefty and not Rice.

3. Now Rice not playing on Tuesday night isn’t why the Yankees lost to the Angels, even if Rice did drive in the Yankees’ only run in his only plate appearance. A day after the best win of the season in which the Yankees blew three different leads before overcoming a two-run deficit in the ninth, they reminded everyone that momentum is only as good as the next day’s starting pitcher. And when the next day’s starting pitcher allows back-to-back-to-back home runs in the first inning, well, anyone who thought Monday’s win would get the Yankees on a roll was sorely mistaken. Ryan Weathers gave up four home runs and five earned runs in five innings. But hey, he struck out 10 batters, which is what the Yankees’ front office will be proud of.

“Three misfires to a really good low-ball hitting team is not a good start,” Weathers said. “I wish I could go back and re-do the first, but I’ve just got to take it and roll with it.”

4. Paul Blackburn allowed an earned run and four baserunners in an inning of work and Yerry de los Santos proved why he was in Triple-A up until Wednesday. The pitching was bad, as it has been a lot lately, and the offense was even worse, as it has been a lot lately.

5. The offense had two singles through the first seven innings, which is double what they had through seven innings in multiple games recently. The offense went 5-for-31 with no walks and 12 strikeouts against Reid Detmers, Chase Silseth and Ryan Zeferjahn. Detmers had only made it through five innings once in three previous starts this season and couldn’t be trusted to start a single game last season for a 72-win Angels team. But there he was dominating the Yankees at Yankee Stadium just like another household name lefty in Jeffrey Springs did last Thursday.

6. “Didn’t mount much” has a commanding lead in terms of Boone-ism usage this season. Boone used that phrase after Tuesday’s loss and he has had the opportunity to use the phrase to explain the offense’s performance against Drew Rasmussen and Steven Matz and Jeffrey Springs and Luis Severino and nearly every starter the Yankees have faced since they surprisingly got to Logan Webb on Opening Day.

7. Former Yankee Oswald Peraza went 3-for-3 with a walk and solo home run in the game for the Angels. He has an .838 OPS this season and in one game produced half as many hits as McMahon has this year. That’s notable because the Yankees were willing to take on the roughly $38 million owed to McMahon through 2027, so they wouldn’t have to play Peraza anymore.

“He killed us,” Boone said. “He stung three balls and then works a 12-pitch walk in his last at-bat. He was right in the middle of hurting us tonight.”

8. It’s startling that the Yankees were nearly shut out by the Angels, but even more startling that they have allowed 17 runs to the Angels in 18 innings. The Angels have averaged 4.6 runs per game in all of their other games.

“We’ve played a lot of close games and lost,” Paul Goldschmidt said, maybe not realizing 7-1 is not a close game. “We’ve been one play or pitch away in a lot of these games.”

.9 The Yankees are simply not a good team right now. Good teams don’t lose to bad teams with this kind of regularity. The Yankees have played six opponents to date and five of them didn’t reach the postseason last year and they are a loss away from being .500 against the Giants, Mariners, Marlins, Athletics, Rays and Angels. They don’t purposely bench the best statistical hitter in the league through three weeks. They don’t have a bullpen with a single trusted arm or a rotation with only two reliable starters. They don’t have a lineup with roughly five automatic outs in it every night and they certainly don’t have a manager still learning on the job now in his ninth season after spending his entire life around the game.

10. The Yankees are average, which is why they are 9-8 on the season and just one game over .500 with a chance to fall to .500 on Wednesday with their worst starter going. I knew the Boone Swoon that comes with every Yankees season under this manager would come at some point. I baked it into my projection for this team, I just didn’t think it would come so early, especially against this part of the schedule, which was supposed to be an easy part of the schedule.

1. Things are bad. Really bad. The Yankees have lost five straight and six of seven since Easter. If not for the help of Mark Leiter Jr. and the meltdown he had last Monday, things would be even worse. I can’t think of a worse possible second week of the season to endure, especially following what went on during the first week.

But that first week was clearly a mirage, just like most of the Aaron Boone era has been. This is the ninth season of waiting for the other shoe to drop with the Yankees under his management. The big Game 2 win at Fenway Park in the 2018 ALDS was immediately met by humiliation and elimination. The 2019 ALDS sweep of the Twins and Game 1 rout of the Astros in the ALCS were followed by a team-wide inability to hit for the remainder of the series. Minutes after DJ LeMahieu’s game-tying home run in Game 6 of that ALCS, Jose Altuve walked off the season. A season-saving win in Game 4 of the 2020 ALDS came a day before the Yankees scored a single run in a Game 5 loss. The 13-game winning streak to save the 2021 season was undone when they failed to finish as the first wild card in the final weekend of the season, had to go to Fenway and lost the one-game playoff. The 61-23 start in 2022 was followed by a 38-40 finish. The comeback in the 2022 ALDS against the Guardians was met with a sweep at the hands of the Astros in the ALCS. The re-signing of Aaron Judge that offseason was followed by him missing two months of the next season as a team that was 11 games over .500 in June finished two games over .500. A 49-21 start to 2024 led to a 45-47 finish, and the first World Series appearance in 15 years led to the most embarrassing inning and demise in World Series history. A 42-25 start to 2025 was followed by a 23-31 stretch as the team blew an eight-game lead over the Blue Jays and then was eliminated by the Blue Jays in the ALDS. So when the Yankees ripped off eight wins in their first 10 games in 2026, a week like this last week should have been expected.

2. The issue isn’t that the Yankees ave lost five straight and six of seven. Losses are going to happen. It’s how they have lost these games. The team is 0-6 in one-run games this season. Do you think that’s a coincidence? Do you think it’s a small sample size or bad luck? Or do you think it’s because the Yankees are managed by someone who uses J.C. Escarra and Randal Grichuk in game-changing, ninth-inning at-bats and someone who still hasn’t figured out how to utilize a bullpen? Do you think instead of blaming it on luck and chance maybe the blame should be placed on a roster constructed with a complete lack of situational hitters whose only way to score runs is to hit the ball over the fence?

3. Five of the Yankees’ nine everyday players have below-league-average OPS+ for the season and two of their four bench bats do as well. Trent Grisham has been 42 percent worse than league average, Austin Wells 45 percent, Jazz Chisholm 53 percent, Ryan McMahon 86 percent and Jose Caballero 87 percent. Escarra at -74 percent and Grichuk at -100 percent are breaking the laws of mathematics with their ineptitude. If Grichuk were to now play 100 percent better than he has, he would still be 100 percent worse than league average. You reading this right now have provided more value to the Yankees at the plate this season by simply watching the games from your home than Escarra or Grichuk have.

4. The lineup is a recipe for disaster on good days when the top of it is hitting because the bottom is full of automatic outs. At best, the Yankees give away one-third of their outs every game by employing the players they do. On a bad day, when the top of the order isn’t hitting (which it hasn’t been), the lineup is an atrocity.

This isn’t a mistake. This is by design. The Yankees purposely ran it back with the same position players to create this lineup. This isn’t the product of injuries to starters and more injuries to the best backups. This isn’t the 2019 Replacement Yankees relying on Mike Tauchman to carry them for weeks. The lineup you see is the lineup the Yankees wanted this season. So when I wrote endlessly about my fear of running it back all offseason, the worst possible scenario is what I envisioned, and that’s what the Yankees are providing.

5. It would help if the Yankees had more than a couple trustworthy relievers in the bullpen to win close games, but they don’t have that either. Brian Cashman let his two best relievers from this time last year leave through free agency and replaced them with in-house options he didn’t feel were good enough to be on the major-league roster at the end of last season. But even if the Yankees had better bullpen options, it’s hard to imagine Boone properly using them given the way he let Ryan Yarbrough face Chandler Simpson on Sunday after the Yankees cut the deficit to one run. Why not Tim Hill there in the seventh? Hill had thrown one pitch (yes, one pitch) over the previous four days.

6. Unless the Yankees can outhit Boone or outpitch him with efforts like Max Fried and Cam Schlittler gave the first two times through the rotation, it’s going to be very hard for the Yankees to win close games, just like it has been in the past. When you have a manager who thinks Grichuk should bat instead of a borderline Hall of Famer in Paul Goldschmidt with the game on the line, only to admit after the game that Goldschmidt should have hit, you get the type of results the Yankees have produced in the last five games, games in which hits have been harder to come by than logical Boone decisions. After getting their asses kicked by their own division last season, the Yankees are 0-3 to start this one.

7. You would think the least the Yankees could do is play error-free, clean baseball in the field since they can’t manage, hit or pitch with any reliability. But they can’t do that either. The way they pissed away the late innings on Saturday and then let the Rays tack on two runs on Sunday was appalling. But that’s Boone baseball. Being a laughingstock defensively when the ball is put in play is how this team has always played under Boone. The difference between the Yankees and Rays aside from hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll is that Kevin Cash squeezes every last bit of talent and strategic options out of his team, puts his players in the best possible position to succeed and manages a game by utilizing the individual skillsets of his players. Boone has trouble filling out a sensible lineup card, seems to pull relievers out of a hat for the order in which they are used and sits around waiting for a three-run home run or a shutout from a starter so the Yankees can shake hands at the end of a game.

8. What went on with Chisholm to end Saturday’s game is something I would rather not think about again for the rest of my life, and yet, it’s the only thing I can think about when I see Chisholm’s name or face. His admission that he doesn’t know the rules of force outs as a professional baseball player seeking a nine-figure contract was mystifying. But for as crazy and truly unbelievable as it was to hear those words come out of Chisholm’s mouth, it was even more so to hear Boone say that Chisholm does know the rule after Chisholm told everyone he didn’t. There’s sticking up and defending your players, and then there’s whatever Boone is now doing. It’s one thing to tell everyone a starter had “good stuff” on a day he was pulled in the third inning, but to basically tell everyone you know the inner workings of Chisholm’s brain better than Chisholm does, well, we’ve officially gone off the deep end. I have also said Boone will defend his players to no end, but saying a player knows something they said they don’t know when the players provided that information on his own volition is really to “no end.”

(Chisholm went 2-for-13 in the three games in Tampa in a dome after saying he hasn’t hit yet because of the cold weather.)

9. “Good compete today as far as finishing,” Boone said after Sunday’s loss.

The Yankees didn’t finish anything. They lost another one-run game.

Boone got testy when asked about McMahon’s continued offensive struggles, telling the media they “love to bring up his name.”

Yes, people tend to love to bring up a player the team targeted with a trade, agreeing to take on the $40 million owed to him. A player who is 4-for-35 on the season with no extra base hits through mid-April. The funniest moment of Sunday’s game came when McMahon was up with two outs in the ninth and the tying and go-ahead runs on base and Joe Girardi said, “This could turn his whole season around.” McMahon then swung at the first pitch and weakly grounded out to first to end the game.

“We’re going to hit,” Boone said, “there’s no doubt in my mind.”

There should be some doubt.

Boone also called this team “a new group” as the organization-wide stance to never reference “running it back” from 2025 to 2026 seems to be still alive and well.

10. It’s back to the Bronx to host a four-game series against the Angels. The Angels are 8-8, aren’t any good and seem destined for another last-place finish in the AL West. And because of that, every Yankees fan should be worried about this matchup. When you get nearly swept by the A’s at home and then get swept by the Rays, it’s hard to have any confidence in this team. And if the top of the order doesn’t hit the ball over the fence, they’ll make the Angels look as good as they made the A’s and Rays look.