1. The weekend couldn’t have started out worse with Devin Williams blowing his second games in as many appearances. After blowing a four-run lead on Saturday in Tampa, Williams blew a one-run lead on Friday to the Blue Jays. It was the first time he entered a game with only one run to work with, and he gave up that run and two more without recording an out.

It took Clay Holmes five months of blown saves last season for him to be removed from the closer role. It only took Williams a month after allowing 20 baserunners and 12 earned runs in just eight innings.

“Being a closer is a position you have to earn and you have to keep earning to continue to be in that role,” Williams said. “I haven’t been doing that. It’s disappointing.”

The wild part about how bad Williams’ numbers are is that all of this damage has come without allowing a home run. Eight singles, four doubles, seven walks and a hit batter. An impressive combination of ineptitude.

Everyone treated the update of Williams’ removal from his role as news on Sunday. No one should be surprised that a pitcher who single-handedly cost the Yankees two games in six days was removed from being the closer when the team has another elite option already in place.

2. Luke Weaver has been exceptional since the beginning of last season. This season he has allowed three hits over 14 scoreless innings and has stranded all five inherited runners, and now he moves back into the ninth-inning role where he was at the end of last season.

“I prepare the same way,” Weaver said. “I try to not look at the situation any different. I need to get outs.”

I wish the Yankees would operate without a set closer. Because now Weaver will be attached to the ninth inning (and maybe used for an out or two in the eighth here and there), when he’s most valuable pitching when the game needs him the most. Maybe that’s in the sixth inning with two on and the heart of the order coming up. Maybe that’s in the seventh inning of a one-run game with the tying run in scoring position and the lineup turning over. I don’t like that Weaver is now the “ninth-inning guy” when the game can be ruined before he ever gets into it.

3. The Yankees answered back from their latest late-game collapse with a sweep of Sunday’s doubleheader. In the first game, Max Fried started, and when Fried starts, the Yankees win, and they did again, 11-2.

The Yankees trailed 1-0 in the bottom of the third before Kevin Gausman fell apart.

After a couple of walks and an Aaron Judge single to the wall in right (that Oswaldo Cabrera inexplicably didn’t score from second on in what was another example of the Aaron Boone Yankees’ sloppiness), Cody Bellinger hit a sacrifice fly to tie the game at 1. Gausman was an out away from getting out of the inning, but then walked Paul Goldschmidt, Jazz Chisholm and Anthony Volpe consecutively to score two runs. (You know you suck if you’re walking Chisholm and Volpe with the bases loaded.) The Yankees led 3-1 when Austin Wells came up with the bases loaded, worked a nine-pitch at-bat, and on that ninth pitch, hit a bases-clearing double to center field to break the game open. (It felt weird to experience the Yankees getting a hit to break a game open.)

With Fried on the mound, the rest of the game became a formality. The Yankees plated three more in the fifth, one in the sixth and one in the eighth. Fried finished the day with one earned run allowed over six innings, to remain undefeated on the season with a 1.43 ERA. The Yankees are 6-0 when he starts.

4. I was worried the Yankees used up all of their runs for the day in the first game, but Trent Grisham took care of that fear with a leadoff home run off of Chris Bassitt. It was the first home run Bassitt had allowed this season.

Clarke Schmidt — in his third start — allowed just one hit over five innings (but did walk four). That one hit was an Anthony Santander blast to the second deck in right.

With the game tied at 1 after five, Boone made the right decision to remove Schmidt from the game (90 pitches) rather than let him face Santander for a third time. The idea anyone would let Schmidt face Santander a third time seems outrageous as a possibility, but with Boone you never know.

Tim Hill pitched a scoreless sixth and Judge greeted Bassitt with a first-pitch home run to lead off the bottom half of the inning. After a Chisholm single, a Jasson Dominguez RBI double and a J.C. Escarra RBI single, the Yankees led 4-1.

Escarra added the first home run of his career in the eighth (a long home run into the right-field bleachers) in the 5-1 win, and we got a look at the new eighth-and-ninth-inning tandem of Fernando Cruz and Weaver. We actually got a look at the new sixth-seventh-eighth-ninth formula with Hill, Mark Leiter Jr., Cruz and Weaver. Those four combined to allow two hits and no walks with six strikeouts over four scoreless innings. The first game with Williams out of the late-and-close equation was a resounding success.

5. Volpe looked the best he has in nearly a month in the doubleheader (4-for-7 with a double and home run), but don’t let him fool you. His home run in the first game came off a Triple-A pitcher and we have seen this from Volpe before where he leads many to believe he has turned the corner only to then spend the next four weeks without an extra-base hit while playing every day. He needs to be consistently productive for an extended period of time for anyone to think he has figured out how to hit in the majors.

6. It wasn’t a great day for Bellinger (1-for-7), but what day is a great day for Bellinger? He was in the lineup for both games of the doubleheader, while Grisham sat the first one and proceeded to go 1-for-2 with a home run and two walks in the second one to reach base three times. Bellinger has been on base three times in a game once since March 29. He has one home run since March 29. But he and his .570 OPS are going to keep on playing because he’s owed more than $20M by the Yankees this year and Grisham is owed $5M. Owed money always trumps performance.

7. Judge finally hit his eighth home run of the season after getting screwed in Tampa and then hitting the top of the giant wall in the deepest part of the park in Cleveland over the last week. Judge should always bat second. Either Grisham or Ben Rice can lead off, but then it should be Judge and the other one who isn’t leading off behind Judge. So:

Grisham
Judge
Rice

or

Rice
Judge
Grisham

Either of those work, though I prefer the first one.

That makes the best possible lineup this:

Grisham, CF
Judge, RF
Rice, DH
Goldschmidt, 1B
Chisholm, 2B
Dominguez, LF
Wells, C
Volpe, SS
Cabrera, 3B

That is the optimal Yankees lineup at the moment, even if it’s not a lineup we will see because it doesn’t include Bellinger and has Volpe too low for Boone’s liking.

8. Dominguez quietly had a nice first month in his first full season as a major leaguer. He’s fifth on the teams in hits (despite being seventh in plate appearances), second on the teams in doubles (7), has less strikeouts than Chisholm and Volpe, has yet to be caught stealing (3-for-3), is hitting .315/.383/.500 against right-handed pitching and is hitting nine percent better than league average overall.

Hopefully as he gets more plate appearances against lefties (36) his .450 OPS against them will improve. It’s never going to be the .883 it is against righties, but something respectable in the 6s would be nice. Either way, I’m happy with Dominguez through the first month.

9. Offensively, I’m also happy with Cabrera, who’s hitting .278. Cabrera just needs to continue to hit for average consistently, draw the occasional walk and hit the occasional homer and he’ll be fine, as long as he plays solid defense. The solid defense part seems to be the hardest as Cabrera has been throwing balls to first base all over the place. He has five errors on the year, and while I think he’ll be fine, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the throws coming from the left side of the infield. For as good as Goldschmidt has been over there, things would look a lot worse if an average first baseman had been playing with the way Cabrera and Volpe throws have been.

10. It’s off to Baltimore for the first series of the season against the struggling Orioles. The Orioles are seven games under .500, in last place in the AL East and 6 1/2 games behind the Yankees with an AL-worst minus-39 run differential.

The Yankees will see Tomoyuki Sugano for the first time ever in the series opener. Sugano doesn’t strike anyone out with just nine strikeouts in 28 innings this season, but he doesn’t walk anyone either with five free passes so far.

The Orioles will see Will Warren for the first time ever in the series opener as well. Warren was solid in his last start, but he tends to alternate good starts with disastrous ones. He needs to attack the strike zone, believe in his stuff and let the ball get put in play. He can’t be afraid to pitch in the zone and he can’t nibble around the edges, which how he gets in trouble with deep counts and walks. Go out and challenge the Orioles and make them earn it. If he does that, he should be fine, like nearly every starter has been against the Orioles this season.

1. The Yankees needed a win in Cleveland on Wednesday, and thanks to their offense and Carlos Rodon they got a 5-1 one. And when I say offense, I mean Ben Rice, Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt since those three are the Yankees’ offense.

Those three combined to go 6-for-12 with three walks, three extra-base hits and drove in four of the Yankees’ five runs. The rest of the lineup was 5-for-25 with 10 strikeouts. The rest of the lineup is a problem.

2. Jasson Dominguez and Oswaldo Cabrera aren’t necessarily part of the problem since Dominguez has 48 career games to his name and Cabrera is unnecessarily benched nearly every other day. But for the rest of the lineup excluding those two, yes, it’s a problem.

The two biggest problems are Cody Bellinger and Anthony Volpe. One will seemingly be given endless opportunities to bat second, third and fourth in the lineup, and the other has been given endless opportunities since the day he was called up at the beginning of the 2023 season. One is protected by owed money and the other is protected by the organization’s belief he will eventually figure it out. Together, they are destroying rallies, having issues making contact and are magnets for double plays.

3. I wrote this about Anthony Volpe after Tuesday’s game:

It’s hard to watch Anthony Volpe bat. It’s cringeworthy. Volpe went 0-for-3 with a walk and strikeout in the game, but nothing was worse than his final at-bat against Hunter Gaddis in the eighth. With the tying run on second and the go-ahead run on first, Gaddis blew a middle-middle 95-mph fastball right past Volpe to begin the at-bat. Knowing Volpe’s inability to hit fastballs, even ones in the zone, Gaddis threw three more to set up a 2-2 count. Volpe had seen four pitches, all fastballs. Gaddis then threw a slider about two feet off the plate, but Volpe, guessing fastball and knowing he would need to cheat to catch up to it had committed to swing. Once Volpe recognized slider, his hips had already flown open, his bat was on the plane of where he thought the pitch would end up, and instead he missed it by a laughable amount.

Volpe followed up that performance with an 0-for-5, four-strikeout game on Wednesday. His slash line is down to .198/.295/.385. Volpe hasn’t homered since April 2. He has one multi-hit game and two extra-base hits since April 5. This isn’t a slump. This is what he is, now sitting at an 84+ OPS in 1,395 plate appearances. Continuing to bat Volpe sixth (like he has been) would be unbelievable, and yet totally believable with how he has been treated since he was called up. If Volpe is batting sixth on Friday against the Blue Jays, all you can do is laugh. (Get ready to laugh.)

4. All you can do is laugh if Cody Bellinger is batting third as well. (More laughter coming.) Bellinger has hit one home run since March 29. He has one double this season. He’s hitting .177/.236/.291. For as bad as Volpe has been, Bellinger wishes he had a .295 on-base percentage and .385 slugging percentage.

Here is what I wrote about Bellinger after Monday’s game:

Bellinger is a big problem because he’s going to play because of owed money and his name and for the front office to justify the trade for him. The problem is he’s going to bat near the top of the lineup when he plays because of those things, whether he’s producing or not. The biggest problem is that there’s precedent for Bellinger being this bad.

It looks like the Yankees are going to get the version of Bellinger the Dodgers gave up on and not the one who saved his career with the Cubs.

5. Volpe can’t bat sixth. Bellinger can’t bat third. Bellinger shouldn’t even be in the lineup. This is what the lineup should be on Friday:

Ben Rice, DH
Aaron Judge, RF
Trent Grisham, CF
Paul Goldschmidt, 1B
Austin Wells, C
Jasson Dominguez, LF
Jazz Chisholm, 2B
Anthony Volpe, SS
Oswaldo Cabrera, 3B

6. We all know that won’t be the lineup. Bellinger will play because he’s 3-for-4 with a home run off Jose Berrios. (Bellinger has yet to hit any pitcher this season he has good career numbers off of.) Grisham should be back, and if he is, you have to play with how good he has been. Judge obviously plays and Rice is only a designated hitter it seems. That means it’s likely the development of Dominguez is stunted and he’s benched so Bellinger can play. Not only that, but Boone will continue to do his nonsensical lefty-right alteration throughout the lineup to plan for some late-inning lane that will likely never come.

7. Nothing will change because it takes an inordinate amount of underperformance for the Yankees to make a change, especially if the proposed changes involve the Golden Boy (who has been treated differently than any other prospect during the Boone era) and Bellinger, a player the Yankees traded for, and the team will stop at nothing to prove they were right about a underperforming player they traded for. Just ask Josh Donaldson, Aaron Hicks and Alex Verdugo.

8. The Yankees have too many holes in the lineup that anyone who is giving them offense needs to play, regardless of their expected role coming into the season, and anyone who isn’t hitting can’t play every day, regardless of their expected role coming into the season. Reward success. It’s a simple concept. Don’t keep running the same players out there in the same order waiting for something to happen. It’s the same way the team operates when they get a pair of runners on with no outs and wait for a three-run home run that doesn’t come before the inning-crushing double play.

9. Carlos Rodon turned in the best start of his season (7 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 8 K), and didn’t allow a home run for a second straight start. Progress! It’s frustrating to know that version of Rodon exists, but too many times we get the version of Rodon who unraveled against the Diamondbacks, Tigers and Giants. The left-handed A.J. Burnett.

The good news is he is one off the American League lead for strikeouts with 45 (Cole Ragans has 46). The bad news is he leads the majors with 18 walks. Combine a lot of walks with his penchant for giving up the long ball and you have a frustrating starter who at times can be dominant like he was in Cleveland, or a disaster like he mostly is. Rodon can’t be trusted (like Burnett) and likely never will be because he can unravel in any start in the matter of pitches, and once the unraveling start it never ends. You just have to pray he has more starts like he did on Wednesday than he does clunkers.

10. The Blue Jays are in the Bronx this week and they arrive in the middle of a five-game losing streak. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything with Carlos Carrasco getting the ball for the Yankees on Friday. Carrasco in Yankee Stadium is about as good of a matchup you can ask for in the league to end a losing streak. The Yankees are going to need their offense to extend the Blue Jays’ losing streak to six, and by offense I mean more than just Judge, Rice and Goldschmidt.

1. A two-run lead with 12 outs to go and a completely rested bullpen. That’s the position the Yankees found themselves in on Tuesday night in Cleveland. Twelve outs to get between some combination of Mark Leiter Jr., Tim Hill, Fernando Cruz, Luke Weaver and Devin Williams. It may not have been as easy of a winning formula as Max Fried to Weaver to Williams, but in terms of easy-to-navigate scenarios, it wasn’t exactly difficult.

Aaron Boone made it difficult. After getting five shutout innings from Will Warren in what had been his best start in the majors, Boone decided to push Warren a little more. Boone’s obsession with stealing outs knows no boundaries, even if a pitcher who has never pitched more than 5 1/3 innings in his career and is about to face the top of the lineup for a third time should be the boundary.

Boone thought it would be wise to let Warren pitch to Steven Kwan — one of the game’s premier leadoff hitters — to begin the sixth. Kwan had already singled off Warren earlier in the game after picking up two hits in the first game of the series. He singled again off Warren to lead off the sixth. (Kwan is now hitting .341/.400/.505 on the season.)

OK, leadoff man on and the 2-3-4 hitters due up. Now Boone would pull Warren with the tying run at the plate.

No, he wouldn’t.

He would let Warren face Nolan Jones for a third time in the game. Jones promptly singled.

The tying run was now on base and the go-ahead run at the plate in Jose Ramirez. Apparently, that was enough for Boone to remove Warren and bring in Leiter Jr., who could have easily started the inning clean.

2. Leiter Jr. struck out Ramirez on three pitches to bring up Kyle Manzardo. Stephen Vogt knew he would need to be creative to score runs after Ramirez was retired, so he called for a double steal with Kwan and Jones. The two took off and J.C. Escarra tried to pick-and-throw Leiter Jr.’s pitch rather than simply catch it, and it created a passed ball. Kwan raced around to score and Jones reached third. The Yankees’ lead was now 2-1 with the tying run at third and one out.

Manzardo then hit a ball to Aaron Judge, who dove and missed it, allowing Jones to score the tying run and Manzardo to go to second with a “double”. After getting Carlos Santana to ground out for the second out of the inning, Manzardo moved to third. Leiter Jr. then walked the light-hitting Bo Naylor and allowed an infield “single” to Angel Martinez on a ball Anthony Volpe misplayed to score the go-ahead run.

3. The rest of the game became a formality with the Guardians’ elite relievers slamming the door on the Yankees. If you thought the Yankees would mount a comeback, you must not know these Yankees.

These Yankees were on full display on Tuesday. The game was a good summarization of the Boone Yankees as a whole, representing the same type of team the Yankees have fielded for the last eight seasons. It was the type of the game the Dodgers spent all season laughing about at the Yankees’ expense. It had poor managing, incapable hitting and disastrous defense.

4. When the Yankees led off the fourth with back-to-back walks to bring up Volpe, Boone let his shortstop, who is 15 percent worse than league average for his career swing away. And swing away into a inning-destroying 6-4-3 double play he did. When the Guardians had to two on with no one out in the sixth, they put pressure on the Yankees, created a shitstorm and watched the Yankees unravel and lose the game. The Yankees spent all game waiting around for a multi-run home run to save them and it never came, and when they don’t get said home run, they lose.

5. The Yankees’ offense is essentially Judge, Ben Rice and Trent Grisham (and singles-hitting Paul Goldschmidt). Their rotation is Max Fried and their bullpen is Luke Weaver. It’s a top-heavy team whose flaws are outrageous. Judge is hitting .411, Rice has a 1.004 OPS. Fried has a 1.42 ERA and the Yankees are 5-0 in his starts. Luke Weaver has allowed two hits and no runs in 12 innings. What happens when Judge cools off even a little? What happens if or when the clock strikes midnight on Rice and Grisham? What happens if the Yankees lose a Fried start? What happens if Weaver blows a late lead?

Those things are likely to happen, which is why losses like Saturday’s and Tuesday’s hurt so much. The Yankees need to win the games they are supposed to win, the games in which they hold a late lead. Unless they are going to start winning games they aren’t supposed to, and so far this season you can say that has happened once at most (their 4-2 win over the Royals).

6. Tanner Bibee had been rocked in his two starts not against the Royals, allowing 13 earned runs and seven home runs in 9 2/3 innings. It was the perfect matchup for the Yankees to put up runs, and instead, they scored two runs over six innings, with one of those runs coming on the first pitch of the game. A putrid performance.

7. The Guardians do the little things on the field and do them right because they have to. They create runs, they cause havoc on the basepaths, they play exceptional defense and they try to get to their bullpen as quickly as possible. They can’t sit around and wait for a home run that isn’t going to come because it won’t. They can’t play station-to-station baseball or they won’t score. They make the most of what they have.

8. The decision to steal outs with Warren with all five “elite” relievers available was egregious by Boone. But if the offense could have done more or done anything really, he wouldn’t have been put in the position to ruin the game. When the Yankees play close games, they are going to lose a lot of them with Boone at the helm. The Yankees are going to play a lot of close games with so many automatic outs in the lineup.

Each day I write about how bad Cody Bellinger has been and each day he makes things worse, as he went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. Guess where he hit, yet again? Third. His OPS is down to .519.

Jazz Chisholm was 0-for-1 with a hit by pitch and two walks, and that’s actually a really good day for Chisholm, who was passed yesterday for the league lead in strikeouts. Congratulations, Jazz! (He also made a throwing error in the game.)

9. It’s hard to watch Anthony Volpe bat. It’s cringeworthy. Volpe went 0-for-3 with a walk and strikeout in the game, but nothing was worse than his final at-bat against Hunter Gaddis in the eighth. With the tying run on second and the go-ahead run on first, Gaddis blew a middle-middle 95-mph fastball right past Volpe to begin the at-bat. Knowing Volpe’s inability to hit fastballs, even ones in the zone, Gaddis threw three more to set up a 2-2 count. Volpe had seen four pitches, all fastballs. Gaddis then threw a slider about two feet off the plate, but Volpe, guessing fastball and knowing he would need to cheat to catch up to it had committed to swing. Once Volpe recognized slider, his hips had already flown open, his bat was on the plane of where he thought the pitch would end up, and instead he missed it by a laughable amount. After Volpe’s inning-ending act, it took Cade Smith four pitches to close out the ninth. When the going gets though, these Yankees get going.

10. The Yankees had a four-run lead in the ninth on Saturday and lost. They had a late two-run lead with their entire bullpen rested and lost on Tuesday. A 3-1 trip to Tampa that could have been more wasn’t and now a seven-game road trip that started out promising is on the brink of being a 3-4 letdown. That is, unless Carlos Rodon and the offense can save it.

1. When the Yankees get shut down by the opposing starting pitcher, they tend to have an opportunity early on to get to them, don’t and end up being stifled for the remainder of the outing.

It happened on April 2 against the Diamondbacks’ Zac Gallen. The Yankees had second and third with one out against the righty in the second inning and failed to score and Gallen settled in to throw 6 2/3 scoreless innings (with 13 strikeouts).

It happened on April 8 in Detroit against Tarik Skubal. The Yankees led off that game with back-to-back singles, couldn’t get either of them in and Skubal found his groove to retire 16 straight in a Yankees’ shutout loss.

It happened again on Monday in Cleveland. Gavin Williams isn’t Gallen or Skubal, but he certainly has the stuff to be, and like the other two, Williams was in trouble early in the game. The Yankees were gifted a leadoff error by defensive wizard Brayan Rocchio and also had two walks in the first and didn’t score a run. Cody Bellinger unsurprisingly hit into a double play and Jazz Chisholm struck out and the Yankees were held scoreless.

2. Williams kept the Yankees off the board until the seventh when he gave up a two-run home run to Jasson Dominguez right before being relieved at 104 pitches. While Williams (6.1 IP, 7 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 8 K, 1 HR) was throwing up zeros, Clarke Schmidt (4 IP, 7 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 3 BB, 7 K, 2 HR) was throwing batting practice to light-hitting Guardians.

“I felt like he was a little off command-wise,” Aaron Boone said, stating the obvious.

Schmidt put 10 baserunners on in four innings, allowed up five earned runs and two home runs. Lefties mashed off of him, especially Jose Ramirez and Kyle Manzardo who hit back-to-back homers off Schmidt in the third.

“We did a good job limiting the damage,” Schmidt said in all seriousness.

3. Prior to Monday, Schmidt had made three career starts at Progressive Field with this line: 13 IP, 16 H, 10 R, 9 ER, 9 BB, 17 K, 3 HR, 6.23 ERA, 1.923 WHIP. Add in him blowing Game 3 of the 2022 ALDS, being unable to get through five innings in Game 4 of the 2024 ALCS and Monday night, and it’s a good thing the Yankees don’t play in Cleveland again this season.

“I think I was able to make some good pitches,” Schmidt said after getting lit up.

4. The Guardians had a 6-0 lead after six, but the Yankees put together one of their patented trick-you-into-thinking-they-may-actually-come-back comebacks that fall just short. The Yankees scored two in the seventh (Dominguez home run) and another two in the eighth on a Chisholm home run. In the ninth, they brought the tying run to the plate in Aaron Judge, but he struck out against Cade Smith to end the game.

If only the Yankees had scored in the first when they had three baserunners and Williams had tiring at 25 pitches. It may have not mattered since Schmidt was so bad anyway, but the inability to move runners over and get them in and score runs while making outs continues to be a problem during the Boone era. It’s why the team has been awful in extra innings games since the implementation of the automatic runner. The situational hitting remains poor and the manager doesn’t have the creativity to build runs unless someone is hitting the ball over the wall.

5. When you remove two Yankees from the lineup who have been hitting the ball over the wall in Ben Rice and Trent Grisham (who is out on paternity leave), it’s hard to win. Rice was held out of the game after being hit on the elbow on Saturday (despite all tests coming back negative), however, he was able to pinch hit in the ninth. So Rice (who is only used as the designated hitter) was healthy enough to bat once in the game, but not four times? Was his elbow going to break with three more plate appearances?

6. It’s hard to win without Rice and Grisham because so much of the lineup sucks. Austin Wells went 0-for-5 and his OPS is down to .687. Bellinger (.548 OPS) may as well not bring a bat to the plate and hope the pitcher throws four balls before three strikes. Chisholm (.680 OPS) seems to hit a home run every few days and do nothing else in between. Anthony Volpe has a .614 OPS since April 2 with 20 strikeouts in 60 at-bats. Pablo Reyes isn’t a major-league player.

The lineup is essentially Judge, Rice, Paul Goldschmidt (who is basically a singles hitter), Oswaldo Cabrera (who is also a singles hitter), Dominguez against righties (.926 OPS against righties and .390 OPS against lefties) and Grisham when he plays, which isn’t every day since the Yankees have to play Bellinger because of owed money.

7. Bellinger is a big problem because he’s going to play because of owed money and his name and for the front office to justify the trade for him. The problem is he’s going to bat near the top of the lineup when he plays because of those things, whether he’s producing or not. The biggest problem is that there’s precedent for Bellinger being this bad.

Bellinger won the NL MVP in 2019 when the baseball was juiced and Brett Gardner (28 home runs) and Gleyber Torres (38 home runs) became power hitters. Since then, Bellinger has a 99+ OPS in 575 games and 2,352 plate appearances. He’s a .242/.304/.421 hitter since the start of 2020.

Within these last five-plus seasons, Bellinger posted a .542 OPS in 2021 and a .654 OPS in 2022, and the Dodgers moved on from him. The Dodgers –the best organization in baseball — moved on from their homegrown, 2017 Rookie of the Year, 2019 MVP and Gold Glove center fielder after his age 26 season. That’s not great.

8. The Yankees have used Bellinger in the 2-hole hoping he would mash in-zone pitches expected with Judge behind him. They have used him as Judge’s protection. They have used him to clean up. He has done nothing in every spot. The season may only be 14 percent through, but again, there is precedent for Bellinger being a complete zero at the plate for an entire season. And if this is one of those seasons from Bellinger in a year where a single game could decide the AL East or a wild-card berth, the Yankees can’t afford to play him over other bats, whether those other bats are owed less money or not.

9. Bellinger isn’t the only problem, he’s just the biggest once. Chisholm, Volpe and Wells have been atrocious, Devin Williams has been a joke and every starter not named Max Fried has an ERA of at least 4.34. Despite their glaring issues, the Yankees are fortunately 14-9.

Schmidt was bad and Williams was solid, but the Yankees hit into three double plays in the game (one of them was bad luck on a Chisholm line drive), and when you hit into three double plays in six innings, it’s going to be difficult to win.

10. It’s going to be difficult to win on Tuesday as well. Will Warren gets the ball and based off of his Thursday night showing in Tampa (1.2 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 1 K), it’s hard to have much confidence in him. Tanner Bibee goes for the Guardians. Bibee has made four starts this season. Two of them were against the Royals, in which he 10 1/3 scoreless innings. The other two were against the Angels and Orioles, and he allowed 13 earned runs and seven home runs in 9 2/3 innings. The Yankees are going to need that Bibee to show up. They’re also going to need some combination of Bellinger, Wells, Volpe and Chisholm to show up and for Rice to play.

1. When the Yankees led off Thursday’s home game on the road against the Rays with three straight singles to take a 1-0 lead, I was feeling great about where the game was headed. When only one of those three baserunners came around to score, that great feeling quickly turned ominous.

The Yankees have struggled in the past against Taj Bradley (one run in 13 innings) and with runners on first and third with no outs and one run already in and the 4-5-6 hitters in the lineup due up, they had the opportunity to break the game open and didn’t. After Aaron Judge’s single scored Paul Goldschmidt, Bradley faced one batter over the minimum for the next 4 1/3 innings.

2. During those 4 1/3 innings, Will Warren gave a reminder to anyone who thought he may have turned the corner last Saturday against the Giants that he hasn’t. With Marcus Stroman on the injured list, Warren paid tribute to his teammate by putting up a Stroman-like line: 1.2 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 1 K. Warren couldn’t get through the second inning, needed 53 pitches to get five outs and got one swing-and-miss on those 53 pitches. When he was removed from the game, he left the bullpen needing to get 22 outs in the middle of a 13-game-in-13-days stretch, and he left with the bases loaded.

3. It’s rare for Aaron Boone to make a wise in-game pitching decision, considering his lack of feel for what’s unfolding on the field in front of him. But his decision to remove Warren in the second inning and turn the ball over to the bullpen saved the game, and helped lead the Yankees to a win. Had Warren stayed in with two outs and the bases loaded, he was either going to walk in a run or allow the bases to clear. Boone got in front of it for the first of only a handful of times in his seven-plus years as manager.

Ryan Yarbrough (2.2 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 1 BB, 1 K) managed to keep the damage to a minimum in relief of Warren, despite putting seven baserunners on in 2 2/3 innings, and Tim Hill (2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 2 K) put up a couple of zeros following Yarbrough.

4. The Yankees trailed 3-1 with one in the fifth until Oswaldo Cabrera hit his first home run of the season off of Bradley. I keep writing it in each of these Thoughts, but let Cabrera play every day at third. He had three hits in the game and his average is up to .308 and his OPS up to .757. PLAY HIM EVERY DAY until he gives you a reason not to.

5. After Cabrera homered, Goldschmidt singled and Ben Rice doubled. Judge walked and Cody Bellinger — with the bases loaded — hit the ball on the ground to score Goldschmidt and tie the game at 3. (That’s about all anyone can expect or ask of Bellinger at the moment: put the ball in play. He did his best to end the rally and inning with a double play, but managed to beat it out.)

6. The Yankees added a run in the sixth on a Jasson Dominguez groundout, and later in the inning, with the bases loaded and two outs, Rice singled in two more to give the Yankees a 6-3 lead, which is how it would stay.

Rice finished the game with a career-high four hits. He has a .317 average and 1.064 OPS and with each passing game he looks more and more like this is for real at the plate. He’s doing in front of Judge what Juan Soto did last year.

7. Jazz Chisholm has gone out of his way to complain about the weather since the start of the season as the Yankees have only played in frigid New York, Pittsburgh and Detroit. But now they’re in Tampa and Chisholm still went 0-for-3 with a walk. He was a pitch away from having a second walk, but the umpire called a 3-2 pitch low and away for a strike and Chisholm went wild, getting himself tossed in the process. Minutes after getting tossed he took to social media to voice his displeasure with the call only to later delete the message. Keep it together. One missed strike call isn’t why you’re hitting .169 with a .723 OPS. Having one non-home run hit in your last 11 games is why. Maybe try an approach that isn’t think every pitch thrown is going to be the equivalent of a middle-middle, 3-0 fastball and not take your “A” swing with every swing?

8. On a night when Boone needed to go to his bullpen in the second inning and clearly made Luke Weaver unavailable, he was able to piece together 22 outs between Yarbrough (8), Hill (6), Ian Hamilton (5) and Devin Williams (3). Williams had the easiest outing of his Yankees tenure with a six-pitch ninth. Williams, Weaver and Fernando Cruz will all be available on Friday.

9. They’ll only be needed on Friday if Carlos Rodon doesn’t suck the way he has in three of his four starts this season, and the way he has so many times as a Yankee. Rodon has allowed five home runs in 23 innings this season, and his ability combined with Steinbrenner Field isn’t ideal with the way the ball has been flying out of there.

10. The Yankees will need their offense to show up with Rodon on the mound, and unfortunately, they’re going against Drew Rasmussen, who has allowed one earned run and no home runs this season across three starts. It’s never been easy for the Yankees against the Rays in the Boone era and it won’t be for the rest of the weekend.