The Yankees scored 12 runs on Wednesday. It was four more runs than they had scored in their previous five games combined. One game doesn’t change how bad the offense is and it doesn’t change the fact they have now lost two series in a row.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Things are bad, real bad, and the Yankees’ 12-6 win over the Twins on Wednesday doesn’t change that. All that win did was salvage the final game of the series and momentarily pause the Yankees’ dismal play.

The Yankees opened the series by scoring one run in a 6-1 loss, a ninth-inning run that ended the Twins’ shutout bid. The Yankees were thoroughly dominated by old friend Sonny Gray, who threw seven shutout innings. The former Yankee has a 0.62 ERA in five starts this season. He had a 3.08 ERA in 24 starts last season. He had a 3.49 ERA in three seasons with the Reds and a 3.42 ERA in four-and-a-half years with the A’s. But for whatever reason, he had a 4.51 ERA in 195 2/3 innings as a Yankee, a full run higher than his 3.50 career ERA.

When Brian Cashman gave up on Sonny Gray after 2019, he said, “I don’t feel like we can go through the same exercise and expect different results,” and yet, the Yankees are going through the same exercise in 2023 as they did in 2022 and 2021 and 2020 with the offense, and most of the offense was here in 2019 and 2018 as well. So far, the results haven’t been different.

Part of Cashman’s all-or-nothing offenses was Joey Gallo (who the Yankees traded four prospects for) and then traded him away almost exactly a year later. Sure enough, there was Gallo hitting a moonshot against the Yankees on Monday (and again on Wednesday). Like Gray and like every other ex-Yankee, the Law of Ex-Yankees says every former Bronx Bomber has to perform well against them. Whether it’s Gray or Gallo or Thairo Estrada or Gio Urshela earlier this season or pitchers and players like Nathan Eovaldi, Eduardo Nunez and Steve Pearce in the past, it’s just the way it goes.

2. Monday was the second game in a row and third time in four games the Yankees scored a single run. Tuesday wasn’t much better, but it was technically better as the Yankees scored twice, losing 6-2.

“This was better than yesterday,” Aaron Boone said after Tuesday’s loss.

By Boone’s logic, if the Yankees could add a run each day to their previous day’s total then by the weekend they may have enough runs to win a game.

Thankfully, the Yankees didn’t have to wait until the weekend to score enough runs to win.

3. Wednesday’s 12-run outburst was refreshing. It was the most runs the Yankees have scored in a game this season and just the second time they have scored double digits (11 against the Guardians on April 11). Since that 11-2 win over the Guardians, here are the Yankees’ runs per game: 4, 2, 3, 6, 2, 2, 3, 9, 1, 3, 1, 1, 2, 12. That’s a lot of low numbers. That’s 51 runs in 14 games (3.64 runs per game) with 21 of the runs coming in two games. That means in the other 12 games, the Yankees scored 30 runs for 2.50 runs per game.

This isn’t anything new. The Yankees haven’t had a good offense for a long time. Since June 30 of last season they are 60-60. That’s not a small sample size. During that time, they nearly blew a 15 1/2-game lead, squeaked by the Guardians in the ALDS (the Guardians had the tying run at the plate in the bottom of ninth of a winner-take-all Game 5), were humiliated by the Astros in the ALCS, and now are scoring a reasonable amount of runs to win a game once per week.

4. Right now, the Yankees hold the third and final wild-card berth in the American League, so crazy Yankees homers have reminded me “If the season ended today, the Yankees would be in the playoffs.” Well, by that logic, if the season ended today, Willie Calhoun would be a middle-of-the-order bat for the Yankees, they would need to use Gerrit Cole and Nestor Cortes in the best-of-3 wild-card series, and if they were to survive it, they would then draw the Rays and have a combination of Clarke Schmidt, Jhony Brito and Domingo German starting the first two games of a best-of-5. I’m not sure how saying, “If the season ended today …” can be viewed as a good thing for the Yankees. This is a team that had the second-best World Series odds entering the season and is expected to compete for a championship. Yankees fans are now content with being the last team in a six-team postseason field?

5. As I wrote earlier in the week, this isn’t a slump, this is the Yankees offense. This is who they are, and there is limited help on the way. Harrison Bader and Josh Donaldson are upgrades over some of the current everyday options, but neither are going to carry the offense. They just won’t be the automatic outs their replacements have been. (That may be me underestimating just how bad Donaldson is and can be.)

Things are so bad offensively, that Calhoun and his -2.1 career WAR and career .697 OPS have been batting fifth. Fifth! For the New York Yankees in real games! By WAR, Calhoun is the worst player to have played in the majors since 2020. The entire majors. I thought it was bad 10 years ago when Ben Francisco, Brennan Boesch, Lyle Overbay and David Adams batted fifth for the Yankees, but the lineups the Yankees are playing in the first month of this season are nearly as bad.

“There’s no doubt in my mind Willie Calhoun can bang and is going to hit,” Boone said on Tuesday.

Boone isn’t talking about an early-20s top prospect playing his first games in the majors. He’s talking about the statistical worst player in Major League Baseball since 2020. There’s being positive and sticking up for your guys and then there’s just being an outright liar. Boone is the latter. He’s an outright liar. He lies about everything. He lies about injuries, performance, ability, you name it. I wouldn’t trust him to give me the time or tell me what day of the week it is.

If you’re looking for reinforcements in the minors, Jake Bauers has nine home runs and 20 RBIs with a 1.364 OPS in 19 games at Triple-A. If you forget who Bauers is, he’s a 27-year-old who has played parts of three seasons in the majors for Tampa Bay, Cleveland and Seattle. In the majors, he has hit .213/.307/.348 and has produced a negative WAR, just like Calhoun.

“(Bauers) has definitely caught our eye,” Boone said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Of course Boone and the Yankees have their eye on Bauers! As I wrote earlier in the week, the Yankees went into another season with an oft-injured everyday lineup and despite that, completely disregarded building a reliable bench. That’s how you end up with players like Calhoun and Franchy Cordero batting fifth and sixth for a supposed contender and that’s how you get Bauers on the doorstep of being called up and also batting in the middle of the Yankees lineup.

6. The first four batters in the Yankees lineup is the Yankees lineup. Anthony Volpe, Aaron Judge, Anthony Rizzo and DJ LeMahieu. Gleyber Torres is a major-league bat, but he can’t be counted on. Torres’ double and home run on Wednesday were his first extra-base hit in more than wo weeks and his first home run in more than three weeks.

The offense scored five runs in the second inning on Wednesday and it was made possible by a five-run second inning. The rally was started by an error, an infield single and a bunt. It wasn’t until Volpe’s RBI line-drive single and Judge’s three-run, bases-clearing double when the Yankees had something resembling true offense.

7. After Judge’s double, leading by five runs with one out in the inning, he decided it would be a good time to steal third base, so he took off, tried a headfirst slide and ended up faceplanting several feet short of the bag like an infant taking their first steps. Judge got up and ran off the field and down the tunnel with the trainers holding his arm uncomfortably. Thankfully, he was OK, but if he would have been seriously hurt trying to unnecessarily steal third, it would have summed up this shit sandwich season perfectly. Judge is the single-most important Yankee and if he ever gets hurt, just pack up the bats and balls and we’ll see you in 2024. I certainly won’t be sticking around to watch this team without it’s most important player. Think about how bad things are with Judge. Without him? I don’t want to think about it.

8. Since hitting his first carer home run on April 14, Volpe entered Wednesday’s game hitting .263/.404/.421 in his last 11 games and 47 plate appearances. Then on Wednesday he went 2-for-3 with a double and two walks. The scouting report on Volpe at every level has been that he struggles initially and then doesn’t just figure it out but dominates, and that seems to be happening here. The quality of his at-bats are much stronger than they were in the first two weeks of the season (as expected), and he looks like he belongs and looks like he belongs at the top of a major-league lineup. Here’s to hoping he continues to adjust to this level and here’s to hoping he is the Yankees’ solution for a leadoff hitter for a long, long time.

9. It took Boone some time (like most logical things do, if he ever figures them out), but he finally realized that this former leadoff hitter LeMahieu shouldn’t be hitting behind Torres. If LeMahieu isn’t going to lead off, he can’t be hitting behind Torres. Ever. Torres is better than the slop the Yankees have batting 6 through 9, but he’s not better than LeMahieu under any circumstance. LeMahieu isn’t your prototypical cleanup hitter, but neither is Torres. Far from it. The Yankees need to stack as many quality bats together as they can for the time being and that means a 1 through 4 of Volpe, Judge, Rizzo and LeMahieu every day.

10. The road trip continues to Texas where the Yankees begin a four-game series with the first-place Rangers on Thursday. The Yankees will see Andrew Heaney and Eovaldi, who you can expect big starts from based on the Law of Ex-Yankees, Jacob deGrom, who you have to expect a loss against (especially with the state of the lineup) and Martin Perez, who somehow is getting outs in the majors with an extremely hittable repertoire.

The Yankees are not set up well at all to go to Texas right now, considering they’re not set up well to go to Oakland right now. These next four days are likely not going to be good for my health, but I’m prepared for this season to not be good for it. I have Brian Cashman to thank for that.

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The Yankees finished their 10-game homestand with a disappointing 5-5 record. The offense looked every bit as bad as it did from July through October of last season, why wouldn’t it? It’s the same offense.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The Yankees are 14 percent through their season, and to date, it’s gone exactly as expected: when they get outstanding starting pitching, they win, and when they need their offense to win the game, they lose.

Nothing about this season has been a surprise, and why would it be? The Yankees brought back the same lineup that slogged through July, August, September and October, and for some reason, expected different results. The Yankees just scored 32 runs in a 10-game homestand and nine of the 32 runs (28 percent) came in one game. A 5-5 homestand against the Twins, Angels and Blue Jays is less than acceptable.

2. Where does anyone think help is coming from? Harrison Bader is a glove-first player with a .722 career OPS. Josh Donaldson has been a glove-only player since the beginning of last season and his entire Yankees tenure. Those two are going to play once they are healthy, but expecting them to save this offense is like expecting Albert Abreu to emerge as the next Mariano Rivera.

3. Aside from Aaron Judge, Anthony Rizzo and DJ LeMahieu, no one can be counted on. Gleyber Torres hasn’t hit a home run in three weeks and doesn’t have an extra-base hit in the last two weeks (after the Brian Cashman Fan Club wanted the Yankees to extend him following the first four games of the season). Anthony Volpe has 82 career plate appearances, Oswald Peraza plays infrequently and Oswaldo Cabrera looks overmatched. Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Willie Calhoun aren’t major-league-caliber players, and when Franchy Cordero isn’t getting middle-middle fastballs, he isn’t one either. Neither Yankees catcher can hit and Aaron Hicks has more RBI than I do after nearly a month of baseball. And who knows when Giancarlo Stanton will be back. I expect him to not play another game this season.

(Stanton saying he’s in “disbelief” that he’s on the injured list again is my favorite quote of all time. He has missed one-third of the team’s game since becoming a Yankee, and that number would be even worse if the 2020 season started on time. “Disbelief” isn’t the word I would use to describe him missing another large portion of a season.)

4. The Yankees had all offseason to address their glaring needs and their three offseason moves were to re-sign their homegrown superstar (a move that deserves zero praise when you’re the richest team in the sport), sign Carlos Rodon, who has thrown as many pitches for the 2023 Yankees as Clarke Schmidt has quality starts (zero) and sign Tommy Kahnle, who has thrown as many pitches as Rodon has.

5. Like the organization’s failure to add any new pieces to the everyday offense, they also completely disregarded their bench over the winter. When you have a 34-year-old second baseman who has been shut down prior to the postseason the last two years due to injury, a 33-year-old outfielder/designated hitter who has only played in two-thirds of the team’s games over the previous five years, an oft-injured 37-year-old third baseman who provided no offense in his age 36 season, a 33-year-old outfielder who has played in only 60 percent of the team’s games over seven years and a center field who has missed 30 percent of regular-season games in the last five years, you might want to have some position player depth and a quality bench. The Yankees decided not to. So their bench is full of owed money (Aaron Hicks), players no other team wants (Cordero), players who won’t appear in another game in the majors once released by the Yankees (Calhoun) and players they overvalue for unknown reasons (Kiner-Falefa). None of those four are capable of pinch hitting in a big spot and succeeding, and none of the four are capable of being late-game defensive replacements. The Yankees’ entire bench holds no value.

6. In the case of players like Donaldson and Hicks who are still only Yankees because of owed money, the question is why? The Diamondbacks have the league’s 21st-highest payroll and designated Madison Bumgarner for assignment, despite owing him $37 million. They got rid of their highest-paid player because he wasn’t performing, feel he’s detrimental to the team’s success and believe his roster spot would be better used on someone else. The Diamondbacks see what may be a wide-open NL West and a chance for them to return to the postseason for the first time in six years and they are going for it.

7. The Yankees, on the other hand, are supposed to be a World Series favorite, generate infinitely more revenue than the Diamondbacks and have a payroll two-and-a-half times that of Arizona and still roster Donaldson and Hicks. The extension for Hicks was idiotic and the trade for Donaldson was foolish, but seeing the Diamondbacks operate the way the Yankees should is disturbing.

8. It’s even more disturbing than Aaron Boone using Michael King in Sunday’s game with the Yankees trailing by three runs late. You may be thinking that move wasn’t a big deal because King had only pitched once in the previous eight days, but that’s the problem. When King threw 25 pitches on April 12 against the Guardians, for some reason it made him unavailable two days later to pitch against the Twins in the eighth inning, in the game Clay Holmes ruined. Boone cited King throwing those 25 pitches two days earlier as to why he was unavailable, but didn’t mention it was the only 25 pitches he had thrown in five days. Sure enough, King was only used once within a week’s span and then was used on Sunday just to get work in, and Boone had him pitch multiple innings in a game that was over. So if the Yankees need King on Monday or Tuesday, he won’t be available.

9. At this point, I think the Yankees have to play Hicks. I know Boone despises him and the chance Hicks gives the anything is close to zero, but there is at least a chance, even if that chance is nearly zero. This is the lineup I would use every day for the time being:

Anthony Volpe
Aaron Judge
Anthony Rizzo
DJ LeMahieu
Gleyber Torres
Oswaldo Cabrera
Aaron Hicks
Jose Trevino
Oswald Peraza

It’s less than ideal. It’s about as far from ideal as a New York Yankees lineup should be. But for now, it maximizes what’s available on this irresponsibly-constructed roster.

10. If you haven’t noticed, all five teams in the AL East are over .500. There are no cupcake games this year within the division. The Orioles have a better record than the Yankees, and while the Red Sox have no pitching, their offense is likely to carry them to a .500-ish record. It’s going to be a battle to win the East and avoid the best-of-3 wild-card series this season. It may be a battle just to reach the postseason with the state of the offense and rotation and if the bullpen continues down its injured and unproductive path.

The Yankees now begin a seven-game road trip against the Central’s first-place Twins and the West’s first-place Rangers. After that, the Yankees get the pesky Guardians and their first meeting with the Rays. It’s going to be a long two weeks as is, and if Judge, Rizzo and LeMahieu don’t hit, it’s going to be even longer.

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The Yankees have lost three of five at home, lost a bat they can’t afford to lose for the next six weeks and found out their big, offseason free-agent starter signing is headed for tests on his back. It’s hard to feel good about this team right now.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. When Hal Steinbrenner signed Carlos Rodon, he said his Yankees “weren’t done” with their offseason. He lied.

The Yankees were done. They brought back Aaron Judge and signed Rodon. The only other move they made was bringing back old friend Tommy Kahnle. They chose to not address left field. They chose to not move on from Aaron Hicks or Josh Donaldson or Isiah Kiner-Falefa. They chose to not add starting pitching depth to the organization to protect a fragile rotation and refill the depth they depleted to trade for broken-down arms last July. They chose to not address their bench even with a roster littered with oft-injured players.

2. Less than three weeks into the season and Rodon hasn’t thrown a pitch and neither has Kahnle, and Frankie Montas likely won’t throw another one for the Yankees. Luis Severino is on the injured list again, as are IL frequenters Harrison Bader, Josh Donaldson and Giancarlo Stanton. Bader hasn’t played a game this season, Donaldson was unplayable before he became literally unplayable and the Yankees continued their unnecessary rest plan for Stanton to keep him healthy, and once again, it worked about as well as using the 2004 ALCS as a motivational tactic for the 2022 ALCS.

3. Hicks has been even worse than imagined, as has Kiner-Falefa. The bench the Yankees chose to ignore has a career negative-2.0 WAR Willie Calhoun on it, a player who Aaron Boone pinch hit with instead of DJ LeMahieu on Friday night. The limited starting pitching depth the Yankees entered the season with is now part of the actual rotation and filling in about as well as could be expected.

4. If only the Yankees could have seen this coming. If only they could have known players with injured pasts would get injured. If only they could have predicted bad baseball players would continue to be bad baseball players. If only they could have been aware of any of this, maybe they could have prevented all of this.

5. This being playing with a lineup that has at least three automatic outs each night. This being playing with a rotation featuring one starter who has made three career starts, one who has a 6.16 ERA and 1.696 WHIP in eight career starts and another who has allowed 72 home runs in 378 2/3 innings as a starter.

6. Following a day off on Monday, the Yankees were beat rather easily by a crappy Angels team that just got beat up by an even worse Red Sox team over the weekend. The Yankees were lifeless at the plate, foolish on the basepaths and Clarke Schmidt continued to sabotage any future he may think he has a starter in the majors. It was the kind of game the Yankees gave us in July, August and September of last season.

7. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to envision a lot more of these games coming. Prior to the loss to the Angels, it was announced that Rodon will have tests done on his back. The same pitcher who initially said when going on the IL that if it were the ALDS he would be pitching. Do they let pitchers pitch in the postseason who needs to have tests done on their back following bullpen sessions?

8. Along with the Rodon news, the Yankees announced Stanton would be out for six weeks with a hamstring issue. The same hamstring issues he had in the 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 seasons. The best-case scenario is a Memorial Day return, and the worst-case scenario is a repeat of 2019 when he played 18 games and took himself out of the lineup in that postseason.

9. There’s not much to feel good about with this team right now. This season feels like a continuation of last season, and that’s because it is. Saying “It’s early” or calling the team’s injuries “bad luck” is completely disregarding everything this team and organization has done (or hasn’t done) as a group over the last few years. This season, like the recent others that preceded it, was once again set up as a massive parlay, from both injury and performance standpoints. I have seen how this story ends and it’s going to take a lot of change and unexpected production for this version to not end the same way the others have.

10. The Yankees aren’t bad. They’re 10-7. But to get there, they have needed Gerrit Cole to have the best four-game stretch of his career, Franchy Cordero to save the day a few times and a favorable early-season schedule. Thinking this team can pull the same Replacement Yankees miracle the 2019 team did to weather this injury storm isn’t just wishful thinking, it’s foolish. But that’s all Yankees fans can do right now is think foolishly that this team won’t get buried by the Rays trying to runaway before the end of the first month of the season. Think that this team with this makeshift lineup and this makeshift rotation can stay afloat until the always-injured players return. If they return.

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