The Yankees did what they rarely ever do by beating the Rays on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Not only did they beat the Rays, but they won a series against them at Tropicana Field.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The series opener in Tampa was the best start of Jordan Montgomery’s career. The Yankees needed a big performance from someone other than Gerrit Cole, needed to set the tone for the three games and needed to beat the Rays. Montgomery was great, allowed only one run (a Mike Zunino solo home run since Zunino has to homer in every series against the Yankees) and struck out a career-high nine. He avoided the crooked number inning which has been a staple of his career, didn’t give up a lead (another staple of his career) and gave the Yankees six great innings. His next start comes on Sunday in Baltimore against the Orioles, who he has pitched well against in two starts this season (11 IP, 10 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 1 BB, 8 K, 1 HR, 1.64 ERA, 1.000 WHIP), so I expect him to have another big day at Camden Yards.

The only thing that worries me is Sunday will be the sixth game in six days for the Yankees as part of this season-long, 10-game road trip. A Sunday getaway day game before going to Texas for four straight games means we are going to see something resembling a spring training lineup from Aaron Boone in the series finale in Baltimore. Montgomery better have his “A” stuff because he might not get much run support.

2. No Yankees starter is really getting any run support. The Yankees scored five runs in the three games in Tampa (1.7 per game). The series prior they scored “11” runs against the Nationals, but three of those runs were a result of the automatic runner at second base in the 10th and 11th innings, so they really only scored eight runs in that series (2.7 per game). Even against the Astros, three of their 17 runs came on an Alex Bregman throwing error.

The Yankees’ offense is nowhere near having arrived in 2021. They are fourth in the division in runs (only ahead of the last-place Orioles by five), and only ahead of the Orioles and Tigers in the entire American League.

3. “I’m not worried about our offense,” DJ LeMahieu said after Thursday’s loss. “We’re in a good place.”

Three “everyday” Yankees are below the Mendoza line in Gary Sanchez (.197), Aaron Hicks (.194) and Clint Frazier (.141), as are Brett Gardner (.182), Rougned Odor (.164) and Mike Ford (.095). Miguel Andujar doesn’t have a hit in 13 at-bats and Luke Voit doesn’t have one in six.

LeMahieu himself is only hitting .264 with a .716 OPS. He has three home runs on the season and two of them came in the same game. Aaron Judge has been inconsistent, Giancarlo Stanton’s crazy two-week run has ended, Gleyber Torres has been mostly bad and Gio Urshela has been pretty good, but is hurt again, and probably won’t play on Friday.

Ronald Acuna has a league-leading 12 home runs. That’s two more home runs than LeMahieu, Frazier, Ford, Torres, Andujar, Gardner, Voit and Tyler Wade have combined. Even if you had in Jay Bruce (who retired after playing in 10 games and still has as many home runs as Torres) and Mike Tauchman (who was traded to the Giants two weeks ago), Acuna still has one more home run than all of those players combined.

The offense was supposed to be a sure-thing in the regular season until the lineup only faces elite pitching in the postseason, and the starting pitching was supposed to be the team’s biggest concern (it was, but it’s been much better of late). It’s been the opposite through 37 games and 22 percent of the season.

4. Cole has never been a concern. Cole dominated the Rays on Thursday to clinch the three-game series for the Yankees with eight shutout innings and 12 strikeouts. If not for the magical catching powers of Kyle Higashioka, I don’t know that Cole would be capable of the season he’s having, currently leading the league in wins (5), FIP (1.11), WHIP (0.684), walks per nine (0.5) and strikeouts per walks (26). Somehow, even with a 1.37 ERA over 52 2/3 innings, the Yankees are only 5-3 in his eight starts, and had to win 1-0 in his most recent start.

The offense has scored 31 runs in Cole’s eight starts (3.9 per game) and 10 of those came in one game (10-0 win on April 30 against the Tigers) when he only needed one run to work with because of his six shutout innings. Take away that game, which is the only time the Yankees have scored double-digit runs this season, and it’s 21 runs across seven games. If any other Yankees starter was given the run support Cole has been given, the Yankees would be much worse than the 5-3 they are in Cole’s starts.

5. In theory, Jameson Taillon is good. He’s 6-foot-5, 230 lbs., a former second-overall pick, throws hard and has a devastating curve. On top of that, he’s an easy guy to root for given his health and injury history. In reality, Taillon hasn’t been good as a Yankee. Sure, he’s only made seven starts, but he hasn’t given the team length (four of seven starts have been less than five innings and six of seven have been five innings or less), and the performance has been mediocre at best (5.40 ERA and 4.45 FIP).

I didn’t expect more from Taillon. He’s giving me what I thought he would as a guy who has barely pitched in two years. To me, he’s Phil Hughes. He looks like Hughes on the mound, throws exactly like Hughes with his new short-arm delivery and can’t put away hitters with two strikes, just like Hughes couldn’t. If this is what Taillon is going to be full time, then OK, he’s a solid No. 5 starter. However, that’s not what he was advertised as or traded for to be.

6. Luke Voit made his 2021 season debut on Tuesday. He played on Tuesday and on Wednesday. On Thursday, he wasn’t in the lineup. Why? A planned day off, according to Boone. A planned day off after having had already had the first month-plus of the season off. To make matters worse, the Yankees faced a lefty in Rich Hill and could have used Voit’s right-handed bat in the middle of the order.

There is no medical fact or any science behind giving a player a day off after playing two games following knee surgery. The only way to prevent a player from an injury is to not play. Ever. Does Voit having Thursday make it any less likely he won’t get hurt on Friday or Saturday? Of course not. All it did was make it so he wouldn’t get hurt on Thursday. If the Yankees have solved injury prevention as an organization then why do they hold the single-season record for most players placed on the injured list and why do all of their players keep getting hurt?

7. Aaron Hicks wasn’t in Thursday’s lineup because of wrist soreness, requiring an MRI. This comes after Hicks was held out of Tuesday’s lineup because he fouled a ball off his leg on Sunday. (He was healthy enough to play through the foul ball and finish the game on Sunday, and healthy enough to be in the original lineup on Tuesday, though not healthy enough to actually play on Tuesday.) As a Yankee, Hicks has had every injury imaginable, and this wrist issue is the latest to be added to the long list. There wasn’t an update on Hicks following the game, which isn’t good, and I expect to him at least go on the injured list. It wouldn’t be baseball season without Hicks landing on the IL at least once.

8. Gary Sanchez is quietly coming out of his slump. He’s 4-for-13 with a double, two home runs and three walks in his last four games. His average still sucks (.197), however, nearly Yankees batting average sucks.

Sanchez’s on-base percentage is up to .351 and he has walked in 15 of the 24 games he has played in, including six of the last seven. Even in Sanchez’s 33-home run 2017 season, his on-base percentage was only .345 and in his 34-home run 2019 season, his on-base percentage was .316. The power hasn’t completely been there (though four home runs in 24 games is a 27-home run pace over 162 games), but we are seeing good things out of Sanchez at the plate.

9. Meanwhile, Higashioka who briefly took over the majority of the catching duties is hitting .087/.192/.261 over this last 26 plate appearances. Thankfully for him, one of his two hits in that time was a home run (the one off Max Scherzer), otherwise his .453 OPS would be even worse than it is, and it doesn’t get much worse than that.

Again, I like Highashioka. But he’s not a starting catcher and he’s not better than Sanchez. He doesn’t have magical powers that make starting pitchers better, and he has zero to do with Cole being one of the best two or three pitchers in the world, if not the best pitcher in the world. It was only a matter of time until Higashioka gave way to Sanchez again, and it happened even faster than I thought it would.

10. The Yankees have won 14 of 20 and are 5-0-1 in their last six series. If they continue to play like they have over their last 20 games, they will be where they want to be at the end of the season and that is as AL East champions with the best record in the AL and home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.

The easy way to achieve that is to beat up the bad teams in the AL, and there are a lot of them. The Yankees have gone 7-3 against the Orioles and the Tigers this season, which is good, but not good enough (because of their play against the Rays and Blue Jays), considering they are only 4-3 against the Orioles. This weekend in Baltimore presents another chance for the Yankees win another series and beat up on a bad team before going to Texas for four games against another bad team.

The hard part of the 10-game road trip is over and the Yankees did what they needed to do in Tampa. A 5-2 record in Baltimore and Texas isn’t too much to ask. It shouldn’t be too much to ask.

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The Yankees are very fortunate to have won two of three against the Nationals. They were very close to being swept by the struggling Nationals, and on their way back under .500. Instead, they’re riding a two-game winning streak after back-to-back walk-off wins as they head back to Tampa.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. On Friday, I wrote the following:

I think the Yankees have turned their season around. Normally, I would be hesitant to make a claim like that, but I saw enough of a change out of the team this week to believe their level of play in the season’s 25 games is behind them and they will continue to be the team they were expected to be in 2021. (Now watch them get swept by the Nationals this weekend.)

I take that one back, and yes, the Nationals were very, very close to sweeping the Yankees. They beat the crap out of the Yankees on Friday, were three outs away from holding on to a dominating Max Scherzer performance, and were able to embarrass Aaron Boone’s bullpen management on Sunday.

The team really hasn’t turned it around like I thought they might have, and it all has to do with the offense. The Yankees have scored 36 runs in eight May games. Two of those games came against the Tigers, and they only scored eight runs total in those two games. The team’s best offensive output of May so far has been the seven runs they scored against the Astros on May 4, and three of those runs came on a bases-clearing throwing error by Alex Bregman. The Yankees have scored 15 runs over their last four games, and two of those runs came because of automatic runners placed on second base in extra innings. The Yankees have actually scored 13 runs over their last four games, and only scored nine “real” runs in three games against the Nationals.

2. Outside of Giancarlo Stanton for the last two weeks and DJ LeMahieu for the last week, the offense has continued to be abysmal. Aaron Hicks went 1-for-the weekend. Gary Sanchez went 1-for-the week, but did hit first home run since April 3 and his first extra-base hit since April 7. Aaron Judge is 5-for-29 in May with 15(!) strikeouts and no home runs, and three of those five hits came in one game on May 1. Gleyber Torres hit his first home since October. Clint Frazier is 2-for-May (20 at-bats). Mike Ford is 4-for-the season, and won’t be good enough to be a Yankee when Luke Voit is activated, but is good enough to bat sixth when he is a Yankee. Kyle Higashioka’s average and on-base percentage are quickly falling to his career averages (.192 and .242).

3. “It’s not always going to be easy,” Boone said after the team’s win on Sunday. “You’re not always going to just have your way with a team but you’re going to have to win these tough ones every now and then.”

When exactly has it been easy? When is it going to be easy? The Yankees have 18 wins. Four of them have been easy. The 7-0 win over the Orioles on April 5, the 7-2 win over the Orioles on April 6, the 7-0 win over the Orioles on April 28 and the 10-0 win over the Tigers on April 30. Four easy wins in 34 games and they are all against the Orioles and Tigers.

The Yankees don’t have “to win tough ones every now and then.” They have to win tough ones every single time they want a win and aren’t playing teams destined for 100-plus losses.

So yes, the Yankees still have the same offensive problems they had a week ago, and the week before that, and two weeks before that, and all the way back to Opening Day. The team has scored double digit runs just once this season 10-0 win on Apr 30 over Detroit. The Red Sox scored double digit runs three times last week in six games.

4. I also wrote this on Friday:

Loaisiga has gone from unpitchable in high-leverage spots in October to now being the most trusted active member of the bullpen behind Chapman. I wanted Loaisiga in the eighth inning on Thursday, but understood why Boone went to Green.

Jonathan Loaisiga backed up my words and followed up Chad Green’s meltdown on Thursday with one of his own on Friday. It wasn’t just a meltdown, it was a Jonathan Holder-like meltdown. Loaisiga had given up two earned runs in 18 1/3 innings before Thursday and then managed to give up four earned runs while recording only one out. He entered  a 3-3 game and by the time he was done, and by the time Luis Cessa was done making sure Loaisiga’s ERA took as big of a hit as possible, the Nationals led 9-3 after sending 12 batters to the plate in the eighth.

The Loaisiga who had no business pitching in high-leverage spots in 2020 appeared for the first time in 2021, and it better have been an anomaly. Because with Zack Britton still out and Darren O’Day now out, the elite, trustworthy options in the bullpen are dwindling. The Yankees can’t afford to have the clock strike midnight on Loaisiga. Not if the offense is going to have trouble scoring runs the way they have for the first 21 percent of the season.

5. If the Nationals fall out of it, and I expect them to, when they make Scherzer available, the Yankees need to do everything they can to acquire him. Will they? Probably not. Instead, they will probably let him go to the Astros the way they let Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Zack Grienke and then they can see Scherzer twice in the ALCS and we can see another easy 14 strikeouts from him against this lineup.

6. Boone did everything he could to lose on Sunday. Why was Scumbag Domingo German was allowed to try to go through the Nationals’ lineup a third time? It’s something Boone rarely lets Cole do, and he might be the best pitcher in the world, let alone Scumbag German who is barely in the majors. Rather than make the move he always makes, Boone decided with Scumbag German, he could get a seventh inning out of him and steal some outs and give his bullpen a lighter workload.

Scumbag German gave up a double on the first pitch of the inning to Josh Bell. With one out and Bell at second, Boone let German stay in to face Kyle Schwarber. Four pitches later, Schwarber his a missile to the second deck in right field to tie the game. Then, once the lead was erased and the game was tied, Boone went to Michael King for the first time in 11 days and second time in 23 days.

7. Where was Lucas Luetge to face Schwarber? Where was Wandy Peralta? What I’m about to say next is very scary.

Luetge was most likely unnecessarily unavailable on Sunday. That means Peralta was the only left-handed option for Boone in the bullpen. Boone was saving Peralta for Juan Soto’s late-inning plate appearance no matter what. No matter what situation might come up before Soto’s late-inning trip to the plate (like the actual one we saw with Schwarber) and no matter what the score was by the time Soto stepped into the box or what situation he was stepping into the box in, Boone was saving Peralta for that. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.

That’s who manages the Yankees. Someone that dumb and idiotic that they allowed the game to be tied by letting Schwarber face a righty, while representing the tying run. They say you might see something you have never seen before whenever you go to a baseball games, well each day I see something I have never seen before from Boone, and it’s never a good thing.

The day before, on Saturday, Boone asked Ford to sacrifice bunt in the 10th inning. The last time Ford had a sacrifice bunt was in 2012 in the Cape Cod League. Nine years ago. That’s who manages the Yankees.

8. I had to do a double take to make sure that was really Michael King wearing number 73 in the game on Sunday. It was King’s first appearance in 11 days and second in 23 days. Good use of a roster spot! The Yankees have played 34 games over 40 days (counting Monday’s day off) and King has appeared in four of them. The Yankees should continue to hold him out for that one time a starter gets hurt early or is getting knocked around and they need a long man. More Cessa, please.

9. Just a nice little Sunday off for Judge. Drive to the Stadium, put on the Yankees uniform, take in the game from the best seat in the place and make around $62,000 for the afternoon.

Why did Judge not start on Sunday before his pinch-hit walk in hte ninth? Because the Yankees have Monday off and having Sunday off and Monday off give him two days off. Why does he need two days after having only started 29 of 34 (85 percent) games this season ? Because the Yankees are playing at the Trop the next three days and the Trop has turf and Judge needs time off before playing on turf. I wish I were being sarcastic and making it up.

Starting on Tuesday, the Yankees are going to play 13 games in 13 days. Three at Tampa, three at Baltimore, four at Texas and then three back home against the White Sox. Expect to see some spring training lineups beginning this coming weekend in Baltimore. The lineup you will see on getaway day Sunday in Baltimore and getaway day Thursday in Texas are going to be all-time Boone lineups. I look forward to Rougned Odor coming back lead off. Maybe Tyler Wade will stick around and bat third. Why shouldn’t he? Everyone else has gotten a chance to.

I want a 7-3 road trip to Tampa, Baltimore and Texas. If the Yankees have really turned their season around, they’ll accomplish it.

10. This three-game series in Tampa is enormously important. One, because the Yankees have won 12 of 17 and are two games above .500 and seem headed in the right direction. Two, because the Yankees have been embarrassed by the Rays during the Boone era the way the Rays used to get embarrassed by the Yankees in the late-‘90s and early-2000s. Three, because the Rays aren’t very good and the Yankees should be able to beat them (the Rays are 5-1 against the Yankees and 14-16 against everyone else). And four, the Yankees are missing Tyler Glasnow this series (or at least they’re supposed to). Enough is enough with getting embarrassed by the Rays. The Rays! 2004 me can’t believe I wrote that.

I want a 7-3 road trip to Tampa, Baltimore and Texas. If the Yankees have really turned their season around, they’ll accomplish it.

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