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

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

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

Prior to Wednesday’s game I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Yankees’ odds of winning seemed bleak early on Tuesday as Carlos Rodon allowed a leadoff single to open the game and was at 30 pitches with the bases loaded and no outs in the first inning. Rodon’s Yankees career has been three seasons of letting the team and its fans down, but this time he settled in, allowed one run in the inning and didn’t allow another hit for the rest of his night. The Yankees as a whole didn’t allow a hit for the rest of the night. The Twins went 1-for-28 with two walks and eight strikeouts against Rodon, Tim Hill and Yerry De los Santos.

“We were set up for disaster there, but we got through it,” Rodon said. After the first inning, I attacked the strike zone and made them put the ball in play, and the defense played great.”

2. The Yankees scored nine runs in the game and it could have been a lot more. They racked up 11 hits (five for extra bases) and 11 walks. There was traffic on the bases all game as the Twins failed to have a single 1-2-3 inning. The 9-1 win gave the Yankees back-to-back wins for the first time in two weeks and just the second time in a month.

3. Giancarlo Stanton hit his 12th home run of the season (in only 157 plate appearances) and had his first four-hit game in two years. Stanton is now up to .300/.376/.586 on the season and has been the Yankees’ best hitter since he returned from the injured list. The games he lost sitting on the bench over the last couple of weeks that the Yankees lost because he was on the bench look even worse now than it did at the time.

“It’s refreshing after missing so much time, because I contribute zero when I miss time,” Stanton said. “Anything I can do when I’m back is always nice.”

4. Anthony Volpe hit a three-run home run after what looked like a little help from Jazz Chisholm on second base relaying him the pitches. As long as Chisholm is on second base waving his arms for Volpe to see, Volpe is a great hitter. To his credit, Volpe has been a much better all-around player in recent weeks, especially defensively. I still don’t trust him at the plate and will never trust him in the field, but he’s fine since the boos starting raining down in him at home last month.

5. Aaron Judged homered in the first to tie the game. It was Judge’s first home run since July 23. Yes, he missed a chunk of time on the IL during the last three weeks, but he had gone seven games without a home run, which is an eternity for Judge.

6. Wins by four or more runs are always welcome, like the Yankees provided the last two days. Blowout wins like Tuesday’s are the best. It’s no coincidence the Yankees’ starter pitched into the seventh inning and the offense scored six-plus runs in both games in the series and the Yankees won both. Aaron Boone looks like a genius when he doesn’t have to think. Pitch well, hit well and play clean baseball and Boone doesn’t get to be a part of the equation. It’s the best kind of baseball there is.

7. “Our mission is still the same thing: Go back to the World Series and win it,” Judge said. “We made it a little tough for ourselves the past couple of weeks, falling out of first place, but we have a lot of ballgames left to go do our thing.”

First, let’s settle down with any World Series talk. Right now the Yankees are tied with the Guardians in the loss column and the Guardians have two games in hand. If the Guardians and Yankees finish with the same record for the third wild-card spot, the Guardians will get in based on their record against their own division. Second, you didn’t make it “a little tough” you made it a lot of tough. You went from an eight-game division lead over the Blue Jays to pissing it away entirely in two months. And it hasn’t been a few weeks, it’s been more than two months of bad baseball and you haven’t been in first place since July 3. Third, there aren’t “a lot of ballgames left” as there are now 42 games left.

Unfortunately, the Mariners, Blue Jays, Guardians and Red Sox all won, so the Yankees’ blowout win didn’t change the standings. (The Rangers did lose to fall 4 1/2 games behind the Yankees, so for now they aren’t worth worrying about.)

8. It was another start at catcher for Ben Rice on Tuesday. The Yankees traded away every catching prospect they had because they believed Austin Wells would be their starter for the next decade and that J.C. Escarra would be a worthy backup. Now Wells is benched since he can’t hit sliders or sweepers and Escarra was sent down at the trade deadline and only recently recalled because of the injury to Amed Rosario. The Yankees’ payroll distribution and roster construction are deplorable and their decisions at catcher are a big reason why.

9. I can’t believe I forgot to write about Brooks Kriske in Tuesday’s thoughts after he pitched against the Yankees on Monday. Kriske threw 11 1/3 innings across 12 games for the Yankees in 2020 and 2021 and is best known for his wild pitch meltdown at Fenway Park to lose an extra-inning game in 2021. But my favorite thing about Kriske is just looking at his pitching line as a Yankee: 11.1 IP, 15 H 20 R, 19 ER, 6 HR, 13 BB, 15 K, 1 HBP, 7 WP, 15.09 ERA, 2.471 WHIP. What a masterpiece. That’s 29 baserunners in 11 1/3 innings! That’s an average 11.9 hits, 4.8 home runs and 10.3 walks per nine innings. It has to be the single-worst pitching line in Yankees history for someone who was allowed to pitch in 12 games. And to think the Yankees chose to protect Kriske and Nick Nelson instead of Garrett Whitlock. Now you know how it’s possible the same front office chose Wells and Escarra over Carlos Narvaez and Agustin Ramirez, only to have someone (Rice) they said wasn’t good enough to be a catcher in the majors become their starting catcher.

10. The Yankees will go for the sweep on Wednesday night, and in order to pull it off, they will need to beat the Twins’ best starter in Joe Ryan. The active Yankees have only faced him a couple of times in their careers and their numbers against him are weak. Cam Schlittler will need to match Ryan for as long as he can because after scoring 15 runs over the last two nights, Wednesday has a Yankees offensive no-show written all over it. Yes, it’s hard to sweep any team, even the Twins, but the Yankees need to find a way to. That’s what happens when you spend two-and-a-half months losing more often than not.

1. Oh how easy being a Yankees fan would be if the Yankees were part of the AL Central. In desperate need of a win, the Twins arrived in the Bronx and rolled over for the Yankees like they always do. The Yankees won 6-2 to win the first game of a series for the first time since the July 11-13 against the Cubs (though the Yankees ended up losing the second and third games of that series).

2. Will Warren (6.2 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 0 BB, 7 K, 2 HR) was dominant and economical through the first 5 2/3 innings before Byron Buxton got him for a solo home run. Up until that point it felt like the Yankees had the game in the bag with Warren throwing a one-hitter, even though the Yankees only had a 3-0 lead. Warren gave up another solo home run in the seventh and the three-run lead that felt like it would be enough for a win was suddenly down to a single run.

3. Thankfully, the Yankees added two runs in the bottom of the seventh and another in the eighth. Luke Weaver got four outs across the seventh and eighth in relief of Warren and David Bednar got the final three outs of the game. Starter to Weaver to Bednar is a recipe for success and the only formula that can be trusted at this point since no other relievers can be trusted and Boone doesn’t know how to or when to properly use anyone other than those two.

4. “I think we’ve been needing that spark,” Warren said. “The past month hasn’t been how we’re supposed to play baseball.”

The past month? How about the past two months? Because this collapse started back after the win over the Royals on June 12. If you want to go back further, the Yankees are just one game over .500 since April 27.

Cody Bellinger hit a first-inning solo home run, Giancarlo Stanton and Ben Rice hit back-to-back solo home runs in the third and Jazz Chisholm hit a solo home run in the eighth. The solo home run: the only way the Yankees seem to know how to score.

5. “That’s what it’s supposed to look like right there,” Boone said of the win.

And that’s what it’s supposed to look like to take Boone out of the game: 6 2/3 innings from the starter, only needing your best two relievers, six runs from the offense and no errors in the field or on the bases. A Boone-less game is the best kind of game. The manager never had a chance to impact the game and ruin it.

6. Trent Grisham, Aaron Judge and Ryan McMahon each went 1-for-4 and combined for five strikeouts. Anthony Volpe went 1-for-3 with a walk and Paul Goldschmidt went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts as he continues to be unable to hit right-handed pitching, no matter who it is, and demolish left-handed pitching, no matter who it is. The Yankees went 10-for-34 as a team with a double, four home runs, two walks and 12 strikeouts.

7. Do I feel any better about the Yankees after Monday’s game than I did before it? No. The Yankees are still a mess. One win against a team going nowhere and a team that sold nearly half its roster at the trade deadline isn’t exactly feeling-changing. The Yankees could (and should) win on Tuesday and again on Wednesday for their first sweep in more than a month and I would feel the same way about them. The Twins suck and beating up on them should be expected and nothing more. Yes, wins over the Twins are crucial and much-needed, but there is nothing the Yankees could do in this series to make me think the Yankees team that is one game over .500 over their last 91 games isn’t going to show up in St. Louis on Friday.

8. The Blue Jays, Mariners and Guardians were off, the Red Sox lost and the Rangers won, so it was a pretty good night for the Yankees. The Yankees remain in the third wild-card spot (and would play a best-of-3 against the Astros with all games in Houston if the season ended today). Here is where the Yankees are in the standings:

7 games back of the Blue Jays in the division (because of the head-to-head tiebreaker)
3 games back of the Mariners for the first wild card
2.5 games back of the Red Sox for the second wild card (because of the head-to-head tiebreaker)
Tied with the Guardians in the loss column (Guardians hold intradivision tiebreaker)
3.5 games up on the Rangers (because of the head-to-head tiebreaker)

9. The Yankees really need the Guardians to start losing because it’s going to be very difficult for the Yankees to finish with a better record against the AL East than the Guardians will have against the AL Central.

While the Yankees play the Twins, the Blue Jays play the Cubs (great), the Red Sox play the Astros (great), the Mariners play the Orioles (not great), the Guardians play the Marlins (OK) and the Rangers play the Diamondbacks (not great).

10. Carlos Rodon gets the ball on Tuesday. In his last seven starts dating back to June 30, he has one quality start (July 11 against the Cubs). Outside of that start, he failed to go more than 5 1/3 innings in any of the other six and has put 55 baserunners on in 38 innings. He has been bad for a long time (just like Max Fried has) and that needs to change on Tuesday. It has to change on Tuesday.

1. Another series against a playoff team and another series loss for the Yankees. Aaron Boone let Devin Williams ruin Friday’s game (a 5-3 loss), then allowed Camilo Doval to nearly ruin Saturday’s game (a 5-4 win) and then the offense Boone called the “best in the league” at various points this season was no-hit by Jason Alexander — a 32-year-old journeyman with a 5.97 ERA this season — in a lackluster 7-1 loss.

2. The last time the Yankees played a series against a team currently over .500 and won was back from July 8-10 when they swept the Mariners at the Stadium. Before that it was June 3-5 when they took two of three from the Guardians at the Stadium. In the last 10 weeks the Yankees have won two series against teams over .500. During that time they have dropped series to the Red Sox (twice), Reds, Blue Jays (twice), Mets, Cubs, Phillies and now Astros.

3. Unsurprisingly, the Astros did to the Yankees what they have been doing to them for the last decade. The crowd booed Jose Altuve in the first inning on Friday night with chants of “FUCK AL-TU-VE” and Altuve responded with a two-run home run. Two days later, he homered again in the first inning and would finish the series 6-for-11 with a double, two home runs, four RBIs, three walks and a stolen base.

Carlos Correa returned to the Astros at the trade deadline just in time to arrive in the Bronx playing third base for his former-and-once-again-current team. Like Altuve, Correa didn’t miss a beat against the Yankees with a 6-for-11 weekend, including a home run, three RBIs and three walks.

Why is it that every time these two teams meet the Astros’ stars play like stars and the Yankees’ stars run away and hide? (The one outlier was Juan Soto last season, but he’s no longer here.) Aaron Judge did what he does best against the Astros in a short series, picking up just two singles over the weekend, and the rest of the offense followed with a comeback effort that fell short on Saturday and a dismal performance on Sunday.

4. Not only was the defense a mess, yet again, but Max Fried wasn’t good, yet again. Fried has one quality start since June 25. He blew a lead and the Yankees lost to the last-place Orioles on June 20. On June 25, he shut out the Reds for seven innings to salvage the last game of that series. He pitched poorly in Toronto on July 1, struggled against the Mets in just five innings on July 6, left the game against the Cubs after three innings on July 12 and then pitched poorly in Toronto again on July 23. He followed that up by beating the Rays before getting beat up by the Rangers and Astros. He has put 22 baserunners on in his last two starts and 10 innings.

5. My biggest fear with Fried has always been how he will perform in the postseason and in big games, since he has been atrocious in October in his career. In 20 games and 12 starts in the playoffs, he has a 5.10 ERA and 1.493 WHIP which is a far cry from his 3.02 career ERA and 1.148 career WHIP. Well, my fear is being realized as the season progresses with the Yankees essentially playing a playoff game every night and Fried pitching like it’s October in July and August every five days.

6. If Fried and Rodon are going to lose every time they take the mound then there’s no point playing the remaining 44 games. On Saturday, Luis Gil became the first Yankees starting pitcher to get an out in the sixth inning since July 30 (stat from Katie Sharp). The starters have been bad and the bullpen has been overworked. Add in an offense that is benching their best hitter over the last month (Giancarlo Stanton) on purpose every game and you get a bad team, which is what the Yankees have been for a long time. At 20-31, the Yankees have the worst record in the American League since June 13. For two months (or one-third of the season) the Yankees — the team with the highest payroll in the AL has been the worst team in the AL.

7. As the Yankees have gone from 17 games above .500 with an eight-game division lead to out of the playoff picture like they were for about an hour yesterday, Boone’s tone and demeanor have changed in his postgame press conferences. The confident, cocky, arrogant version of Boone who acts as if he has a ring for every finger on one hand as Yankees manager is now speaking like someone who seems to be thinking about his job security for the first time on the job.

After Sunday’s loss, Boone said the following: “The game is littered with dead and buried teams … that are sitting in a worse position than we are right now that go on a run.”

Hmm, that sounds familiar. Wait a second, Boone said the same thing two years ago on Aug. 16, 2023 when the Yankees were swept by the Braves.

“The game is still littered with examples of teams going on unlikely runs,” Boone said back then.

8. On Sunday, Boone also said, “This is different than ’23 where I didn’t think we were necessarily capable of that run we needed … This is different.”

Oh really? Now it’s different? I find it quite amusing Boone says he didn’t believe in the 2023 team considering there are endless quotes from him from July and August of that season telling us how the offense will find it and how the team has the players to turn it around and have they will get going. It sounds an awful lot like the bullshit he has been spewing over the last two months.

2023: “We got the players to do it. We have the players with the track record to do it.”

2025: “I believe we have the people to get it done.”

2023: “We’ve got to fix out own house and get going.”

2025: “We got to play consistent baseball.”

9. Boone has run out of answers or ways to motivate his team, so on Sunday, he did what he knows best: he argued balls and strikes and got ejected in the third inning for the fifth time this season. At the time the Yankees were trailing 2-0. If Boone thought he could light a fire under his team, well, they were no-hit for two more innings and outscored 5-1 the rest of the game after he was tossed.

10. Maybe the Yankees will win a couple of games against the Twins over the next three nights at the Stadium, but who knows? The Twins sold at the deadline and yet they have a winning record since then, while the Yankees turned over 27 percent of their roster at the deadline and have lost seven of nine. Even if the Yankees are able to win a couple of games and a series against a team counting down the days until their season is over, then it’s off to St. Louis and Tampa and back home to host the Red Sox.

I keep hearing about how “easy” the Yankees late-August and late-September schedules are, but they have to actually be alive to have those matter, and they actually have to be playing well to think they can advantage of them. Otherwise, this season will end the same way 2023 did, whether Boone or anyone in the clubhouse believes in this team or not.