The Yankees’ offense mostly no-showed for a second straight game in Baltimore, and the Yankees lost to the Orioles again. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees. 1. The Yankees couldn’t hit for a second
The Yankees’ offense mostly no-showed for a second straight game in Baltimore, and the Yankees lost to the Orioles again.
1. The Yankees couldn’t hit for a second straight night, and for a second straight night they lost to the Orioles. The 4-2 loss on Tuesday coupled with the 2-0 loss on Monday gives the Yankees two runs in 18 innings in what is the most important series of the season to date.
Dean Kremer entered the game with a 4.61 ERA, but had no problem keeping the Yankees’ offense quiet: 7 IP, 4 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 4 BB, 4 K, 2 HR. The Yankees had five hits in the game and Juan Soto (2) and Austin Wells (2) had all but one of them. Anthony Volpe had the other.
2. Soto stared down Kremer after his home run, and when asked about it after the game, he said, “We were going back and forth. He didn’t like the shuffle. I bet he didn’t like the homer, too.”
Typically, it would bother me for a Yankee to be trash talking an opponent after a loss, but Soto can do whatever he wants since he represents the entirety of the offense for the season. This is his team and if he wants to chirp Kremer after blasting a 447-foot home run onto Eutaw Street, so be it. He’s the only one contributing offensively with any consistency.
3. With the loss, the Yankees fell to 0-9 when they score two runs or fewer this season, which is the worst winning percentage in the majors.
As I wrote yesterday, the Yankees are 19-3 when they score at least three runs, and yet they couldn’t do that for two straight days against the Orioles. They have the best winning percentage in the majors when they score three runs and it feels impossible for them to do so at times.
4. The biggest reason it feels impossible at times is because of their knack for destroying innings with double plays. The Yankees hit into three double plays in the game: Aaron Judge hit an inning-ending one in the first, Anthony Rizzo erased a leadoff walk in the second and Giancarlo Stanton ended the Yankees’ rally in the sixth. The Yankees have hit into 36 double plays, which leads the majors.
5, Nearly three years ago in June 2021, after a loss to the Red Sox, Boone said, “Typically, the better teams are going to hit into double plays.” Three years later, I’m still laughing at that quote. Here is the double play leaderboard this season following the Yankees’ 36.
Not exactly the kind of company you want to be keeping.
6. The Yankees’ double play problem is led by Judge, who has hit into 10, tops in the majors. His previous high in a season is 16 (2021), which he could break by mid-May at this rate. Judge is 1-for-7 with a walk and two strikeouts in the series.
7. “I think they’ve had a lot of good bounces go their way,” Wells said of the Orioles after the game.
That’s not how I view it. I view a young, athletic, fast team that puts the ball in play and is able to put pressure on the defense, even beating out balls that might otherwise not be hits. The Yankees, on the other hand, have players like Rizzo and Stanton going station and station (and at times not even doing that like Stanton on Monday) and I’m not sure either would beat Jorge Posada in a race during his playing days.
The Orioles may have soft contacted their way to a three-run lead against Nestor Cortes (6 IP, 8 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 2 BB, 5 K), but Joe Girardi explained it best on the broadcast, saying, “They beat two balls out for infield hits where a lot of teams don’t get those hits and it changes the complexion of the inning. Very athletic and young, fast team. It doesn’t always have to be stolen bases and first to home. Sometimes it’s infield singles.”
8. This is Anthony Volpe’s batting line from the first four games of the season: .571/.667/1.000.
This is Volpe’s line from the next 26 games: .231/.310/.317.
Volpe has stolen one base on one attempt in the last 14 games. He has been on first base 14 times in that span and has run once.
It’s clear the Yankees don’t want Volpe to run in front of Soto or Judge for fear of taking a run off the board if either of them goes deep, but Volpe needs to run. It’s the one thing offensively he’s good at. Considering he is rarely getting on base (.246 on-base percentage in the last two weeks), it would be nice if he could put some pressure on the defense and make something happen on the bases.
9. Gleyber Torres made his losing play of the day when on a ground ball instead of taking an easy out at first tried to throw out the runner moving to third and hit the runner with the ball, allowing the runner to then score. Even on days when Torres pitches in offensively (which is rare), he’s usually negates it with a defensive or baserunning mistakes. On Tuesday, he made the defensive mistake and did nothing at the plate, going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. His OPS is .549.
10. “Overall, I think it was a pretty good month for us,” Cortes said. “We could have probably won four of those 12 games that we lost.”
It was a good month (plus four days), and Cortes is right, the Yankees could have won more games than they did, much more than four.
The only true loss was 7-0 to Arizona on April 2. Other than that, the Yankees were in every loss. They lost by one run three times, lost by two runs six times and lost by three runs two times.
If they continue to play the way they played for four days in March and all of April, they will be just fine. It would be nice though if they could win the next two days in Baltimore.
The Yankees lost to the Orioles 2-0 on Monday. It was the fifth time the Yankees were shut out in 30 games this season. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees. 1. The Yankees began
The Yankees lost to the Orioles 2-0 on Monday. It was the fifth time the Yankees were shut out in 30 games this season.
1. The Yankees began the most important series of the season to date — a four-game series against the Orioles — with a 2-0 loss.
“They’re legit,” Clarke Schmidt of the Orioles said after the game.
Yeah, no shit. They only won 101 games last year, finishing 19 games ahead of the Yankees, have the best offense in the AL this year and now have a one-game lead in the AL East.
2. “When you face them and then you face other teams, you really kind of feel it,” Schmidt said. “They really hit mistakes.”
Schmidt made his only mistake of the game to the first batter he faced. With a 2-2 count against Gunnar Henderson, Schmidt was unable to put the lefty away as Henderson fouled off two two-strike pitches and then hammered a long home run to right field. Schmidt’s career issue of being unable to put away lefties found its way into the first batter of the game and it seemed like an ominous sign.
3. But it wasn’t. The Yankees lost the game, but it wasn’t because of Schmidt. He ended up going 5 2/3 innings while allowing just the one run from the Henderson home run. To me, it was the best start of Schmidt’s career, considering the lineup and the ballpark.
The Yankees’ offense is what lost them the game, which has been the case in all but two of their losses this season (April 14 at Cleveland and April 26 at Milwaukee). The offense was shut out for a fifth time in 30 games.
4. “I haven’t really thought much of it,” Aaron Judge said of the shutouts. “Things like that happen.”
Things like that do happen, but for these Yankees, they happen way more than they should. To put into perspective how truly awful it is to be shut out five times in 30 games, here is the game number when the fifth shutout of the season happened for the Yankees in the other five full seasons in the Aaron Boone era.
2023: 103 2022: 72 2021: 90 2019: Only two shutouts 2018: Only three shutouts
The 2023 offense was as bad as it gets in terms of Yankees’ offenses and that team didn’t get shut out for a fifth time for another 73 games. The 2018 and 2019 offenses were so good they were only shut out three and two times respectively. (It’s hard not to think the Yankees’ best chance at winning it all with this group, or what’s left of this group, was 2017-19.)
“We’ve had some of those nights where we’ve gotten shut out when we’ve had a lot of traffic,” Boone said. “We didn’t come up with a big hit, and they kept us in the ballpark.”
It’s really not surprising when the Yankees get shut out because the 2023 Yankees Plus Juan Soto don’t score and don’t win when Soto doesn’t hit. These Yankees go as Soto goes, and Soto only went 1-for-4 with a single on Monday. Now that single unfortunately went off the high right-field wall at Camden Yards, but that’s baseball, right?
5. After Schmidt, Dennis Santana threw 1 1/3 perfect innings, Caleb Ferguson got two outs and Clay Holmes got an out.
The best part is Holmes probably won’t be needed for a few days. He may not be needed for a week. If Boone wants to play the what-if game, let’s play it. He thinks he made need Holmes for an inning on Saturday, so he wasn’t going to push him for a second inning on Friday. Well, what if Holmes isn’t need on Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday? Then he’ll be used in a game on Wednesday no matter what the score is to get him work.
Holmes wasn’t needed again on Monday, but Boone went to him. Apparently, having Holmes get an out in the eighth inning of a game the Yankees are trailing is more important than Holmes closing out a game the Yankees are winning.
If the Yankees had tied the game in the ninth, Holmes was going to pitch the ninth and be used for four outs. Which means, Boone is OK with Holmes pitching in multiple innings in a game the Yankees are losing and then tied in rather than pitching multiple innings in a game the Yankees are tied and then winning.
6. Anthony Volpe had another poor night at the plate (0-for-4 with a walk) and made an extremely costly error in the field, booting an inning-ending ground ball in the eighth that increased the Orioles’ lead from 1-0 to 2-0. Once the deficit went from one run to two runs with the bottom of the order due up (Gleyber Torres, Oswaldo Cabrera and Trent Grisham) it was hard to envision the Yankees coming back. And they didn’t.
7. Grayson Rodriguez got lit up in his previous start by the lowly Angels (4.1, 11 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 1 BB, 7 K, 1 HR), so of course he was awesome against the Yankees (5.2 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 3 BB, 3 K). The Yankees had some bad luck on their side in the game with booted balls by the Orioles going right to other fielders, rockets hit right at fielders, the called third strike on Anthony Rizzo, the Soto “single” and the play where Giancarlo Stanton had to hold up on a base hit to the outfield before getting thrown out at second.
8. Michael Kay is always quick to defend Stanton and his speed on the bases saying he’s not “loafing” and that that’s how fast he can go. That’s not as fast as Stanton can run. That’s as fast as Stanton can run without getting injured. It’s not running. It’s jogging. It may not even be jogging. It’s the type of speed a valet attendant uses to go get your car. Unfortunately, Stanton isn’t going to get faster, only slower, which is hard to believe.
9. It’s hard to believe the Yankees only struck out three times in the game and not only lost, but were shut out, stranding all 10 baserunners they had. It’s hard to believe this offense scored 15 runs in back-to-back games over the weekend (even if some of those runs came against position players pitching). It’s even harder to believe how much the offense missed Alex Verdugo’s bat in the lineup.
Verdugo has become the team’s second-best hitter through the first month of the season, behind Soto. Is anyone surprised the two best hitters on the team through the first month are two players the Yankees didn’t draft or develop and have had the least to do with the major-league success?
10. “Guys were taking good swings all night,” Judge said. “We just couldn’t get them to fall.”
The Yankees will need them to start falling over the next three days. The Yankees are 19-3 when they score three runs in a game. That’s all that’s needed: three runs! At worst, the Yankees need to split this series with the Orioles, and to do that, they will now need to win two of the next three. They will need to more offensively than they did on Monday, which was nothing … again.
The Yankees lost a winnable game to the Brewers on Friday, falling 7-6 in 11 innings thanks to their own manager. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees. 1. On Monday, I wrote the following:
The Yankees lost a winnable game to the Brewers on Friday, falling 7-6 in 11 innings thanks to their own manager.
Boone has had a mostly error-free three-plus weeks to begin the season. Wait until that changes. The Yankees are 7-2 in one-run games. Of their 23 games, 39 percent have been decided by one run. The more one-run games they play in, the more Boone’s in-game decisions become vitally important. If there’s any part of the Yankees standing on the tracks waiting to be destroyed by the regression train it’s their play in one-run games when managed by Boone.
The train is here.
On Friday night in Milwaukee, Yankees fans were treated to the version of Aaron Boone they have watched for six-plus seasons. The version of Aaron Boone that plays for tomorrow when there’s a winnable game at hand. The real Aaron Boone.
2. It all started in the bottom of the sixth inning with the Yankees leading 5-4.
Luis Gil had given the Yankees five mediocre innings, allowing four earned runs on five hits and two walks and getting burned by a pair of two-run home runs. He had thrown 95 pitches and considering the Yankees haven’t let him reach 100 pitches this season and have already given him extra rest once (which led to a seven-walk performance), he wasn’t going to be able to finish a sixth inning of work unless he got three groundouts in four pitches (something he’s incapable of doing). But Boone sent him back out for the sixth anyway.
Two pitches later, the Brewers had a leadoff double with the tying run on second and no one out. That double came off the bat of Gary Sanchez, who undoubtedly wants to give it to the Yankees more than you want anything in your life. Knowing how the law of ex-Yankees works in that every ex-Yankee comes back to haunt their old team, an extra-base hit was inevitable in that situation.
3. Boone used Gil in hopes of stealing one or two outs in the sixth, figuring it would be one or two less outs his bullpen would need to get. It’s a strategy employed by Boone frequently and one that backfires nearly every time, just like the contact play the Yankees put in motion with a runner on third and less than two outs on a ball hit in the infield with the infield in. You know, the play they miserably failed to convert in the 11th inning.
Stealing outs is a dangerous game, but Boone doesn’t care. He doesn’t care who the pitcher is he’s sending back out, what the score is, what the situation is, what the standings say, nothing. He’s going to do it no matter what and on Friday he sent back out a clearly fatigued Gil, who didn’t have his best stuff all night and who battled and grinded to get through five innings.
Because teams other than the Yankees have no problem scoring a runner from second with no outs without getting a base hit, the Brewers did it with ease: ground ball to second followed by a sacrifice fly. 5-5. Tie game.
4. The Yankees failed to score in the seventh inning because Juan Soto and Alex Verdugo, the only hitters on the team capable of getting on base consistently didn’t bat in the seventh. In the eighth, Soto led off the inning with a single, but was quickly erased when Aaron Judge hit into a double play, which is all he seems to do. Well, that and strike out. In the ninth, Verdugo did walk with one out, but was thrown out trying to steal second.
5. With the game tied going to the bottom of the ninth, Boone called on Clay Holmes. Ron Marinaccio (1 1/3 innings), Dennis Santana (2/3 innings) and Caleb Ferguson (1 inning) had done their jobs keeping the Brewers off the board for the sixth, seventh and eighth innings. Holmes is the team’s best reliever, and despite it not being a save situation he entered the game. (It’s absolutely insane to manage your bullpen based on a stat, and yet, the Yankees still do so.)
Here was Holmes’ recent workload before Friday:
Sunday, April 21: Didn’t pitch Monday, April 22: Didn’t pitch Tuesday, April 23: Nine pitches Thursday, April 24: Didn’t pitch
Over the previous four days, Holmes had made one appearance throwing nine pitches. When he entered the game on Friday against the Brewers, I figured because of his recent light workload, he was going to pitch the ninth, and if the game reached the 10th inning and the Yankees scored in the top of the 10th, he would close out the game in the bottom of the 10th inning. Sound logic. Unfortunately, the manager of the Yankees doesn’t operate or base decisions on sound logic.
Holmes went out and had arguably his best outing of the season. He retired the side on 10 pitches, striking out Oliver Dunn and William Contreras in the process. To the 10th inning the game went.
Giancarlo Stanton pinch hit for Trent Grisham and immediately crushed a double to the left-center gap scoring the automatic runner on second. The Yankees had a 6-5 lead and the idea of Holmes having a chance to close out the game in the bottom half of the inning was coming to fruition.
6. After the top of the Yankees’ lineup stranded Stanton on second with no outs (because why wouldn’t they?), Holmes didn’t walk to the mound from the dugout. Instead, out of the bullpen came newest Yankee Michael Tonkin.
If you were unfamiliar with Tonkin prior to seeing him jog to the mound to close out Friday’s game and were thinking “Who the fuck is this guy?” when an unknown Number 50 uniform began throwing warm-up pitches to Jose Trevino, it’s understandable. I wasn’t thinking “Who the fuck is this guy?” I was thinking “Why is this fucking guy in the game?”
Tonkin had become a Yankee just the day before. He had signed with the Mets in the winter, got designated for assignment by the Mets and purchased by the Twins on April 9, got designated for assignment again and selected off waivers by the Mets on April 17 and then got designated for assignment again and selected off waivers by the Yankees on Thursday. Why has Tonkin been designated for assignment three times in less than three weeks? Surely, it must be because he’s awesome and capable of closing out the first-place Brewers in extra innings with the automatic runner on second and no outs.
Tonklin immediately gave up the lead, allowing a game-tying single to Willy Adams, but did manage to get out of the 10th inning without losing the game. Unfortunately, he would save that for the 11th inning.
In the 11th inning, the Yankees failed to score the automatic runner from second, largely because the team’s offense sucks, but also because their trusty manager had the aforementioned contact play on with a runner on third and one out in the inning. That runner was Jahmai Jones and he was thrown out by at least 10 feet on the idiotic play, running home on contact on a ball hit right back to the pitcher. In the bottom of the 11th, Tonkin allowed a walk-off single to Joey Ortiz, as the Brewers’ 8-hitter capped off a nice four-RBI day.
“It’s definitely a tough spot to go in,” Boone said of Tonkin entering an extra-innings save situation for his first appearance in his first day as a Yankee.
Then why was he put in that spot, you moron.
Boone’s sole job as manager of the Yankees is to put his players in the best possible position to succeed. If he does that and it doesn’t work out, so be it. There isn’t a person in the world who would have questioned Holmes being used for a second inning if he couldn’t hold the lead and allowed the tying run to score or lost the game. He’s the best reliever on the team in the middle of a stretch in which he had thrown nine pitches in four days. Boone didn’t see it that way.
7. “He’s on about an 80-game pace in April, and with some of the attrition we’ve had in our bullpen, I wasn’t going to send my closer out,” Boone said.
Holmes was on a 75-game pace prior to his appearance last night, not 80. Holmes’ career high for appearances is 69, so his pace wasn’t far off a number he’s already previously accomplished. (For reference, Mariano Rivera averaged 67 games per season in his career, and three times pitched over 70 times. A 75-game pace is in no way outrageous.)
I wish Boone were joking about the attrition the Yankees have had in their bullpen, but he wasn’t. Jonathan Loaisiga went down for the season within the first week. Guess what Loaisiga is best at? Getting hurt. That’s what he does. The only “full” season he pitched in the majors was in 2021 and he was the best reliever in baseball that season. But outside of that his career has been marred by injuries. Not even three weeks ago, Boone himself said, “It’s been pretty much something every year that’s tripped him up.” Relying on Loaisiga to be the team’s best reliever was irresponsible given his injury history, much like it was irresponsible to rely on Aaron Hicks to be a starting out fielder on the team in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. The Yankees continue to count on players with extensive injury histories and when they inevitably get injured, the front office and manager cry about the injuries and adversity the team has had to deal with, or in this case: attrition. The only other reliever the Yankees have had get hurt since the start of the season is Nick Burdi. He entered this season having thrown 15 1/3 career innings in the majors over six years because of injuries. I can’t believe he’s hurt again.
8. “I’ll do four outs this time of year,” Boone said, “but I wasn’t going to send him out for a second inning.”
If you don’t think Boone is detrimental to the success of the team he manages, don’t ever forget that sentence.
The evaluation of a pitcher should be done by pitches never by outs, and yet, Boone is making millions of dollars per year for the seventh straight year while doing the complete opposite. Not all outs or appearances are created equal. Holmes pitched a scoreless ninth inning in Milwaukee on Friday. He also pitched a scoreless ninth inning in Houston on Opening Day. He recorded three outs in both and pitched exactly one inning in both. To Boone, those two appearances are of equal value and energy.
Again, Holmes threw 10 pitches in the ninth. TEN! He threw nine pitches over the previous four days. The Yankees had the opportunity to win a game against a good team and Boone decided saving Holmes for a situation on a different day that may never happen was a better idea. The Yankees had a winnable game at hand and Boone decided he would rather take his chances of winning a made-up game in the future. That’s who’s managing the Yankees.
The best part is Holmes probably won’t be needed for a few days. He may not be needed for a week. If Boone wants to play the what-if game, let’s play it. He thinks he may need Holmes for an inning on Saturday, so he wasn’t going to push him for a second inning on Friday. Well, what if Holmes isn’t need on Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday? Then he’ll be used in a game on Wednesday no matter what the score is to get him work. Not even two weeks ago, Boone refrained from using Ian Hamilton in the extra-inning game in Cleveland that the Yankees led in and instead used Caleb Ferguson who blew the game and the Yankees lost. Three days later, after having still not pitched, Boone used Hamilton in a game the Yankees were trailing in because he needed the work.
9. “He’s got a lot of experience,” Boone said of Tonkin.
Yeah, a lot of experience sucking.
“That’s just where we were in the game,” Boone said, “with what we had left.”
The Yankees also had Victor Gonzalez available. I guess he was good enough to close out the Rays with a one-run lead on Sunday, but five days later isn’t good enough to close out the Brewers with a one-run lead. Let’s have the new guy that the Braves didn’t want back, the Mets gave up on twice and the Twins allowed to make one appearance before cutting ties.
10. I’m not mad at Tonkin. Not in the least bit. He’s not good. If he was, the Braves would have re-signed him after last season or the Mets or Twins would have kept him. He wasn’t put on waivers because he’s really good at closing out one-run games. He didn’t ask for the Yankees to offer him a major-league contract. He didn’t ask for Boone to put him into the game in that spot. It’s not his fault he blew the lead in the 10th and lost the game in the 11th.
It’s the Yankees’ fault for lacking bullpen depth when they knew they wouldn’t have Michael King, didn’t re-sign Wandy Peralta, knew of Loaisiga’s unbelievable injury history and knew they would be without Tommy Kahnle, Scott Effross and Lou Trivino to begin the season. And it’s Boone’s fault for putting him in the game. Unfortunately, that won’t be the last bad decision Boone is allowed to make.
The Yankees followed up their series win over the Rays by splitting four games against the lowly A’s at Yankee Stadium. It was a disappointing series in which the Yankees were shut out in the
The Yankees followed up their series win over the Rays by splitting four games against the lowly A’s at Yankee Stadium. It was a disappointing series in which the Yankees were shut out in the first game and left 13 runners on in the fourth game.
1. The Yankees went 4-3 during their week-long homestead and that winning record was a disappointment. It was a disappointment because two of the three losses came against the A’s, and in those two losses the Yankees scored one run total. One run in 18 innings against the A’s, a team that is purposely fielding a team with the intention of losing.
To make matters worse, the Yankees only allowed five runs in those two games (two in the first and three in the second). Those have to be wins. They have to be wins because when the Orioles play the A’s this week in Baltimore, you can bet your ass they won’t be getting shut out by the A’s (like the Yankees did on Monday) and they won’t be leaving 13 runners on (like the Yankees did on Thursday).
2. Yes, the A’s are much improved from the team 112-loss team they were a year ago, but they are still on pace to lose 100 games this year. The biggest difference between last year’s A’s team and this year’s is that they have a bullpen, and a very good one. Mason Miller is awesome with his 104 mph fastball and unhittable slider. He got seven outs in the series and six were strikeouts, including two impressive ones of Juan Soto.
3. Soto went 0-for-4 on Monday and 1-for-4 with a walk on Thursday, and the Yankees lost both games. Howdoyoulikethat?! (John Sterling voice.) The Yankees are going to lose nearly every game Soto doesn’t carry them, and that includes against bad teams like the A’s. The 2023 Yankees Plus Juan Soto are a real thing.
They are a real thing because Aaron Judge continues to not be himself. Sure, he hit a first-inning, two-run home run on Wednesday, but he also needed a four-strike count to do so because of a balk call. He went 0-for-7 with four strikeouts and hit into two double plays in the two losses. He’s hitting .186/.322/.371 on the season.
5. Giancarlo Stanton hit .136/.208/.182 in the seven-game homestand, striking out in a third of his at-bats. Despite his recent slide back into being the 2022-2023 version of himself he was promoted in the lineup from the fifth spot to the fourth spot because of how bad Anthony Rizzo has been.
Yes, Rizzo kind of came out of it with a pair of home runs in the A’s series, but again, like I wrote on Tuesday, it’s the A’s. I will gladly the take the offense since it’s hard to come by even with the household names the Yankees have, but let’s see what Rizzo does over the next week against the Brewers and Orioles before we decide he’s back.
Anthony Volpe has a .636 OPS since his four-hit game in Arizona on April 1 with 19 strikeouts to six walks in his regression back to being who he was last year.
6. Then there’s Gleyber Torres. (I will refrain from writing about Alex Verdugo, Jose Trevino, Austin Wells and Oswaldo Cabrera since my expectations for them are nothing.) I feel unwell when I watch Torres play baseball. When he’s not striking out on three pitches (like he does at least once a game), he’s getting thrown out on the bases (like he was on Thursday) or throwing balls away in the field (like he does a once a week). Torres isn’t a smart player, and right now he’s not a good player. It’s a dangerous combination to be relying on to hit in the middle of the order and play every day.
Torres is a losing player. He’s a disappointment. His entire game epitomizes the 2018-2023 Yankees (and going on 2024 Yankees). He’s on the Mount Rushmore of this Yankees’ core of disappointment along with Judge, Stanton and Aaron Boone with Brian Cashman chiseling the stone for this era. Torres has a .520 OPS. He has two RBIs. Yes, TWO RBIs. It’s the end of April. Tyler Nevin, who is a 27-year-old with a .631 career OPS matched Torres’ RBI total with one swing on Thursday. (It’s absolutely disgusting that Nestor Cortes let Nick Allen and his .545 career OPS and Nevin beat him on Thursday.)
At some point Torres will hit a three-run home run … I think. He will, right? He has to. If he’s going to play every day and get 600-plus plate appearances, at some point he will run into one. And everyone will think it’s the turning point of his season. He may even hit two home runs in a week (what a concept), but don’t let him fool you. This is the same player that came to 2020 spring training 2.0 out of shape, played his way off shortstop in 2021, had the worst OPS in the majors for a six-week stretch in 2022 and tricked everyone into thinking the Yankees should keep him for 2024 because he hit 25 home runs in 2023. Now as an impending free agent he’s playing himself into a prove-it deal instead of a nine-figure deal because he’s completely abandoned any semblance of having a plan at the plate to go along with the worst Baseball IQ in the league when he’s in the field or on the bases.
If you’re holding out hope the 2018-19 Torres is going to return at some point, that’s only going to happen if the juiced baseball of those two seasons returns as well. Otherwise, this is who Torres is.
7. “It’s one of those games where you get all those opportunities,” Boone said after Thursday’s one-run performance. “Ultimately, you want to create that traffic, but you have to deliver on it and we were not able to do that tonight.”
It wasn’t just Thursday night the Yankees weren’t able to deliver on it. They scored one run on Thursday. They were shut out on Monday. They were shut out on Saturday. They scored one run last Monday in Toronto. This isn’t a one-time thing with the Yankees leaving everyone on base and not scoring. This is a common occurrence. It’s becoming expected. The Yankees have been shut out four times already this season. For as bad as the 2023 team was, at this point last year, they hadn’t been shut out a single time yet. They weren’t shut out for a fourth time until their 89th game on July 7. It’s April 26.
8. The Yankees are 17-2 when they score three runs. Three runs. That’s all they need to win to have an 89 percent chance of winning, and yet, they have failed to do that in 27 percent of their games. At least once a series (outside of the Astros series), they are completely stifled.
It’s not as though it’s a surprise. The 2023 Yankees offense was a monumental disaster, and this year they are only marginally better. That margin is Soto. The other eight bats are essentially the same with the only other difference being Verdugo. He’s been coming around somewhat over the last few days, but he may as well be Aaron Hicks aside from those few days.
I have zero confidence in Torres or Verdugo doing anything at the plate, and no one should be counting on Trevino, Wells or Cabrera for offense. Whatever they give you is a bonus. Judge, Stanton and Rizzo have to hit. It’s that simple. Soto is always going to be fine, and Volpe will give enough as a sophomore. It’s the heart of the order, the 3-4-5 hitters that can’t continue toe be as bad as they have been.
9. “Its a tough one because of the chances to really grab this game a couple of times,” Boone said about Thursday. “We were not able to get through.”
What happened on Thursday is going to happen at times over 162 games. But with the Yankees, through 27 games, it has happened too often, just like it did it in 2023 and half of 2022 and all of 2021. I don’t expect the Yankees to win every game. Even in a great season, they will lose 62 times. I do expect them to beat the A’s though, especially at home. I do expect them to win games started by JP Sears (who entered Monday’s game with nine strikeouts total in four starts and then struck out seven Yankees over six shutout innings) and Alex Wood (who entered Thursday’s game with the worst ERA of any pitcher in baseball). I expect the trio of Judge, Stanton and Rizzo to do more, much more than they have this season.
10. I watched the Brewers-Orioles series a couple of weekends ago and the Yankees will be “up against it” (to use a common Boone phrase) for the next seven games. They won’t be facing Sears or Wood this coming week (not that they hit either of those two anyway). The Yankees’ pitching will be facing dynamic, potent lineups that are going to feast on the Yankees’ anemic bullpen arms if given the opportunity.
The Yankees’ offense has to show up starting on Friday night. The season is a month old. The soapbox for the “It’s early!” crowd has been put away until next year. If the offense doesn’t show up, a bad weekend against the Brewers while the Orioles are hosting the A’s coupled with a bad four games in Baltimore next week will allow the Orioles to create separation in the division and run away and hide with it for the rest of the summer. Every game of the season is important. This next week is even more important.
The Yankees have played four games on their current homestand, have been shut out in two of them and even lost to the A’s. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees. 1. The 2023 Yankees
The Yankees have played four games on their current homestand, have been shut out in two of them and even lost to the A’s.
1. The 2023 Yankees plus Juan Soto have been on full display through the first four games of the current seven-game homestand. The Yankees beat the Rays 5-3 on Friday, lost to the Rays 2-0 on Saturday, beat the Rays 5-4 on Sunday and were embarrassingly shut out by the A’s 2-0 on Monday. The Yankees have scored 10 runs in the four games, were shut out twice and have only scored in three of 36 innings to begin the homestand. If that doesn’t portray how truly awful the offense has been, how’s this: Soto has two extra-base hits in the four games and the rest of the Yankees have zero. Not a single extra-base hit from anyone other than Soto in four straight home games.
I continue to wonder where the 2024 Yankees would be without Soto, and it’s a place you don’t want to know about. The Yankees’ strategy to upgrade the offense this season was to trade for the generational superstar and then hope all of their aging, oft-injured, on-the-wrong-side-of-30 bats would bounce back. Soto has lived up to his expectations and then some, while the other half of the strategy has been a collective disappointment.
2. There’s been no bigger disappointment than Judge who seems to ground into a double play or strikeout in every at-bat, killing any rally he can get his hands on. His one clutch hit of the season, the two-run single against the Blue Jays last Wednesday was hit on the ground and mere inches from being an inning-ending groundout.
Judge is hitting .174/.308/.337 and the narrative is to not worry about him and the commonly used silver lining is “Look at the Yankees’ record without Judge hitting!” It’s no longer acceptable to make excuses for Judge not getting a full spring training worth of at-bats when he’s had 104 plate appearances during the season.
3. Judge has been booed this week at Yankee Stadium, and a lot is being made about it. Every Yankee has been booed at least once. Derek Jeter was booed during his 0-for-32 slump in 2004. Mariano Rivera was booed for blowing saves. The two of them helped the Yankees to five championships. Their numbers are in Monument Park and they are the most voted-for Hall of Famers in history. If they can be booed anyone can be, especially Judge.
“I’ve heard worse,” Judge said about the booing, though he has never heard worse at home. “I’d probably be doing the same thing in their situation.”
Judge gets it. He has sucked this year and he’s hearing about it. It comes with the territory. It’s not going to last because his slump isn’t going to last. He’s just another Yankees superstar who has been booed. It’s a non-story.
4. The Yankees don’t need 2024 Judge to be 2022 Judge to get to where they want to go now that they have Soto. The Juan Soto Yankees don’t need the history-making version of Judge, they just can’t have this version of him.
“We’ve just got to keep grinding,” Soto said after the 2-0 loss to the A’s even though he doesn’t need to do anything different. “We just had a tough game. Forget about it and come back tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, the Yankees didn’t just have a tough game as in a single game, and it would be easy to forget if it wasn’t a disturbing trend.
The Yankees have already been shut out four times this year. They have scored three or fewer runs in more than one-third of their games. They are 14-1 when they score four runs in a game, which seems like it should be so easy for a team that features the names this team features, and yet, they frequently have trouble plating four runs.
5. Aaron Boone, who lasted less than one inning on Monday after he was wrongfully ejected for something a fan said gave us his fist “We’ve got to mount more than that” after the shutout loss to the A’s. That’s how bad things are offensively that Boone is dipping into his buzz word bag to describe his offense.
“I’m seeing the ball well,” Rizzo said after another 0-for on Monday. “I’ve just got to put better swings on the ball.”
I don’t know what’s worse: home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt trying to say he ejected Boone because what was said to eject Boone came from the dugout or Rizzo trying to tell the world he is seeing the ball well. Rizzo sounds like a clearly drunk person trying to tell you they’re not drunk.
Rizzo is hitting .227/.307/.284 on the season. The batting average is 36 points below his career, the on-base percentage is 57 points below his career and the slugging percentage is 245 points below his career. Rizzo isn’t seeing the ball well and hasn’t in 11 months since suffering a concussion against the padres last May. As a soon-to-be 35-year-old who has a negative-0.3 WAR on the season and whose contract ends this year (plus the $6 million buyout the Yankees idiotically agreed to for 2025), he’s closer to being designated for assignment than he is putting “better swings on the ball.”
6. For as “bad” as Judge has been, Rizzo would gladly trade his .590 OPS for Judge’s .645. And Gleyber Torres would donate an organ to have Rizzo’s .590 instead of his own .516.
The day Torres is no longer a Yankee will be a wonderful day. For someone who should have been traded three years ago, Torres has somehow been worse than Judge and Rizzo. Torres has yet to hit a home run and has driven in two runs. TWO RUNS in 98 plate appearances. Austin Wells is 3-for-the season and has as many RBIs as Torres in 55 fewer plate appearances.
On Monday, Torres struck out on three pitches in his first plate appearance and in his second plate appearance he struck out on nine pitches. So when he came to bat a third time, Ryan Ruocco said, “Here’s Gleyber Torres. He struck out in his last at-bat, but really battled.” That’s what we’re resorting to in evaluating Torres? Congratulating him for battling? Can someone show me where battling can be found in a player’s slash line? Is it before or after slugging percentage? Torres struck out on three pitches in that third plate appearance, finishing the day 0-for-3 with three strikeouts.
Torres had to be praying he didn’t get a chance to come up in the ninth representing the tying run. Considering he couldn’t get the bat on the ball against the light-throwing JP Sears, I’m curious to see how he would have looked swinging against A’s closer Mason Miller and his 104 mph fastball that he used to strike out Anthony Volpe, Judge and Soto for a perfect ninth.
7. The 2024 A’s aren’t the 2023 A’s because this version of the A’s has a bullpen, which is something the Yankees now completely lack. The two most trustworthy relievers in the Yankees’ bullpen are Ian Hamilton and Clay Holmes and I wouldn’t trust either of them to tell me what day of the week it is, so you can imagine how good I feel when I see them enter a close game. After those two it’s Caleb Ferguson and Victor Gonzalez? Because of a lack of relief depth, barely-in-the-majors Luke Weaver is firmly entrenched in Boone’s circle of trusted receivers, and Estevan Florial showed everyone 10 days ago why that’s a bad idea. The entire bullpen is a joke. No Yankees reliever is a true strikeout pitcher and no one out of the bullpen can put away a hitter with two strikes on them. Holmes has tried to blow or ruin every game he has come into, but he has had a horseshoe jammed so far up his ass this season, I hope he has been playing Powerball and Mega Millions every single day given what has transpired in his outings for him to still not have allowed an earned run.
If you’re waiting for Tommy Kahnle, Scott Effross and Lou Trivino to save the day, you’re going to be waiting for a long time. And by the time those three are all healthy (if they are ever all healthy at the same time) there might not be a day to save. It’s not early. The season is nearly a month old and we’re approaching the 20 percent mark of the schedule.
8. You may be wondering what I’m writing about since the Yankees are 15-8. If you are, then you were probably wondering what I was writing about when the Yankees were winning nearly every day in April, May and the first half of June in 2022 before that entire season crumbled leading into 2023, which was the worst Yankees season in 30 years.
I don’t view these Yankees as a team that has only played 23 games. How could you? It’s the same team plus Soto from last year. It’s the same team plus Soto from 2022 as well. Sure, some of the names are different, but the production is equal. Rizzo may as well be Josh Donaldson. Torres may as well be Aaron Hicks. The starting pitching is relatively the same and the bullpen is much, much worse without Jonathan Loaisiga, Michael King and Wandy Peralta.
9. I would trade King for Soto a trillion times out of a trillion, but when the Yankees knew they weren’t going to have King, how do they not bring back Peralta at a measly $4.25 million a year? He has a 0.82 in 12 appearances for the Padres.
Relying on Loaisiga to be the team’s best reliever was irresponsible given his injury history, much like it was irresponsible to rely on Hicks to be a starting out fielder on the team in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. The Yankees continue to count on players with extensive injury histories and when they inevitably get injured, the front office and manager cry about the injuries and “adversity” the team has had to deal with.
The Hal Steinbrenner Yankees always have to cut corners somewhere. They will give Judge a monster contract, only to not address left field or the bench. They will trade their farm system for Soto, only to skimp out on the bullpen. For the last six-plus years, both Hal and Brian Cashman have talked about “leaving no stone unturned” when speaking to the media about the free-agent market, and yet they rarely turn over any stones. That’s how you end up with Dennis Santana and his career 5.19 ERA pitching important innings in the third week of April.
10. These Yankees are what they are and that is the same offense of the last four years plus Juan Soto, a starting rotation that rarely gives more than five innings and a bullpen that is being held together by tape, glue and gum scraped off a bleacher from Section 39. Boone has had a mostly error-free three-plus weeks to begin the season. Wait until that changes. The Yankees are 7-2 in one-run games. Of their 23 games, 39 percent have been decided by one run. The more one-run games they play in, the more Boone’s in-game decisions become vitally important. If there’s any part of the Yankees standing on the tracks waiting to be destroyed by the regression train it’s their play in one-run games when managed by Boone.
The offense has the ability to take Boone’s in-game strategy out of the equation before the train comes with an inverse regression of their own. That will take Judge waking up, Rizzo proving he’s past his 2023 head injury and Torres not being the equivalent of a random fan getting to face major-league pitching. If it happens, the Yankees will be fine. It could even happen as early as this week against the A’s mediocre-at-best starting pitching. I’m going to need to see it for a lot longer than a series against the A’s, but after what I watched on Monday, I’ll gladly take any offensive outburst even if it’s against the A’s.
