The Yankees went to Boston for three games and were swept. They have lost eight of 11 and four straight.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I didn’t think things could get worse for the Yankees over the weekend after they were humiliated in a 15-5 drubbing by the Red Sox on Friday night. But not only did things get worse (a lot worse), the 10-run loss in the three-game series opener was actually the best the Yankees looked at Fenway Park.

The Yankees began the series by scoring a run in the very first inning. That run was quickly erased when Domingo German allowed a pair of doubles, a walk and hit a batter for two earned runs in the bottom of the first inning. German, clearly choosing to pitch without sticky stuff, proceeded to allow another three baserunners and two runs in the second. Trailing by three with this Yankees offense meant a comeback would be nearly impossible, and German made sure it was impossible when he, Matt Krook in his major-league debut and the Yankees’ defense combined for six runs and a 10-1 Red Sox lead through three innings. By the end of the fourth, the Red Sox led 13-1. The game was long over when the Yankees scored four meaningless, garbage-time runs.

2. In the first game of Sunday’s doubleheader, the Yankees once again got out to an early lead with a pair of runs in the first inning. Considering the Red Sox were willing to punt the game by starting barely-in-the-majors reliever Kaleb Ort as an opener with the plan to use 27th man Chris Murphy making his second career appearance as the bulk reliever, the game favored the Yankees.

Instead of ending the game in the first or taking advantage of Ort or Murphy at any point, the Yankees were shut out for the final 8 2/3 innings. After Gleyber Torres’ one-out home run in the first, they recorded just one hit (a sixth-inning leadoff double by Jake Bauers, in which he was obviously stranded) until there were two outs in the ninth.

Clarke Schmidt eventually imploded because Aaron Boone let him implode despite having an extremely well-rested Michael King ready in the bullpen, as Boone didn’t go to King with the lead, but rather once the game was tied. King couldn’t hold the game at 2-2, and the Yankees lost 6-2.

3. After that game, Boone started to get a little testy with the media, as he does when things aren’t going well for his team, which they haven’t been for a large part of his tenure.

“They’re gonna hit,” Boone said about his offense.

“‘Big G’ is gonna hit,” Boone said about Giancarlo Stanton, who went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts in the day game.

“They’re gonna get it rolling,” Boone said about his offense, much like he said in 2021 and 2022.

Boone even took it one step further, using a prop for his postgame presentation.

“That team we’re rolling out there (he held up the lineup card from the 6-2 loss),” Boone said, “They’re capable of doing damage defensively.”

It was unbelievable comedy from the manager as a desperate man in desperate times. There’s no way Boone could actually believe a lineup featuring a majority of hitters with sub-.300 on-base percentages were capable of doing any damage other than to the Yankees’ postseason odds.

4. I grew up hating the Braves with the Yankees having played them in the 1996 and 1999 World Series (thankfully, winning both). But now I find myself jealous of the Braves and envious of their fans. The Braves have played 72 games and their four core position players (Ronald Acuna, Ozzie Albies, Matt Olson and Austin Riley) have all played every game this season. It’s no surprise the Braves are 22 games over .500 and have the best record in the National League, and it was no surprise when they trailed 5-0 early on Sunday only to win 14-6. A week ago, in a doubleheader the Braves played all their regulars in both games. Unsurprisingly, they swept the doubleheader. What a concept.

You know Boone is feeling it when he plays Stanton in both games of a doubleheader and claims he was going to play Stanton in the outfield in Boston (though he didn’t like a classmate saying they were going to say an answer to a question only after the answer is announced). Boone tried to play his best available players in both games on Sunday, but it didn’t matter because nearly all of the best available players on the Yankees belong in Triple-A. Unfortunately, Oswaldo Cabrera was the only one of them to be sent to Triple-A after Sunday night.

5. Like the first two games of the series, the Yankees started the series finale with a first-inning run. And then the offense did its daily disappearing act for a second time in the day. The Yankees never scored another run and lost 4-1. Kyle Higashioka committed catcher’s interference with the bases loaded to force in the go-ahead run in the fourth inning, hours after Nick Ramirez forced in a run with a balk in the first game. And hours after Boone said, “’Big G’ is gonna hit,’” Stanton went 0-for-3 with a walk and three strikeouts.

Brayan Bello shut down the Yankees with seven innings of one-run ball, and after scoring two runs on four hits in the day game of the doubleheader, the offense Boone said was “capable of doing damage offensively” scored one run on five hits in the night game. The Yankees produced three runs on nine hits in 18 innings on Sunday at Fenway Park.

6. At various times during Sunday’s doubleheader, Fenway Park broke out in expected ‘Yankees suck’ chants and I too wanted to join in on the fun. The Yankees do suck. Within the last week, Boone and the seemingly alternate captain (with Judge out) Anthony Rizzo both used the word to describe the team’s play.

“Losing sucks,” Boone said last weekend when the Red Sox beat up on the Yankees in the Bronx.

“It sucks,” Rizzo said after being swept over the weekend, “It’s definitely a low in the season.”

7. The Yankees have the lowest batting average and OPS in the majors since June 4, which was the first game Judge missed with his current toe injury that no one seems to know when it will be healed. They have the third lowest team OBP in the majors this season. They have lost four straight, are now 1-5 against the Red Sox (who are 32-34 against everyone else) and just went 3-8 against the Red Sox, White Sox and Mets. Add it all up and you have a team that sucks, though that’s not how Boone sees it.

“For the most part, we have been playing pretty well,” Boone said after Sunday night’s loss. “We just haven’t been scoring.”

Playing well and scoring go hand in hand in a game in which the object is to score more runs than your opponent. It takes a delusional person to see the brand of baseball the Yankees have played since they left Dodger Stadium two weeks ago and consider things to be going “pretty well.”

8. The Yankees are so poorly constructed that even when Judge returns the ceiling for this season remains exceptionally low. There’s nothing to suggest Stanton and Josh Donaldson will become their former selves since both are coming off the worst seasons of their careers and look worse this season than they did last season. The hope that DJ LeMahieu is actually healthy is fading, and once Rizzo’s mid-summer back issues flare up, a resurgence from him will be unlikely.

9. As I wrote last week, Bauers is the hitter I trust most right now on a team that has the second-highest payroll in the sport, and that’s disturbing. What’s even more disturbing is that this horrifically designed roster isn’t just a problem for this season, but is going to be a problem next season as well, as the star of the upcoming free-agent class is Harrison Bader. Bader declined the chance to come off the injured list to play in Boston this weekend, citing not feeling comfortable defensively yet. It was determined he would play two more rehab games and be activated on Tuesday, missing three actual games against a division opponent. I hope he was able to find himself defensively in the two meaningless Double-A games.

10. The Yankees have yet another day off on Monday before beginning a six-game homestand against the Mariners and Rangers. Bader should be back on Tuesday (until his next injury), so the Yankees will get a little healthier, though the only player return that matters is Judge’s.

Maybe on Tuesday Yankees fans will be given a positive update on Judge with an actual timeline for a return. Maybe Carlos Rodon will still be on the right path to eventually pitch for the Yankees as he continues to make about $700,000 each time his spot in the rotation comes up. Maybe at least one of Stanton, Rizzo, Donaldson or LeMahieu will start to hit on the homestand. I doubt it. All of it. It would take a true moron to think one or more of those things is going to happen. Then again, you have to be a moron to still be watching this team.

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The Yankees split the first half of this season’s Subway Series, and the bats expected to step up without Aaron Judge remained cold for another two games. The Yankees haven’t won a series since Judge injured his toe.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Things have gone as expected since Aaron Judge injured his toe at Dodger Stadium nearly two weeks ago. The Yankees lose home series to the White Sox (30-40) and Red Sox (34-35), and just split a pair at Citi Field with the Mets (32-36). Those are three mediocre-to-bad teams and the Yankees lost five of eight to them. That’s because without Judge, the Yankees are a mediocre-to-bad team.

The reason the Yankees are 3-5 over their last eight against third-, fourth- and fifth-place teams isn’t because of the starting pitching despite Luis Severino throwing batting practice every five days and it’s not even because of Aaron Boone’s bullpen decisions, which cost the Yankees the second game of the Citi Field series and nearly cost them the first game of that series as well. It’s because of the offense and the lack of production from the high-priced, veteran bats in the lineup.

2. The Not-So-Fab Five of Giancarlo Stanton ($32 million salary this season), Josh Donaldson ($21.75 million), Anthony Rizzo ($17 million), DJ LeMahieu ($15 million) and Gleyber Torres ($9.95 million) are making a combined $95.7 million this season. They are collectively making more than the entire payrolls of the Royals, Nationals, Reds, Guardians, Rays, Pirates, Orioles and A’s.

Earlier this week, Hal Steinbrenner said, “This is New York City. Fans want the stars.” If that’s the case, Hal, then why don’t the Yankees have any stars other than Judge and Gerrit Cole? The Yankees have former stars, but actual, current stars, it’s only Judge and Cole. And relying on former stars is going about as well as expected.

3. The Yankees traded for Stanton nearly six years ago coming off an NL MVP-winning season. As a Yankee, he has rarely played and his OPS is 78 points lower than it was as a Marlin. He’s hitting .213/.295/.468 in his last 132 games.

4. Donaldson got AL MVP votes for five straight seasons in Oakland and Toronto from 2014-2018, winning it in 2015. His OPS with the Yankees is 171 points lower than his career OPS. He has a .299 on-base percentage as a Yankee, but that hasn’t prevented him from only batting second, third, fourth and fifth this season.

5. Rizzo was a star with the Cubs from 2014-2019 (.901 OPS), but that was a half-decade ago. His Yankees OPS is 47 points below his career OPS, and he’s 1-for-29 with three walks since Judge got hurt. He has one hit, no extra-base hits and no RBIs over the last two weeks despite only batting second, third and fourth during that time.

6. LeMahieu finished in the Top 4 in AL MVP voting in his first two seasons with the Yankees, finished second for the batting title in 2019 and won it in 2020, hitting .336/.386/.536 in 871 plate appearances. Since the start of 2021, he’s hitting .260/.343/.373, had his last two seasons end early due to injury and has the highest strikeout percentage increase in the majors from 2022 to 2023.

7. Torres, who was a two-time All-Star in his first two major-league seasons, hitting 62 home runs in 267 games in 2018-19 has 47 home runs over the last four seasons, was moved off his position of the future and the Yankees have reportedly unsuccessfully tried to move him for the last calendar year.

8. Those five bats are supposed to complement Judge when he plays and carry the team when he doesn’t. They haven’t done either. Here is what they have done since Judge went down in Los Angeles:

Stanton: .115/.233/.269
Donaldson: .091/.222/.364
Rizzo: .035/.177/.035
LeMahieu: .185/.214/.333
Torres: .172/.294/.379

I don’t know what’s worse: Rizzo having a .035 slugging percentage in his last 34 plate appearances or Donaldson batting third for the Yankees with a .091 average in the last two weeks. (Congratulations to Torres for being the best of the bunch with a magnificent .673 OPS since Judge went on the injured list!)

9. It’s not good that the bat I trust most and want up in a big spot right now is Jake Bauers. Yes, Jake Bauers. The negative-career WAR player who is hitting a paltry .222/.308/.456. His .763 OPS is Barry Bonds-ian compared to most of the Yankees and he’s just one of five Yankees with an on-base percentage above .300. Two of the other four are Willie Calhoun and Billy McKinney, also journeymen, below-league-average hitters for their careers. This is a team that Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman have both categorized as “championship-caliber.” (The last two actual champions in the Astros and Braves have a combined three hitters of their 18 starting position players with on-base percentages below .300.)

10. Coming off a day off on Thursday, the Yankees are set up bullpen-wise for the three-game weekend series in Boston. They are expected to get Harrison Bader back, and have another day off scheduled for Monday. They are in as good of a spot health-wise from a position player perspective as they could be with Judge unavailable, and yet, none of it matters if the five veterans who will likely bat 1 through 5 in some order in the series don’t starting hitting like they are paid and expected to.

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The Yankees lost a home series to the last-place Red Sox after losing a home series to the well-below-.500 White Sox. Things are bad for the Yankees without Aaron Judge, and they could get a lot worse with the upcoming schedule.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The Yankees returned home from their successful 4-2 West Coast road trip against the Mariners and Dodgers and lost back-to-back series to the White Sox and Red Sox because they returned home without Aaron Judge. They lost two of three to the nine-games-under-.500 White Sox and two of three to the Red Sox who came to New York having lost 19 of 30 and after leaving New York immediately lost at home to the 13-games-under-.500 Rockies. The Yankees lost four of six because they scored 17 runs during the homestand.

2. The Tigers have the worst offense in baseball, averaging 3.6 runs per game. The Yankees without Judge average 3.3 runs per game. Without Judge, the Yankees have the worst offense in baseball. It wouldn’t be that way if someone, anyone could pick up even the littlest bit of slack with Judge on the injured list. It would be nice if one of the veteran bats making good money to be good at baseball would in fact be good at baseball.

3. You can break the Yankees offense down into four groups.

The first group isn’t really a group, it’s Judge, all by himself.

The second group is the veteran bats who are supposed to complement Judge: Giancarlo Stanton, Anthony Rizzo, DJ LeMahieu, Josh Donaldson and Gleyber Torres. (Harrison Bader would go here as well if he weren’t on the IL again.)

The third group is the group no one expects anything from: Anthony Volpe, Oswaldo Cabrera, Jose Trevino, Kyle Higashioka and Isiah Kiner-Falefa.

The fourth group is the group of spring training non-roster invitees and journeymen who the Yankees are forced to play every year because of a lack of depth and a roster of oft-injured players: Jake Bauers, Willie Calhoun and Billy McKinney.

Right now the first group (Judge) is on the IL. The second group is in a collective slump. The third group is performing as expected, which is not performing at all. That leaves the fourth group, which is somehow “carrying” the Yankees, and they are doing about as good of a job as Kevin Malone did carrying his pot of chili into Dunder Mifflin.

4. Even when Judge comes back, whenever that may be, the players around him are still going to be the same players. Torres will hit that timely home run to do just enough to not become the focal points of Yankees fans’ ire, LeMahieu will have that two-hit game to make you think he’s turning it around, Rizzo will hit a short porch home run and have you believing he’s back, Donaldson will run into a middle-middle fastball from a fringe reliever to keep his job and Stanton will hit a ball 492 feet to have you feeling good. But those moments will continue to be far and few between, and not nearly enough make the offense anything more than one dimensional with that one dimension being Judge. Given the way the Yankees play with and without Judge, he’s vastly underpaid. Yes, the guy with the $360 million contract over nine years is underpaid.

5. I joke and complain about the Yankees rostering names like Bauers, Calhoun and McKinney, but without those three since the second game of the Dodgers series, the Yankees may not have a win. The Yankees are relying on three journeymen, career below-league-average hitters to provide offense for them, and yet, Brian Cashman still has a job.

Can you think of anyone you know who isn’t a firefighter, police officer, teacher, doctor/healthcare worker or municipal worker who has the same job they had 25 years ago in 1998? Because that’s how long Cashman has been general manager of the Yankees. And ever since 2, 20, 42, 46 and 51 retired, the Yankees haven’t reached the World Series let alone win it. Under Cashman, the Yankees have never won the pennant with solely players he signed and developed. Likely, because nearly all of the players he signs and develops suck.

6. Do you know who has the lowest on-base percentage of players in the majors? That would be the Yankees’ top prospect Anthony Volpe. Volpe has 67 major-league games and 22 Triple-A games to his name, and he’s not the problem, but he’s a problem. He’s a problem because he can’t hit major-league pitching and because the Yankees are reluctant to admit he needs more seasoning in the minors.

The Yankees went all in on Volpe choosing to not sign any of the highly-touted shortstop free agents over the last two offseasons (like Corey Seager who has a 176 wRC+ for the Rangers this season) because they believed in Volpe so heavily. Maybe their belief will pay off. Maybe Volpe will eventually become a star. Maybe. Right now he isn’t though and he can’t continue his development at the major-league level.

It’s not as if the Yankees don’t have another option. Oswald Peraza has a .980 OPS at Triple-A right now, and in the 28 major-league games he has played in, he has a .714 OPS. If Volpe had a .714 OPS (he doesn’t, he has a .605), the Yankees would have you believing he’s not only going to become Derek Jeter, but that he’s 1999 Jeter right now. At this point, Volpe would have to hit like 2022 Judge for the next month to get his OPS in the realm of .714.

Again, Volpe isn’t the problem, but the Yankees need to optimize their lineup in any way possible and that means not having Volpe in it, as he’s one bad series from having his OPS dip below .600. I’m not going to hold my breath on the Yankees sending Volpe down and calling Peraza up. The Yankees had nearly two months to play Peraza every day with Donaldson out and they didn’t, just like they had a chance to play him all last summer and postseason with Kiner-Falefa being an automatic out at the plate and a liability in the field, and they didn’t. It took Cashman years to give up on Aaron Hicks and four straight offense-less postseasons to admit having an all right-handed lineup isn’t a recipe for success. It’s going to take him a lot longer than two months of having the worst bat in the league in his lineup to make a change.

7. I wish the Yankees would change their approach with playing Stanton, but we all know that’s not going to happen. Here is Stanton’s season to date:

RF
Yankees off
RF
DH
DH
RF
Personal day
Yankees off
DH
DH
DH
RF
Personal day
RF
DH
DH
DH
47 days on IL
DH
Personal day
DH
Yankees off
DH
Personal day
DH
DH
DH
Personal day
Yankees off

The season is 75 days old. Stanton spent 47 of those 75 days injured. In the other 28, he played right field five times, was the designated hitter 14 times, had five personal days off (for injury prevention because that works so well) and four scheduled days off. He makes $197,530.86 per game.

8. No matter the nonsense anyone in the Yankees spews, the Yankees aren’t a championship-caliber team. I don’t know how Aaron Boone could even mention the team being championship caliber since he has no idea what a championship team looks like, having never won as a player or manager. After Friday’s game, he said, “Losing sucks,” and he should know since that’s all he has ever done.

9. The Yankees are likely to do a lot more losing until Judge comes back, whenever that may be. After being embarrassed for six-plus seasons now with wrong diagnoses, missed timetables and outright lies about injuries, the Yankees are keeping Judge’s injury, symptoms and expected return. a mystery to the media and fans. Though that may just be because it’s a mystery to them as well. We are talking about an organization whose star player was going to miss the first half of the 2020 season if it started on time after team doctors weren’t being able to identify broken ribs and a punctured lung for five months. They are likely to do a lot more losing because their ceiling for runs scored each night is three, their high-paid veterans can’t hit and the schedule for the next 11 games is Mets (2), Red Sox (3), Mariners (3), Rangers (3). You would like to think the six games against the A’s and Cardinals at the end of the month would be a nice break, but if Judge isn’t back for those, those will be far from a “break.” (The A’s beat the Rays on Monday night and have a five-game winning streak, which is something the 2023 Yankees haven’t accomplished.)

10. The next two nights the Yankees will face Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, so if you think playing the 31-35 Pete Alonso-less Mets favors the Judge-less Yankees, think again. The Yankees have allowed 18 starting pitchers to complete seven innings against them this season and that’s more than any other team in the majors. With Scherzer and Verlander, who both have owned the Yankees in their Hall of Famer careers both coming off bad starts, expect the Yankees to increase their lead on that humiliating stat.

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The Yankees returned home from their successful West Coast road trip by losing two of three to the well-below-.500 White Sox. It was a disappointing few days of losing and injury news for the Yankees.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The White Sox are aren’t good (.438 winning percentage). But the Yankees without Aaron Judge are basically the White Sox (.467 winning percentage). The Yankees didn’t have Judge for the three-game series against the White Sox, and to no surprise, the Yankees lost the series, scoring 10 runs in three games.

On Monday night, the Yankees were no-hit by Lucas Giolito for six innings. Giolito isn’t having a great year, but no staring pitcher needs to be having a great year to shut down this Yankees offense. Just ask Alek Manoah who was demoted to the Blue Jays’ instructional league this week to completely reset his career after posting a 6.36 ERA and 6.53 FIP in 13 starts. For as bad as Manoah has been, that didn’t stop him from pitching seven shutout innings against the Yankees earlier this season. If not for Giolito throwing 100 pitches in his six shutout innings, he would have undoubtedly no-hit the Yankees (but he may have needed 130-plus pitches to do so).

The Judge-less Yankees managed to score two runs off the White Sox’ bullpen, but came up short in a 3-2 loss. The loss dropped the Yankees to 6-7 when Judge is out of the lineup, and in those 13 games, the Yankees have scored 45 runs or 3.46 per game.

2. Judge was put on the injured list prior to the start of the doubleheader and Aaron Boone got aggravated when asked about the status of Judge.

“We don’t have the timeline,” Boone said. “We don’t know.”

Finally, Boone took my advice. Earlier this week, I wrote:

I wish Boone would just say no comment to every injury-related question. His understanding of the severity of injuries is elementary and the timetables he has given for injury returns for now six years as a manger are laughable.

Maybe Boone is getting smarter.

3. No, Boone isn’t getting smarter. In the first game of the doubleheader on Thursday, he managed to use Wandy Peralta for one pitch, Michael King for two innings and Tommy Kahnle for an inning in a game the Yankees lost. So he possibly took Peralta out of the equation for the night game, made King unavailable for the first game of the Red Sox series on Friday and lost Kahnle for the second game of the doubleheader as well. It was a work of art from Boone.

I don’t blame Boone at all for the 6-5 loss in the first game on Thursday. I do blame him for how he set up the bullpen for the second game and for Friday’s game. It’s not his fault King blew the lead and gave up a two-run, go-ahead home run to Luis Robert in the seventh inning. But once King did blow the lead and the Yankees didn’t at least tie the game in the bottom of the inning, King shouldn’t have been back out for the eighth in a game the Yankees were now losing, considering it would make him unavailable for Friday.

4. Luis Severino was the reason the Yankees lost the first game. After working a scoreless first around a single and walk, Severino allowed a two-run home run in the second and a pair of solo home runs in the third. It was the second bad start in a row for Severino (5 IP, 6 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 2 BB, 6 K, 3 HR), something the Yankees can’t afford with the lineup missing Judge, Nestor Cortes on the injured list and Carlos Rodon nowhere near throwing a pitch for the Yankees. In a game the Judge-less Yankees scored five runs, they needed to win. Instead, they lost and fell to 6-8 without Judge, averaging 3.57 runs in those 14 games.

5. Offensively, the second game of the doubleheader looked like it was playing out like the first game of the series as the Yankees were no-hit through the first three innings. Fortunately, it ended there.

In the bottom of the fourth, new leadoff hitter (he batted first in both games of the doubleheader) Willie Calhoun doubled and Gleyber Torres followed with a two-run home run to give the Yankees a 2-0 lead. They added a run in the fifth when Billy McKinney (yes, Billy McKinney) went deep and then held on for a 3-0 win behind 3 1/3 innings of no-hit relief from Ron Marinaccio and Clay Holmes.

Randy Vasquez was awesome in his second career start in the night game (5.2 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 3 K) to lower his two-start ERA to 1.74. After Vasquez struck out Juan Soto in his major-league debut a week-and-a-half ago, I knew he had the potential to be really good at this level, and he showed it on Thursday.

6. Aside from Vasquez’s impressive outing, the reason the Yankees were able to earn a split for the day and score eight runs had nothing to do with the remaining names in the lineup you would think it would have to do with. Anthony Rizzo, Giancarlo Stanton, DJ LeMahieu and Josh Donaldson combined to go 0-for-20 with three walks. Calhoun, McKinney, Jake Bauers and Kyle Higashioka combined to go 10-for-23 with four doubles, two home runs, five RBIs and a walk. That’s a problem.

It’s a problem that LeMahieu looks every bit as bad as he did last year when he was shut down with a foot injury. In the last three weeks he has two extra-base hits and they came in the same game. In the last four weeks he has one multi-hit game. Is LeMahieu hurt again and just not telling anyone to avoid missing significant time for a third straight year?

Rizzo is also in a slump of his own, though he was so good for the first two months of the season that it’s hard to get on him for his first rough stretch of the year. The problem is that without Judge in the lineup, the Yankees can’t have a rough stretch from Rizzo. Not with LeMahieu going the way he is, not with Stanton and Donaldson having just returned, not with Torres having just homered for the first time in two weeks and not with Anthony Volpe and Oswaldo Cabrera both playing like they should be playing in Triple-A.

7. It’s one thing to count on players like Calhoun (who entered the year as the worst position player from a WAR perspective in the majors since 2020), Bauers (who has been with four organizations in five years) and McKinney (who has been with six organizations in five years) for a day. But to count on three journeymen, negative-career-WAR players like those three for a lengthy amount of time is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, the Yankees don’t have another option.

8. With Judge and Harrison Bader on the IL and Aaron Hicks playing for the Orioles (where he’s hitting .368/.478/.632), the Yankees’ expected starting outfield from the winter isn’t available. The Opening Day left fielder (Cabrera) is supposed to be in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, and only isn’t because Greg Allen (Hicks’ replacement) also had to go on the IL. That’s how you end up with the Yankees playing two infielders in the outfield daily (Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Bauers), a poor defensive outfielder (Calhoun) and needing to call up McKinney. If you told me in the offseason that on June 8, McKinney would be starting in center field, Calhoun would be hitting leadoff, Bauers would be batting fifth, Kiner-Falefa sixth and three-fifths of the rotation being Vasquez, Clarke Schmidt and Domingo German, I would have asked how many games the Yankees were out of a postseason spot.

9. Thankfully, the Yankees currently hold a postseason spot: the second wild-card berth (which would have them playing a best-of-3 in Baltimore to advance to the ALDS). It’s not the spot they want (the AL East title and a first-round bye), but it’s a spot nonetheless. A spot they are barely hanging on to by one game over the Blue Jays.

They won’t have a spot for much longer with Judge out if the other big-money, All-Star names on the team don’t start hitting. The Yankees can’t rely on the Misfit and Replacement Yankees to keep them afloat until they get healthier (if they ever do). They need to be able to rely on the bats they expected to rely on this season.

10. The last three games against the White Sox were the “easy” part of the Yankees’ schedule for the next couple of weeks and they lost two of three at home to their lowly opponent. Now they have three against the Red Sox, two against the Mets, three more against the Red Sox, three against the Mariners and three against the Rangers.

The 14-game gauntlet begins on Friday night against the Red Sox, a team that has lost 18 of 28 and is in last place in the AL East (but would be in first place in the crappy AL Central). Gerrit Cole gets the ball in the series opener followed by German and Schmidt. Given the Yankees’ starters in the second and third games of the series, and the unlikelihood of the offense generating many runs at this time, the Yankees can’t afford to lose the Cole start. They have already lost too much of late.

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The Yankees finished their six-game West Coast road trip with a three-game series win over the Dodgers to finish 4-2 in Seattle and Los Angeles. But even with the four wins, the Yankees may have suffered their biggest loss of the season.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I was sad to not be at Dodger Stadium this weekend and missing out on attending a Yankees-Dodgers series for the first time in a decade. Instead, I watched the three-game series from home with my wife, who likes the Dodgers as much as I like the Yankees. On Friday night, I had to sit through my wife laughing at me during the most Murphy’s Law inning of all time for the Yankees.

After Gleyber Torres singled on the first pitch of the series from Clayton Kershaw, Aaron Judge erased the leadoff single by grounding into a double play. The immediate threat was gone and Kershaw had two outs on two pitches. After retiring Anthony Rizzo on three pitches, Kershaw had needed only five pitches to get through the first inning.

Mookie Betts hit Luis Severino’s second pitch out for a leadoff home run. 1-0 Dodgers. After Freddie Freeman grounded out, Will Smith reached on an infield single that was originally called an out, but overturned after a Dodgers challenge, and Max Muncy followed with a two-run home run. 3-0 Dodgers. Then J.D. Martinez, Jason Heyward and Miguel Vargas hit three consecutive ground ball singles to load the bases with one out. James Outman followed with a single. 4-0 Dodgers. Miguel Rojas hit a sacrifice fly. 5-0 Dodgers. Betts (in his second at-bat of the inning) singled. 6-0 Dodgers. Mercifully, Jose Trevino picked off Outman at third with two on and Freeman at the plate to end the inning. It was the kind of inning you see at Coors Field from some bum with an 8.43 career ERA pitching in relief for the Rockies. It’s not the kind of inning you expect Severino to be responsible for.

Severino threw 34 pitches in the inning and allowed six runs on eight hits, including six consecutive hits. It was the most runs he had allowed in any of his 654 1/3 innings. After looking like the same old Severino in his first two starts against the Reds and Padres (11.1 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 4 BB, 10 K, 1 HR, 1.59 ERA, 0.794 WHIP), the start on Friday night was startling. It would have been startling if Nick Nelson was on the mound for it, the fact it was Severino was stunning. Severino’s velocity was noticeably down, and maybe that was just a result of him being part of the rotation for a third start after having not been so since the end of last season. Maybe it was fatigue. Maybe he was tipping pitches. Whatever it was, it needs to be fixed, and fast. The Yankees can’t afford to have Severino be anything less than a front-end starter.

2. Josh Donaldson homered off Kershaw in the second inning in his first at-bat since April 5. In typical Donaldson fashion, he performed a bat flip worthy of coming after hitting a walk-off home run, rather than a solo shot in a game the Yankees were still losing by five after he jogged around the bases. Donaldson hit a second home run in the ninth inning as well and for a night he looked like the version of himself the Yankees agreed to take on $51.5 million in salary for. But it only lasted a night.

The following night, the Dodgers attacked Donaldson with breaking balls and he looked as lost as he did early in the season before getting hurt (2-for-16 with six strikeouts) and all of last season (.222/.308/.374), especially in the ALCS when the Astros embarrassed him each time he stepped in the box 91-for-13 with 10 strikeouts). In the second game of the series, Donaldson went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts, and I can’t imagine any team moving forward throwing him anything other than breaking pitches until he figures out how to hit them again, if he does.

3. Giancarlo Stanton also homered on Friday in his return to the lineup for the first time since April 15 (and hit a clutch and important double on Sunday night). Stanton then sat on Saturday and Donaldson sat on Sunday in what was a pre-planned injury prevention strategy by the injury expert Yankees. Donaldson just had nearly two months off and Stanton seven weeks. The last thing these two need is to play less baseball, but there was the Yankees conducting their usual load management nonsense for the duo because their load management methods have done such a good job preventing injuries over the last five years, especially for Stanton.

4. I was prepared to stop being a Yankees fan after Saturday night’s game. Not because of the Yankees’ unnecessary rest for their everyday players, but because of Gerrit Cole’s removal from a game in which he looked the best he has all season. Cole had stifled the Dodgers for six innings on 80 pitches and the only hits and lone run they had produced of him all came on weak, soft bloop contact.

When the seventh inning started and Wandy Peralta was on the mound with Cole shown drinking a water bottle in the dugout, I couldn’t believe what I was watching. The only acceptable reason for what was unfolding was that Cole had suffered an injury, and given the Yankees’ ongoing injury issues it made sense. But it also made sense that Boone was trying to prove he’s smarter than everyone by lifting Cole and getting the last three innings of outs from his three best relievers. The fact that myself and many Yankees fans thought it was possible that Cole wasn’t hurt and that Boone was trying to implement some genius strategy shows you the level of competence we expect from the Yankees manager.

Immediately after Cole came out, the first four Dodgers reached and a 5-1 Yankees lead was now 5-2 with the tying run at the plate and no outs. My heart rate was bordering on needing medical intervention as Peralta and Michael King were melting down and the thought that Boone had created this plan from his brain had me infuriated. Thankfully, the Yankees held on for a 6-3 win, and thankfully, the decision to put Peralta in the game to begin the seventh instead of leaving Cole in wasn’t concocted ahead of time by Boone and was the result of Cole having cramps.

5. The Yankees held on to win because Oswaldo Cabrera had one of his two biggest moments of the season by adding a much-needed insurance run in the ninth with a solo home run. (His other big moment this season was his double off Emmanuel Clase in Cleveland in April.) But the lead was truly preserved because of Judge’s ridiculous catch on a J.D. Martinez ball that left Judge stumbling for his balance inside the Yankees’ bullpen in right field.

When Judge ran through the bullpen door, my heart sank as I figured he would come out of the play with some sort of injury, possibly season-ending given the speed he chased the ball down and crashed into the wall with. At the time it seemed like he was able to come away from the play unscathed, but on Sunday, he was held out of the lineup for a toe injury suffered on the play that he had needed treatment on.

6. Jake Bauers earned himself a month of criticism immunity with his performance on Saturday, so you won’y be reading anything unless  positive about Bauers in these thoughts in June. So I guess you won’t be reading anything about him all! OK, I’ll stop now. Bauers had himself a game in his return to his home in California, and it’s a good thing he did because he’s the only Yankee who could solve Michael Grove. Every opponent Grove has faced has been able to solve him, but not the Yankees other than Bauers.

John Smoltz spent the Saturday game telling viewers how great Grove was, even as he allowed two home runs to the same batter and four earned runs in five innings. Smoltz kept advising the Dodgers pitcher to forget about the two home runs and think “I pitched great.” With that kind of loser mentality I think we all now know why the Braves lost to the Yankees in the 1996 and 1999 World Series, and why Smoltz broadcasts with a 27-year-old grudge against the Yankees.

7. Knowing Bobby Miller’s prospect hype and what he had done in his first two major-league starts, my expectations weren’t high for the series finale on Sunday night. Once the lineup was posted without Judge’s name in it, I had no expectations other than the Yankees may get shut out.

There was Willie Calhoun batting cleanup. Calhoun wasn’t good enough to be on the roster before the injury bug ravaged the Yankees clubhouse, and he isn’t good enough to be in the lineup most days, but when he does play, he’s somehow good enough to bat fourth. And making up the rest of the outfield for the rubber game was Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Jake Bauers.

“A lot of people looked forward to this series,” David Cone said on the ESPN broadcast. “Yankees-Dodgers, Dodger Stadium here in June. If you had Kiner-Falefa and Willie Calhoun and Jake Bauers to be the starting outfield today, I want to go to Vegas with you.”

Domingo German was able to match zeros with Miller through six. the Yankees broke through with a run created by an error in the seventh, and then German gave the run right back in the form of a Martinez home run while Eduardo Perez was opining that German looked like Pedro Martinez. I think it was the Baseball Gods way of reminding everyone that german and Martinez should never be mentioned in the same sentence or thought.

8. In the eighth, Rizzo walked and Stanton hit a booming double to the gap in left-center. Kyle Higashioka miraculously managed to make contact with two strikes to score Rizzo and give the Yankees a 2-1 lead. Then in the ninth, Anthony Volpe picked up his second hit of he game, this one a two-run home run that was crushed to left-center to give the Yankees two important insurance runs for the bottom of the ninth.

Was Sunday night the turning point of Anthony Volpe’s season and career? The rookie shortstop went 2-for-4 in the game with a single and two-run home run to provide the Yankees with a pair of insurance runs in the ninth inning. We all thought Volpe’s big home run against the Blue Jays on April 22 was the turning point and it wasn’t. we thought his big series against the Rays in mid-may was going to be it and it wasn’t. Maybe this was it?

9. Not a series go by without the Yankees losing at least one player or pitcher to injury, and coming out of the road six game road trip, they not only lost Judge for who knows how long, but they also lost Nestor Cortes to a shoulder injury. Boone claims Cortes should only miss a start or two, but Cortes could need both Tommy John and labrum surgery and Boone would call it minor and say he could see Cortes missing only a start or two. I wish Boone would just say no comment to every injury-related question. His understanding of the severity of injuries is elementary and the timetables he has given for injury returns for now six years as a manger are laughable. It’s a good thing the Yankees have five more days off in June because they need every one of them to avoid having to use a fifth starter as much as possible since they don’t have a fifth starter.

10. The Yankees have a day off on Monday and then host the lowly White Sox for three games at the Stadium. The White sox aren’t just bad, they’re a joke. They are nine games under .500 with a negative-47 run differential. They don’t have a starter with a sub-4.00 ERA and their offense is … sad? Yes, I think sad would be the best way to describe it. This is a series the Yankees have to win. After this, it’s three against the Red Sox, two against the Mets, another three against the Red Sox, three against the Mariners and three against the Rangers. That’s 14 straight games against teams over. 500. So yeah, beating up on the White Sox isn’t just needed, it’s imperative.

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