The Yankees went to Seattle banged up and left even more banged up, losing Harrison Bader to the injured list. Despite new and existing injuries, the Yankees unexpectedly managed to take two of three from the Mariners.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. When Willie Calhoun is your 3-hitter it’s hard to expect much. So for the Yankees to go to Seattle against three hard-throwing righties and win two of three was more than acceptable, it was satisfying. For as infuriating as getting shut out and being unable to plate the automatic runner in extras innings is, Yankees fans should be delighted the Yankees didn’t get shut out in all three games with the lineups they used.

In the series opener, Aaron Boone had Calhoun batting third, Jake Bauers sixth, Isiah Kiner-Falefa seventh, Kyle Higashioka eighth and Oswaldo Cabrera ninth, creating the weakest 3-hitter and 6 through 9 as in the league. Considering I wouldn’t have a good feeling about a lineup with those names producing against Brooks Kriske, I didn’t have a good feeling about the lineup producing against rookie sensation Bryce Miller (who entered the game with a 1.15 ERA) having allowed four totals runs over his first five major-league starts. Combine the shockingly horrific lineup with Domingo German making his first start post-suspension, and I figured I may be asleep much earlier than planned with the 9:40 p.m. start time. Instead, the game ended up being a John Sterling Special because “you can’t predict baseball.”

The Yankees torched Miller for eight runs on 11 hits (six for extra bases) in 4 2/3 innings en route to a 10-4 win. German was OK (6.1 IP, 7 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 3 BB, 4 K, 1 HR) but it didn’t matter that he was just OK since the offense exploded for 10 runs for the second straight game. The Goof Troop went off: Calhoun with two doubles, Bauers with two doubles and a home run, Kiner-Falefa with a double and a single and Higashioka with a pair of singles. Every Yankees starter had multiple hits in the game, except for one: Oswaldo Cabrera.

2. Here is what I wrote about Cabrera a week ago:

It’s time for Cabrera to be sent down. It’s well past time. He’s in the fifth percentile of the league in expected batting average and the third percentile in expected slugging percentage. He doesn’t barrel the ball up (17th percentile), doesn’t hit the ball hard (24th percentile) and doesn’t walk (21st percentile). He doesn’t do anything well, other than make outs.

Cabrera was a breath of fresh air last summer when the only major-league bat in the Yankees lineup at times was Judge and Yankees fans were yearning for someone, anyone to enter the lineup not named Aaron Hicks, Joey Gallo or Josh Donaldson. Cabrera can get back to being that guy, but it’s not happening at the major-league level and the Yankees can’t afford to continue to run him out there every day hoping he figures it out in real, meaningful games.

After Wednesday’s game, Cabrera was sent down. In January, Brian Cashman and Boone said they expected Aaron Hicks to be the team’s starting left fielder come Opening day. It was instead Cabrera. The Yankees chose to not address left field in the offseason because of those two internal options and those two options now play for the Baltimore Orioles and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.

For as good and fun to watch as Cabrera was upon being called up last summer, he has been equally as bad and not fun to watch this season. A .195/.246/.292 batting line and a 49 OPS+ through one-third of the season isn’t going to cut it. Cabrera has been unplayable for a while now, but he has maintained his roster spot because there supposedly weren’t better options in the minors (which is scary). That’s no longer the case and he’s no longer a Yankee.

3. Harrison Bader is also no longer a Yankee. Well, an active Yankee, that is. Bader hurt himself running to first base on Monday and had to be replaced for a pinch runner. When Boone went to check on him at first base and Bader immediately came out of the game, I knew it would be weeks not days for his return and I said as much on the Keefe To The City Podcast after the game. Sure enough, the following day he landed on the 10-day IL with a hamstring issue despite Boone calling the injury minor before he was placed on the IL.

Bader has been hurt more than he has been healthy as a Yankee. When he has played he’s been good to great, but he rarely plays. There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not the Yankees should extend him during the season or re-sign him as a free agent in the offseason. I believe they will retain him, but for a guy who has been mostly hurt for his 20s, what would make anyone think he’s going to be mostly healthy in his 30s? Did we just not go through this same exercise with another center fielder who the Yankees are now paying to potentially beat them in Hicks with the Orioles?

4. Aaron Judge continued his destruction of T-Mobile Park in Seattle with a pair of home runs and a home run robbery in the series opener. The Yankees go as Judge goes, and he went on Monday and they won with ease. He went on Tuesday as well, and again, the Yankees won with ease, 10-2, as Judge hit his AL-leading 18^th home run.

The game was in hand by the time Judge hit that seventh-inning home run and that’s because the Yankees hung a 3-spot in the first, another 3-sopt in the third and scored in the fourth. Through four innings the Yankees had a 7-0 lead, and it looked like for once Nestor Cortes would be able to give the Yankees length and pitch against an opposing lineup with success more than two times. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.

After throwing four scoreless innings, Cortes turned over the lineup for a third time in the fifth and the Mariners scored twice off him with a pair of doubles and a pair of walks. Opposing hitters have a .506 OPS against him the first time they see him, a .640 the second time and an astounding 1.521 the third time. The next time Cortes starts will be on Tuesday against the right-handed-heavy White Sox, so I don’t know if that will be the time he ends this trend.

It didn’t matter that Cortes could only give the Yankees give innings because the bullpen had a five-run lead to work with to get the final 12 outs, and it was largely made possible by Kiner-Falefa. Kiner-Falefa went 4-for-5 in the game with four RBIs, representing 29 percent of his season RBI total in one game.

5. On May 13, Kiner-Falefa was hitting .182/.232/.208. Unspeakable numbers. A .208 slugging and a .439 ops? Seemingly impossible for a near-everyday player to post. But over his last 11 games through Tuesday, Kiner-Falfea had gone 13-for-34, hitting .382/.417/.765 with two doubles, a triple, three home runs, 12 RBIs and two walks. It was easily the best two-week stretch of his career.

“I feel like this is what I can do, this is what I expected to do,” Kiner-Falefa said. “There’s been times where I’ve wanted to shy away from it and go back to hitting ground balls up the middle, but they’ve been keying in on me and telling me to stick with it.”

Is Kiner-Falefa trying to say that he has always been able to do to this, but has instead chosen purposely to hit ground balls? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.

In all likelihood, this was just the ultimate heater for Kiner-Falefa and the next two weeks will be who he has been for his 2,177 plate appearance in the majors, which is a .262/.313/.348 hitter.

“When I was with Texas, I felt like when I was playing third base, I knew I had to do more offensively,” Kiner-Falefa said. “When I made the shift to shortstop, I wanted to be a [high batting] average guy who steals a lot of bases. Now that I’m moving around, I feel like I’m going back into my third-base mode, where I need to drive the ball to stay on the field.”

Again, what? What the fuck?! Kiner-Falefa is admitting he purposely tried to not do as much offensively when he played shortstop and wasn’t aware that he had to produce offense to stay on the field?

Kiner-Falefa may be misremembering how his time in Texas went, so I will remind him. In 1,523 plate appearances with the Rangers, he hit .265/.316/.354 (he has hit .256/.308/.334 in 654 plate appearance as a Yankee), and he averaged 24.4 doubles and 6.6 home runs per games, nearly identical to his 162-game averages with the Yankees (21.1 and 6.20). Kiner-Falefa has been the same player with both teams, so I have no idea what he means when he says he needs to get back to what he was doing with the rangers.

6. Because of what Kiner-Falefa has been doing the last two weeks and what Anthony Volpe has done to this point (which is barely hit and play shaky defense), I was beginning to worry the Yankees may revert back to their failed 2022 experiment and rename Kiner-Falefa the starting shortstop, and possibly send Volpe down to Triple-A. Thankfully, Volpe bought himself more time and put to my fears to rest when he crushed a three-run home run of Logan Gilbert in the middle game of the series.

Unfortunately, that was the only hit Volpe recorded in the series, going 1-for-9 with three strikeouts, as he’s now 7-for-54 with 20 strikeouts over the last two weeks. His last multi-hit game came on May 14.

The struggles continued for Volpe in the series finale as he went 0-for-4 and Kiner-Falefa turned back into Falefa with an 0-for-4 of his own as the Yankees offense hit as one would expect a lineup featuring six below-league-average hitters for their careers to hit in the series finale. The Yankees lost 1-0 in 10 innings on Wednesday, missing out on the opportunity to sweep the Mariners and extend their winning streak to five straight.

7. Clarke Schmidt didn’t struggle though. Schmidt threw 5 2/3 scoreless innings, allowing just four baserunners with seven strikeouts. After pitching like someone out of central casting for a mid-2000s Yankees starting pitcher for all of April (6.84 ERA), Schmidt finished May with a 3.52 ERA. In his last three starts, he has allowed three earned runs in 15 2/3 innings against the Reds, Orioles and Mariners. And while you may be thinking The Reds? They suck! They have won two straight against the Red Sox at Fenway, putting up 14 runs and are sixth in the NL in runs scored. Their offense doesn’t suck, their pitching sucks.

In an ideal world, Schmidt will continue his progression as a major-league starter, Carlos Rodon will get healthy and Gerrit Cole, Luis Severino and Cortes will all stay healthy and Schmidt will be the best No. 5 starter in baseball and German can go away. Sadly, keeping Rodon and Severino both healthy will take a miracle, and if the Yankees were willing to stand by German through his domestic violence suspension, his illegal substance suspension and his strikingly bad career home run rate, I don’t know when or if he will ever go away

8. I have long wanted Josh Donaldson to go away. I don’t mean “land on the IL” go away I mean “no longer be a Yankee like Hicks” go away. But now he’s kind of needed? With Cabrera being sent down, Volpe hitting like he needs to be sent down, Bader always being hurt, Yankees catchers being near-automatic outs and the team having no real left fielder, the Yankees need Donaldson. They don’t need the Donaldson he has been as a Yankee, which is no better than the collection of players I just named, they need the .800+ OPS player Donaldson was with the Twins before becoming a Yankee. I don’t expect Donaldson to be who he was with the Blue Jays, and it’s hard to even ask him to be the player he was with the Twins. But maybe he can be something close to the player he was with the Twins? And I don’t mean defensively. Defense grows on trees. If being a defense-only player was good enough to be an everyday player on the Yankees, Estevan Florial would be an everyday player on the Yankees. The Yankees can’t afford to have Donaldson be a complete zero with the bat like he has been since putting on the pinstripes because he’s playing a premium offensive position, Boone will bat him fifth to no end based off his career numbers and he’s getting paid to hit like a middle-of-the-order bat and not like Kiner-Falefa’s twin.

There’s a good chance Giancarlo Stanton isn’t ready to return to major-league action. One rehab game after having not played in seven weeks? Um, OK. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Stanton go o-for-the Dodgers series this weekend as he gets back into the swing of things. But just his mere presence in the lineup and at the plate is better and more meaningful than the alternatives.

For the first time in a long time the Yankees will have major-league names in their major-league lineup, and once Bader returns, they will have their expected everyday lineup minus a left fielder, which I guess was expected.

Welcome back, Tommy Kahnle. It’s been nearly three years since Kahnle last threw a pitch for the Yankees, and his rejoining the roster means one underserving bullpen arm will go down. Now if the Yankees could only get Jonathan Loaisiga back (and if they could have not lost Scott Effross and Jose Trevino).

9. The best part about the Mariners series was there were no ex-Yankees on the Mariners waiting to have a moment against the Yankees. Last weekend, I went into the Padres series fearing Matt Carpenter and Rougned Odor having a big weekend (luckily Gary Sanchez wasn’t a Padre yet), and it was that duo that walked and homered to nearly come back against the Yankees in the series finale. Like the Mariners, the Dodgers don’t have any ex-Yankees to worry about, so for this weekend Yankees fans can breathe easy knowing they aren’t going to get screwed by someone looking for payback on their former team.

10. This weekend will be a good test for the Yankees. The Dodgers are a good team, though they aren’t who they have been in recent seasons. Their lineup is every bit as top-heavy as the Yankees. Their daily 5 through 9 hitters are every bit as weak as the Yankees’. The Dodgers’ record is a product of their weak division. The Yankees have the same amount of wins as the Dodgers playing an AL East schedule, while the Dodgers have the luxury of having the expected-to-be mediocre Giants (28-28), the underachieving and disappointing Padres (25-30) and the abysmal Rockies (24-33) in the AL West.

The Yankees will see Clayton Kershaw and two rookies over the weekend and combat them with Severino, Gerrit Cole and Domingo German. Three night games in Los Angeles sandwiched between two days off. An exciting, but worrisome way to begin June.

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The Yankees were close to winning two out of three against the Orioles and also close to being swept. They ended up losing two of three, and lost a game in the standings on one of the two teams they are currently chasing.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I miss the Cincinnati Reds. Unfortunately, the Reds don’t play in the AL East, and the Orioles do, and the past three nights were a reminder of what life is like in the toughest division in baseball, where every team is over .500, and there are no easy games. Not even games against Kyle Gibson are easy.

It was a bad few nights in the Bronx, and if not for Aaron Judge, it would have been a whole lot worse. The Orioles got burned by Judge in the series opener and decided they weren’t going to let a one-man offense beat them, so they stopped giving him pitches to hit. Judge walked five times in the series, but only had one hit: the game-tying home run on Tuesday night. The Yankees go as Judge goes, and if he isn’t being given the chance to swing the bat, the Yankees aren’t going to score runs. Certainly not with Oswaldo Cabrera (.553 OPS), Kyle Higashioka (.591 OPS), Jose Trevino (.598 OPS), Jake Bauers (.616 OPS), Isiah Kiner-Falefa (.635 OPS), Anthony Volpe (.649 OPS) and Willie Calhoun (.689 OPS) combining to make up five-ninths of the lineup every game.

2. That home run was made possible by Gerrit Cole’s inability to pitch well against a team the Yankees are chasing. After his best month as a Yankee in April, Cole’s May has been extremely bad given his status and ability: 27 IP, 31 H, 15 R, 14 ER, 12 BB, 26 K, 6 HR, 4.67 ERA, 5.68 FIP. A lot of hits, a lot of earned runs, a lot of home runs, a lot of walks and not a lot of strikeouts.

On Tuesday, he got the first two outs of the game on five pitches and it seemed like he would finally have a quick opening frame and a pitch count that wasn’t in jeopardy. He needed 22 pitches to get the final out of the first.

Cole put the Yankees in a 2-0 hole in the first inning and by the fourth inning it was a 4-0 hole. The Yankees managed to tie the game at 4 through 5, but in the sixth Cole gave up his fifth run of the game to give the Orioles a 5-4 lead. Cole was pulled without recording an out in the sixth, and it was the third time in five starts in May he has failed to record more than 15 outs, after never recording less than 17 in six starts between March and April.

3. Cole’s drop off from his unbelievable first six starts kind of coincides with the crackdown on Yankees pitchers using sticky stuff. The post-sticky stuff crackdown in baseball in 2021 led to a much different and less effective Cole, and the recent issues with Domingo German (twice) and Clarke Schmidt might have spooked the Yankees into laying low for a little with whatever substance they are using and how they are “hiding” it. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Cole has been trying to pitch “clean” in May to avoid being questioned or suspended, and the numbers suggest that may be the case.

4. I know Nestor Cortes isn’t using sticky stuff. At least he wasn’t using it in the seventh inning on Wednesday when he let the left-handed, light-hitting Adam Frazier take him off the right-field pole for a three-run home run. If I hadn’t watched the excruciating moment happen and you had asked me to guess which Oriole hit a three-run home run off Cortes, Frazier and his 49 career home runs in eight years would have been the last Oriole I would have guessed.

5. Aaron Boone will nearly always pull his starting pitcher in a close or relatively close game if they are about to face the order for a third time. He chose not to do that on Wednesday with Cortes on the mound, and Cortes gave up three runs in the span of three batters, and the Yankees’ four-run lead became a one-run lead. Jimmy Cordero didn’t have it (0.1 IP, 3 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 1 BB, 1K), blowing the lead and then some, and Albert Abreu who rarely ever has it (and was due for a clunker) brought gasoline to the fire Boone gathered the kindling for, Cortes loaded up the wood on and Cordero lit the match for by allowing his two inherited runners to score and then one of his own. When all was said and done, the Yankees left the seventh inning they entered leading by four, trailing by five, after an eight-run Orioles outburst.

Cortes can’t be trusted to go through a lineup three times unless the game is truly lopsided. A four-run game against the Orioles offense at Yankee Stadium isn’t lopsided enough. Opposing hitters have a .524 OPS the first time they see Cortes, .630 the second time and 1.548 the third time. Boone knew these numbers and still stayed with Cortes on Wednesday. (Boone is only partly to blame though as Cortes needs to be able to get out someone like Frazier there.)

I wish the eight-run inning was the worst thing to happen for the Yankees in the three games, but it wasn’t, thanks to Thursday.

6. On Thursday afternoon, Randy Levine spoke about Aaron Hicks being designated for assignment. “The priority is putting the best team on the field,”Levine said with a straight face. A few hours later, Levine’s manager posted this lineup:

Gleyber Torres
Aaron Judge
Anthony Rizzo
Harrison Bader
Willie Calhoun
Anthony Volpe
Oswaldo Cabrera
Ben Rortvedt
Greg Allen

I’m not sure how the Yankees are putting the best possible team on the field when six of the nine starters aren’t even league-average hitters for their careers. Because the Yankees fielded a mostly Triple-A lineup on Thursday, the result of getting one-hit by Gibson through six innings was unsurprising.

The Yankees didn’t pick up their second hit off Gibson until the seventh when Calhoun led off with a single. With Calhoun representing the tying run, Cabrera quickly erased any threat with a double play.

7. It’s time for Cabrera to be sent down. It’s well past time. He’s in the fifth percentile of the league in expected batting average and the third percentile in expected slugging percentage. He doesn’t barrel the ball up (17th percentile), doesn’t hit the ball hard (24th percentile) and doesn’t walk (21st percentile). He doesn’t do anything well, other than make outs.

Cabrera was a breath of fresh air last summer when the only major-league bat in the Yankees lineup at times was Judge and Yankees fans were yearning for someone, anyone to enter the lineup not named Aaron Hicks, Joey Gallo or Josh Donaldson. Cabrera can get back to being that guy, but it’s not happening at the major-league level and the Yankees can’t afford to continue to run him out there every day hoping he figures it out in real, meaningful games.

8. Unlike Cabrera, I don’t think Volpe should be sent down, but it would be good to get some semblance of consistency. Maybe that’s asking too much. Each time Volpe has a couple of good games, I think ‘OK, he’s figured out the majors and is going to go off’ only for that to not happen. In the four-game Tampa series, he hit .333/.333/.733, and in the three series since, he’s hit .118/.205/.265. He’s hitting .199/.284/.365 on the season and his Baseball Savant page is full of blue like Cabrera’s.

The plan with Volpe was to bat him ninth and ease him into his major-league career. That’s how the season started, but injuries forced him to the top of the lineup and underperformance moved him back to the bottom third. It’s unfair to ask Volpe to carry the offense or be one of the most important pieces of it, but that’s what’s happening because everyone outside of Judge, Rizzo, and at times Torres, has been a disappointment (again). I don’t expect Volpe to be a superstar at this point, but he can’t be an automatic out like he has been. Not because he will or should get sent down (since there is no other option), but because he needs to just be better.

9. In one of the rare occurrences when Boone does the right thing, he did the right thing on Tuesday, bringing in his elite relievers to hold the deficit at one run to give his offense a chance to come back in the game. It worked out. He had the same opportunity on Thursday and chose not to, and the Orioles’ one-run lead became a three-run lead, and the run the Yankees scored in the ninth was meaningless rather than the game-tying run. Boone needs to do more of what he did on Tuesday and less of what he did on Thursday, especially in one-run games and especially against division opponents.

10. The Padres are coming to town this week with old friends Matt Carpenter and Rougned Odor and old rival Xander Bogaerts. (Manny Machado is on the injured list.) After upsetting the Dodgers in the NLDS and reaching the NLCS, the Padres went out and gave Bogaerts a 50-year contract, tried to do the same for Trea Turner and made a late push to sign Judge away from the Yankees. Despite their offseasons and all of their moves in recent seasons, this season has been a disaster to date for them. They are four games under .500 at 23-27, are in fourth place in the NL West and 7 1/2 games behind the first-place Dodgers. They desperately need to turn their season around, and maybe Odor’s go-ahead, three-run home run in the ninth inning on Thursday in Washington D.C. was that.

I hope that home run isn’t going to send the Padres on a run where they play to their potential for the next three days in the Bronx and beat up on Randy Vasquez making his major-league debut in the series opener and then stifle the Yankees’ embarrassing excuse of an offense. The law of Yankees suggests Odor and Carpenter will go off this weekend against their former team and I’m extremely worried about it.

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The Yankees went 6-1 on their seven-game road trip, finishing with a sweep of the Reds. More importantly, they made a roster move that was long overdue by designating Aaron Hicks for assignment.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The Yankees won three of four in Toronto and Aaron Boone started off the three-game series in Cincinnati with a lineup resembling the Yankees having just clinched the division. Jake Bauers leading off (why is this still a thing), Willie Calhoun batting fifth and an 8-9 of Kyle Higashioka and Aaron Hicks. After losing a home series to the 100-loss Reds last year, I was prepared for a letdown series from the Yankees with the end of the road trip in sight and a day off on Monday, and Boone wasn’t doing anything to calm my fears with the lineup.

The Yankees took an early lead on another Aaron Judge home run and tacked on two more runs in the sixth for a 3-0 lead. Clarke Schmidt had given the Yankees five scoreless innings in his best start of the season, but that wasn’t good enough for Boone. With a rested bullpen after Boone elected to play roulette with Albert Abreu and Ryan Weber in the series finale in Toronto, Boone decided to double down on his ridiculous bullpen management in the first game in Cincinnati.

2. Boone let Schmidt start the sixth and face the top of the lineup for a third time. After a leadoff single, Boone stayed with Schmidt and Schmidt then gave up a double. Second and third, no outs. The Reds now had the tying run at the plate with their 3-4-5 hitters due up. That was enough for Boone. He wasn’t going to let Schmidt completely ruin the game, just set it up for the next guy to come in and potentially ruin with a tiny margin of error and without a clean inning to work with. Jimmy Cordero came in, allowed a two-run double to the first batter he faced and followed it up with a walk. Cordero settled down to retire the next three batters, but the Yankees’ lead was now only 3-2.

With nine outs to go and clinging to a one-run lead, Boone would have his choice of Michael King, Wandy Peralta or Clay Holmes for the seventh, who were all rested. His choice for the seventh inning? Abreu. Truly unbelievable.

After pitching a a 1-2-3 inning on Thursday in Toronto, Abreu had apparently erased all the disastrous appearances he has recorded this season and in his Yankees career. He was pitching in a high-leverage situation on Friday despite the entire bullpen being available. Boone lucked out as Abreu was able to pitch around a two-out walk.

Finally, in the eighth, Boone went to Peralta, who pitched a perfect inning, and then in the ninth the Yankees scored three runs (and Kyle Higashioka earned three weeks of negative criticism immunity for his ninth-inning double), so Boone was able to use Nick Ramirez to close out the game.

3. I was surprised when I saw the news of Aaron Hicks being designated for assignment on Saturday. Confused and surprised. Hicks had finally started hitting (.353/.450/.647 in his last 20 plate appearances) and now the Yankees were going to get rid of him? The timing was odd and actually quite infuriating.

Infuriating, not because I wanted Hicks to remain a Yankee. No, I haven’t wanted him to be a Yankee for a long, long time. (I didn’t want him extended, so of course I didn’t want him still be here). But infuriating because the Yankees chose to not upgrade their outfield in the offseason, believing Hicks would magically revitalize his career after three injury-plagued seasons with below-average production.

“I suspect he will be the guy that emerges [in left field],” Brian Cashman said in late January. “Because he is still really talented and everything is there.”

It took 76 plate appearances (of which the last 26 percent of those plate appearances were finally major-league caliber) for Cashman to go from believing Hicks was “still really talented” and a player with “everything there” to giving up on him.

The Yankees never truly thought Hicks would be an everyday player in 2023. Because while Cashman and Boone spent the offseason and spring training hyping him up to the media, it was Oswaldo Cabrera starting in left field on Opening Day.

Hal Steinbrenner gave Judge a franchise record $360 million and to cover that amount without hurting his balance sheet, Hal was going to pull from other places. Those places would be left field and the bench. So Hicks spent nearly two months barely playing, sitting on the bench so infielders could play the outfield over him, moping around and complaining about his playing time to the media and being a zero at the plate when he did play.

The plug should have been pulled on Hicks last season when he went month-long stretches without extra-base hits and played the outfield like he was blindfolded. Boone benched him several times throughout the season and even removed him midgame against the Rays for his miscues. In a season in which Hicks said, “If I’m a guy that’s in the lineup, cool. If I’m not, it is what it is,” it was irresponsible to continue to roster him for all of 2022, keep him on the roster in the offseason and then play him (even if sparingly) in 2023.

“Hopefully we can get the Aaron Hicks we know is in there back as a consistent player for us,” Cashman also said in January.

The player Cashman spoke about as “getting back” never really existed. It was a mirage. That player would be the 2018-19 version of Hicks who hit a 162-game pace of home runs of 32 and had an .813 OPS when the baseball was juiced to the point that Gleyber Torres hit 62 home runs, Brett Gardner hit 40, Ketel Marte hit 46 and Christian Yelich was Barry Bonds. Those seasons were in no way true indicators of what a player’s ability was or is.

Hicks’ inability to stay heathy and produce cost the Yankees a lot more than the $70 million they extended him for in February 2019. (Immediately after signing the extension, he hurt his back on a 35-minute bus ride in spring training.) It cost them the chance to sign Bryce Harper, who Cashman said “wasn’t a fit” during the two-time NL MVP’s free agency because Cashman was planning on an outfield combination of Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Hicks, Clint Frazier and Jacoby Ellsbury. Whoops! (Reminder: Cashman’s contract was extended this past offseason.) It cost them Ezequiel Duran, Glenn Otto and Josh H. Smith when they had to trade for Joey Gallo to make up for Hicks. It cost them three more prospects when they had to trade for Andrew Benintendi because Gallo didn’t work out. It cost them Jordan Montgomery when they had to trade for Harrison Bader. Sometime this season it will cost them an extension for Bader or in the offseason an overpay in free agency to re-sign Bader.

Cashman always thought he had found Bernie Williams 2.0 in Hicks, but what he had was a major disappointment disguised as a former first-round pick. Thankfully, Hicks is now gone and a piece of this group of Yankees that represents disappointment and coming up short is no longer part of the team. There will be much less booing for players on the home team at Yankee Stadium now. That is, until Josh Donaldson returns.

4. The Yankees have a good thing going right now. Anthony Rizzo at first Torres at second, Anthony Volpe at short and DJ LeMahieu at third. So when Donaldson does come back, he’s going to screw it all up. Eventually, he too, will likely be designated for assignment once the Yankees feel as though they have gotten their money’s worth of the $51.5 million they agreed to pay him. Continuing to roster Donaldson, like Hicks, is another move that doesn’t make sense.

5. It didn’t make sense that Jhony Brito started Saturday’s game without an opener. I guess the strategy worked out too well in his last outing for the Yankees to try it again. Brito was his usual bad self. He allowed a first-inning run after a walk, balk and double. After Judge tied the game with an RBI single in the top of the third, Brito gave the run back in the bottom of the third. Then in the fourth he allowed a two-run home run to 9-hitter Luke Maile to put the Yankees behind 4-1. I think the Yankees will go back to using an opener for Brito the next time he gets the ball. Then again, I thought they would sign an actual major-league left fielder in the winter.

In the top of the fifth, trailing by three runs, Isiah Kiner-falefa (who is going to put Bader on the injured list st some point with his lack of awareness playing the outfield) hit his second home run of the road trip. (I have a feeling there was a performance-enhancing drug test waiting for Kiner-Falefa at his locker after the game.) Ben Rortvedt in his Yankees debut followed with a single, as did Torres. The Yankees trailed by two with the tying run on base and Judge at the plate. Judge hit a booming double off the left-field wall, scoring Rortvedt and moving Torres to third. The Reds went to lefty Alex Young to face Anthony Rizzo and Rizzo singled to left to score Torres. On the Rizzo base hit, Judge was sent home and the throw was at the plate waiting for him before he entered the picture on TV. It was an inexcusable send. If Judge is held at third, it’s first and third with one out for DJ LeMahieu against a lefty. Instead, it became a runner on first with two outs. Sure enough., LeMahieu singled on the first pitch he saw, but the Yankees didn’t score again in the inning. 4-4.

Boone decided his elites relievers had had enough says off so he employed them on Saturday. Ron Marinaccio, King and Holmes all pitched, combining for five innings of one-hit ball. After the Yankees scored three runs in the top of the 10th to take a 7-4 lead, I figured Holmes would go back out for a second inning of work to close out the game. Nope. Boone went with Weber, who is the last pitcher in the majors you want to see pitching in extras, only leading by three with the automatic runner on. Thankfully, the Reds suck, and Weber was able to close out the win. (The longer the Yankees roster Abreu and Weber, the better the likelihood of the duo costing the Yankees immensely increases.)

6. The Yankees had clinched the three-game series and with the series finale on Sunday presenting getaway day into a day off on Monday and the end of a 17-games-in-17-days stretch, I knew to expect a wild Boone lineup on Sunday. Like clockwork, Boone sat Judge, batted Calhoun fourth and Bauers sixth (why not leadoff all of a sudden?!).

Major-league pitching hasn’t been able to slow down Judge (.378/.491/.911 since coming off the IL), so Boone decided he would do whatever he could to cool off his best player. Between Judge’s day off on Sunday and no game on Monday, we all know who to blame if Judge struggles against the Orioles the next three days.

7. A day after DFA’ing Hicks, Luis Severino made his season debut. Severino walked the first batter of the game and allowed a bizarre first-inning run because the Yankees continue to play first baseman Bauers in the outfield, but otherwise was as good as possible for five innings. He obnoxiously was pulled at 75 pitches after 4 2/3 innings because the Yankees think they have some magic pitch count formula to protecting their pitchers’ arms, which is why Severino has pitches so much since the end of 2018.

After being shut down by the hard-throwing Hunter Greene for four innings, the Yankees finally solved him in the fifth and sixth innings and carried a 4-1 lead into the ninth.

8. Last year, Clay Holmes blew a ninth-inning, 3-0 lead, allowing four runs without recording an out against the Reds. I thought something similar may happen on Sunday.

It took eight pitches for Holmes to retire Matt McClain on a flyout. Then he allowed back-to-back singles to Jake Fraley and Spencer Steer. After striking out Nick Senzel, he walked Stuart Fairchild to load the bases. A double would likely tie the game and a home run would win it. Fortunately, Holmes got Will Benson to ground out to end the game.

It’s incredibly hard to trust Holmes and has been for a while now. You really have no idea which version of him you’re going to get each time he pitches. A week ago I gave my current Order of Trust Reliever Rankings as follows:

Michael King
Wandy Peralta
Ron Marinaccio
Ian Hamilton
Jimmy Cordero
Clay Holmes

They are still the same, just with Hamilton removed as he’s on the IL. (Again, no, those aren’t all the Yankees reliever, those are just the ones I trust even a little bit.)

9. Gary Sanchez returned the majors on Sunday as a Met. While I hate the Mets, I still like Sanchez and am happy to see him back in the bigs, even if it’s with the Mets. (I will continue to root against the Mets, but root for Sanchez.)

Sanchez went 1-for-3 with an RBI in his 2023 and Mets debut, and the Mets won the game 5-4. Sanchez caught Max Scherzer, who had his best start of the season with six shutout innings with Sanchez behind the plate, which I found odd since the Yankees made Sanchez out to be incapable of catching star pitchers. I guess that’s only a Gerrit Cole problem.

10. Cole will start the series opener against the Orioles on Tuesday, which is a big series since every game and every series is big, especially in the AL East where being above .500 puts you in last place, like the Blue Jays are at 25-23. The Yankees will see Ryan Bradish, Tyler Wells and Kyle Gibson over the next three nights as they try to make up ground on an Orioles team that is three games ahead of them (four in the loss column) in the standings. While the Yankees are playing the Orioles, the Rays will be playing the Blue Jays, so each Yankees win will mean picking up a game on at least two AL East team and each Yankees loss will mean losing aa game on at least two AL East teams.

Maybe the Yankees will use the best possible lineup in each of the the next three games and utilize their best relievers when the situation calls for it? Ah, who am I kidding?

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For the second straight weekend the Yankees had a chance to win a series against the Rays. Instead, they split the four games, made up no ground in the division and are 3-4 against the Rays this season.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. It was another wasted weekend for the Yankees. Just like the previous weekend, the Yankees had a chance to win a series against the Rays, and they failed to do so. The Yankees are now 3-4 against the Rays this season, when they could easily be 5-2, and now they only have six head-to-head games left.

Friday night’s game was the only game the Yankees didn’t have a chance in. They didn’t get a runner into scoring position until the ninth inning, and by then it was 8-0. The Yankees had a chance to keep it a game at one point, but when Ron Marinaccio failed to hold the Yankees’ deficit at one, Aaron Boone decided to give up on the remaining innings and let a combination of Albert Abreu and Ryan Weber turn it from a close game into a laugher.

2. The following night looked like it would be another disaster. The Yankees took a 4-2 lead into the eighth inning before Michael King turned into Jonathan Holder.

After pitching a scoreless, 12-pitch inning seventh, King allowed a leadoff single to Harold Ramirez in the eighth, then a single to Isaac Parades and a three-run home run to Josh Lowe. King has been so good since the first days of the season that he was due for a clunker, and unfortunately, that clunker came against the Rays. He gets a pass.

Following the go-ahead home run from Lowe, Boone let King to face two more hitters and put another on base before pulling him in typical Boone fashion. A 4-2 lead had become a 5-4 deficit and it looked like the Yankees would go from evening the four-game series at a game apiece to losing another late lead to the Rays. Thankfully, Anthony Rizzo had other ideas. After Jason Adam walked Aaron Judge with one out in the eighth. Rizzo hit his eighth home run of the season to give the Yankees a 6-5 lead. 

Boone had already used King and Clay Holmes, so the job of protecting a one-run, ninth-inning lead was given to Wandy Peralta. Peralta struck out Brandon Lowe and Ramirez before allowing a two-out single Paredes. He closed out the game with by getting Manuel Margot to ground out.

3. Unfortunate clunker aside, I trust King the most of any Yankees reliever then Peralta. I would put my current Order of Trust Reliever Rankings like this:

Michael King
Wandy Peralta
Ron Marinaccio
Ian Hamilton
Jimmy Cordero
Clay Holmes

No, those aren’t all the Yankees reliever, those are just the ones I trust even a little bit.

4. On Saturday, the Yankees trailed the Rays 6-0 with Shane McClanahan on the mound in the fifth. If there was ever a time to do something else with your Saturday, this was it. But as we have learned in the season series between these two teams, no lead is safe and no game seems to ever be over.

The Yankees were in a 6-0 hole because Nestor Cortes was horrible. Cortes put nine runners on in 4 1/3 innings and allowed a grand slam. His ERA now sits at 5.53 on the season and his FIP, while lower, still sucks at 4.61. He’s allowed seven home runs in 42 1/3 innings after allowing just 16 in 158 1/3 innings last season. His hits allowed per nine innings (9.1) is well above his career average (7.8) and his strikeouts per nine (8.9) is below his career average (9.4). Cortes looks like the pitcher the Orioles didn’t want then the Yankees didn’t want then the Mariners didn’t want and nothing like the All-Star who finished eighth in Cy Young voting in 2022. Cortes’ eight inconsistent starts would be less of an issue if Carlos Rodon and Luis Severino were healthy and pitching, but they aren’t, and when three-fifths of the rotation is a combination of Clark Schmidt, Domingo German, Jhonny Brito and openers, the Yankees can’t afford to have pre-2021 Cortes.

5. The offense let Cortes off the hook by staging their biggest comeback in more than 11 years. The Yankees plated four runs in the fifth to make it a 6-4 game and then added five more in the sixth to take a 9-6 lead. This is how those two innings unfolded for the Yankees:

Walk
Home run
Walk
Home run
Double
Groundout
Popout
Flyout
Single
Lineout
Flyout
Walk
Home run
Single
Walk
Walk
Single
Strikeout

The Yankees sent 18 batters to the plate in two innings and scored nine runs. That’s five (or sometimes) six innings of plate appearances for them at times and that can be a week’s worth of runs for them as well.

Because the Yankees don’t make anything easy, Marinaccio and Holmes tried to give it all back immediately, but the Yankees held on to win 9-7. And for the second day in a row, Peralta was asked to close out the game in the ninth.

6. For a second straight Sunday, the Yankees missed out on an opportunity to win a series against het Ryas. This time it wasn’t Cole blowing a six-run lead, it was just Schmidt doing his usual not-a-major-league-starter routine. Schmidt put the Yankees in an early 3-0 hole. They climbed out to make it 4-3. But in the fifth, still holding that 4-3 lead, Boone let Schmidt turn over the lineup for a third time. The result was loading the bases with one out for Randy Arozarena.

Boone always lets his current pitcher load the bases and leave zero margin for error for the next pitcher, so that wasn’t a surprise. Incompetent, but not a surprise. What was a surprise was Boone let Schmidt face Arozarena for a third time with the bases loaded and the Yankees leading. Arozarena crushed a ball to center field and if anyone other than Harrison Bader had been playing center field, it would have been a three-run double. Instead, it only lead to a game-tying sacrifice fly.

7. With two on and the left-handed Josh Lowe up, Boone would now go to the bullpen after having let Schmidt blow the lead. Or so I thought. Instead, Boone let Schmidt face a lefty despite lefties having a 2.000 OPS against Schmidt. Schmidt walked Lowe to reload the bases.

OK, now Boone would go to the bullpen and bring in someone capable of getting a strikeout in a big spot to keep the game tied. No, no he wouldn’t. Instead, he would go to someone capable of ruining a game in the blink of an eye: Abreu. With the bases loaded and Taylor Walls up, it took Abreu four pitches to destroy the game as Walls hit a go-ahead grand slam. For the second day in a row, Yankees pitchers had given up a grand slam.

Why was Abreu pitching in a tie game against the Rays? Why was Abreu pitching in a game against the Rays at all? Boone let the inning dictate his decision and rather than attempt to protect the lead (by taking out Schmidt before he blew it) or hold the Rays at 4 (by not bringing in Abreu) he went with the “Oh well, we play 162 of these” approach. The same approach that has the Yankees in the deficit they have in the division. The same approach that has gotten the Yankees just two division titles in Boone’s five season to date (and it’s likely to be two in six) and has gotten them zero postseasons with home-field advantage throughout. Boone played for tomorrow, and Abreu sent the Yankees to tomorrow. How is Abreu still a Yankee?

8. It was a beautiful day on April 2, 2022 when the Yankees traded Abreu for Jose Trevino. It was a bad day when they picked him back up off waivers after on June 21, 2022 after the Rangers had traded him to the Royals and the Royals put him on waivers. Abreu should not be a Yankee, but Brian Cashman is still trying to prove he won the trade when he acquired Abreu by sending Brian McCann to the Astros in November 2016. That trade can never be won by the Yankees as they paid McCann to play two seasons for the Astros and were paying him when he hit the game-changing double in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS.

Abreu has a 4.73 ERA and 5.11 FIP in 83 2/3 innings as a Yankee (4.56 and 5.55 career). He has allowed an earned run in his last three appearances and has allowed 83 percent of inherited runners to score this season. Let him go be some other team’s problem, and maybe the Yankees will face him along the way and get back some of the runs he has allowed for them.

As long as Abreu is a Yankee, Boone is going to use him, and there will be times when he uses him when he shouldn’t because that’s what Boone has always done with Abreu. The only way to prevent it is by removing Abreu from the roster.

9. It was bad enough Boone opened the series by dropping Anthony Volpe down to seventh in the lineup, but batting him behind Isiah Kiner-Falefa is a fireable offense. I wish I could say that was the only idiotic lineup choice of the weekend for Boone, but on Sunday, he had Jake Bauers leading off. The same Jake Bauers who has a negative career WAR and wasn’t good enough to be a Yankee two weeks ago is now good enough to play every day and lead off. I don’t know why it’s so hard for Boone to have a single day where he makes only logical decisions. It’s not hard. It really isn’t. And yet he makes it so hard by always trying to do these quirky things to prove he’s intelligent. We know he’s not intelligent. We watched him in the broadcast booth on ESPN. We hear him every day in pre- and postgame press conferences. We have seen his lineups and in-game decision making for now six years. Just make the easy, right, logical choices. For once.

10. When the Yankees scored three runs to make it 8-7 in their eventual 8-7 loss it hurt even more knowing they missed out on a chance to win a four-game series against the Rays, and take two games off the Rays’ lead. The Rays came to the Bronx for four days and left having lost zero games on the Yankees in the standings and took four of their remaining 10 head-to-head games off the schedule. The difference between the two Sunday losses for the Yankees was going 3-4 against the Rays or 5-2. It’s the difference between being eight games back on May 15 or four games back.

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The Yankees followed up their three-game sweep of the A’s by getting embarrassed by the Rays at home. The Yankees are nine games back once again and their next seven games are against the Rays and Blue Jays.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. There are times when I say the Yankees are bad or awful or suck, but that’s relative to their expectations and history, and their roster and payroll. In the big picture of Major League Baseball, they are none of those things. But the A’s are.

The A’s are as bad as it gets. Not just in 2023, but historically. The 1962 Mets went 40-120. The 2023 A’s would sign up for 40 wins right now, as they are 8-31 and on pace for 33 wins. There’s a good chance the 2023 A’s go down as the worst team in the history of the league.

2. The arrival of the A’s in the Bronx couldn’t have come at a better time. With the Yankees sitting in last place in the AL East and coming off their worst loss of the season in which Gerrit Cole blew a six-run lead to the Rays, the Yankees needed something to possibly get their season turned around, and that something was the A’s. The Yankees picked up their first three-game winning streak of the season and first sweep of the season by scoring 28 runs in the series. (The Yankees had scored 28 runs in their previous nine games before playing the A’s.) The series got the Yankees three rather easy wins, but it didn’t turn the season around.

3. I’m not an idiot. I know how truly, historically abysmal the A’s are. I know the Yankees’ three games against them were a mirage. I know the success the Yankees experienced in the series is the same success the Rays experienced against the A’s to begin the season and the kind of success the rest of the AL East will experience when they play the A’s. So while I’m happy the Yankees have created some separation from .500, picking up three wins against the A’s was like passing GO and receiving a free $200. Now the Yankees face a board littered with opposing hotels with their next eight games against the Rays and Blue Jays.

4. Immediately after passing GO, the Yankees landed on one of the Rays’ hotel, serving as a quick reminder of the disparity between the actual best team in the AL, and a team that believes they can be the best team in the AL because they were the best team in the AL once upon a time. After a couple of offense-less nights in Baltimore, the Rays showed up in the Bronx (where the Yankees have been since the beginning of the week, able to sleep at home and not travel) and pummeled the Yankees’ pitching and put the Yankees’ offense back in its place. The Yankees were routed 8-2, and the only reason they scored is because the Rays pulled Drew Rasmussen after seven innings to not have him exert anymore energy, though he exerted as little energy as possible in shutting out the Yankees’ sad offense over seven innings. Rasmussen could still be pitching against the Yankees now (as in the following morning) and they would still be scoreless. The way the Yankees feel when they play the A’s is how the Rays feel when they play the Yankees.

5. The rhetoric that the Yankees’ injuries is the reason for their demise continues to get shoved in the face of Yankees fans. The offense sucked when Giancarlo Stanton and Josh Donaldson were a part of it, and with each coming off the worst season of their respective careers, believing they will turn the Yankees from frauds into contenders once they return (if they return) is simply irresponsible.

6. The only way out of this mess for the Yankees is for Carlos Rodon and Luis Severino to return and pitch to the best of their abilities, and for Stanton and Donaldson to return and turn the clock back several seasons. Then on top of that, the Yankees will need Anthony Volpe to hit like the team’s No. 1 prospect and not to the .640 OPS he has, Anthony Rizzo and DJ LeMahieu to stay healthy and produce to their career averages, Gleyber Torres to not go into month-long slumps and someone to emerge as a major-league-caliber left fielder. Someone. Anyone. If all of those things happens, then yes, the Yankees can contend for a championship. But all of those things need to happen. Not some. All. The Yankees aren’t good enough to only have one-third or half or even two-thirds of their roster healthy and producing. They need everyone. That’s a lot of to ask for a team that puts someone new on the IL each series and for a roster that is full of underachieving, aging names.

7. The Rays were fortunate to start their season with nine games against the Tigers, Nationals and A’s, but they took care of business in those nine games, going 9-0. They also swept four games from the Red Sox, three from the Pirates and went 8-2 against the White Sox and Reds. They have beaten up on the bad and mediocre teams on their schedule, and the Yankees are becoming one of those teams.

8. The Yankees’ goal shouldn’t be to erase the division deficit by beating up on the Rays because that’s not a realistic goal. Divisions are won by beating up on the bad teams, which is what the Rays have done. The Yankees’ goal should be to match what the Rays have done against the league’s worst and then hold their own against the league’s best. So far though, the Yankees aren’t exactly doing that with a 2-5 record against the Rays and Blue Jays.

9. The easy part of the Rays’ schedule happened to be stacked at the beginning of the season, while the Yankees’ is more spread out. The Rays had the advantage of being able to fly out of the gate, stack and bank a ridiculous amount of wins and then live off that commanding lead into the summer. The Yankees just played the A’s three times. They will play three against the Reds next week. They have six total games against the White Sox and A’s in June and six total games against the Rockies and Royals right after the All-Star break. A big August with 10 total games against the White Sox, Nationals and Tigers. Another three against the Tigers in September and they finish the season with three in Kansas City. The Yankees will have their chance to match the Rays’ success against the worst teams, but they will need to hold their own in between their spread out “easy” games.

10. The Yankees began this all-important four-game series with the Rays needing to win three of four to make up ground in the AL, and at worst, split the four to not lose any ground. Now they need to win three straight against the Rays (something that would be nearly impossible even without Clarke Schmidt starting one of the three games) and need to win two of three just to maintain their eight-game deficit. The loss on Thursday was disappointing and disheartening, but completely expected and it’s dropped the Yankees nine back (again) and 1-3 on the season against the Rays. The Yankees to do better this weekend. They need to be better this weekend. They need to win two games this weekend.

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