The Yankees scored six runs off Max Scherzer to win the first game of the Subway 7-6 at Citi Field.
The first game of this season’s Subway Series looked like it was going to be a disaster for the Yankees. Luis Severino couldn’t get an out and aside from a Giancarlo Stanton home run, Max Scherzer was shutting down the offense. But everything changed in the fourth inning, and not even Aaron Boone could prevent his team from a much-needed win (though he desperately tried).
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.
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.
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.
If Rafael Devers doesn’t beat the Yankees, the Red Sox can’t beat the Yankees, and yet, they keep pitching to him.
The Yankees lost to the Red Sox 3-2 on Friday, but bounced back to beat them 3-1 on Saturday. In the series, Rafael Devers has driven in two of the Red Sox’ four runs with solo home runs and scored another after a double. If Devers doesn’t beat the Yankees, the Red Sox can’t beat the Yankees, and yet, they keep pitching to him.
The Yankees will play the Red Sox for the first time this season this weekend, and they will do so at much less than full strength.
The Yankees will play the Red Sox for the first time this season this weekend, and they will do so at much less than full strength. Aaron Judge and Harrison Bader will miss the series on the injured list, and so will Nestor Cortes. Thankfully, the Red Sox aren’t very good.
Michael Hurley of CBS Boston joined me to talk about all of the Red Sox’ issues as they fell under .500 this week.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
