The division may be over, but the need to play the Wild Card series at home isn’t. With just a two-game lead over the Red Sox, every game is a big game and should be treated as such.
Coming off a disappointing 3-3 week against the Cardinals and Braves, let’s go through some questions and comments from readers.
George Lombard Jr. looks great on both sides of the ball, but Anthony Volpe looked pretty good too at first. – Bret
Anthony Volpe never looked like George Lombard Jr. has looked. Never. Volpe never made routine plays look routine, never made difficult plays look easy and never had the kind of plate discipline and awareness of the strike zone that Lombard Jr. has. Lombard Jr. doesn’t just look like he belongs, he actually looks like Derek Jeter, both in the field and in the batter’s box with a flair for the dramatic and mannerisms to match (his hand clapping and fist pump approaching home plate this week made me think I was watching Jeter).
It’s been a challenge to find happiness watching another Brian Cashman-run, Aaron Boone-managed team slog through another season with the same disappointing roster from last year, but Lombard Jr. has changed that. The last five days have been the most enjoyable of the season and the Yankees lost one of those five to the crappy Cardinals and lost another extra-inning game in there as well. Lombard Jr.’s presence and his representation of roster change has made it enjoyable. Once Austin Wells, Jazz Chisholm and Ryan McMahon are off the team, the level of enjoyment will increase exponentially.
Well, they moved Volpe to second in Triple-A. What are they going to do about catching? – Peter
Volpe’s best friend Wells should be batting third in Triple-A behind Volpe and Jasson Dominguez. Unfortunately, the Yankees failed as an organization to trade for a capable major-league catcher, while the team they are chasing (Rays) and the team they are trying to hold off (Red Sox) both traded for catchers. On deadline day, as the deadline approached I kept thinking There’s no way they’re not going to get a catcher or reliever. Then it was 5:30 and still nothing, 5:45 and still nothing, 5:59 and still nothing and finally 6:00 and nothing. I’m still amazed they decided to not address a position they knew they needed to address last season or add to a bullpen that has been running on fumes for months.
The catching situation isn’t going to get better. I don’t care what Wells’ plate appearances have looked like of late. He’s 39 percent worse than league average this season. He’s 10 percent worse than league average for his career. During games, Michael Kay keeps saying, “If Wells could just be league average …” and well he’s not. The Yankees will be sitting home watching the remainder of the postseason and will still be waiting for Wells to be league average and Grisham and Jazz Chisholm and McMahon to be league average.
Volpe is in Triple-A because the Yankees finally had a better, undeniable option. Wells is still in the majors because the Yankees don’t have a better, undeniable option. Once they do, he will be gone. He’s not on the Yankees because he earned it or belongs.
Why does Aaron Boone keep Trent Grisham as the leadoff hitter? – Tony
Isn’t it ironic that no matter how bad Alex Verdugo was in 2024 (and he was fucking awful), the Yankees never gave his job to Grisham. Never even considered it. And now here we are two years later, and there’s apparently no level of suck that can get Grisham out of the leadoff spot. (I would say get him out of the lineup, but right now the lineup is so bad you could make a case to remove everyone except Ben Rice and Lombard Jr. from it.) He has started 50 of 65 games leading off with an out.
Offering Grisham the $22 million qualifying offer was a horrible decision in real time. This isn’t second-guessing after 390 miserable plate appearances for someone hitting eight percent worse than league average.
These are Grisham’s OPS+ by season since becoming a full-time player in 2021:
2021: 106
2022: 81
2023: 84
2024 (only a part-time player): 91
2025: 123
Which of those numbers is unlike the others? Last season, of course, when Grisham hit 34 home runs, 17 more than he had hit in any other season. Sure enough, his OPS+ is down to 95 this season and he has 13 home runs. He’s hitting the ball out once every 30 plate appearances. Last season, it was once every 17. He’s hitting .213/.308/.391, and yet, he continues to lead off for the Yankees. He’s 6-for-56 with a .111/.231/.196 slash line as the first hitter of the game. He has a .578 OPS when he leads off any inning. How is it that after 118 games of this he’s still batting first? And the answer isn’t because Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Cody Bellinger are hurt because none of them bats first.
No, at full strength, Grisham should not be starting, let alone batting leadoff. Unfortunately, the Yankees don’t operate and reward playing time based on production. It’s based on owed money and veteran status. And because of that, Grisham will likely be batting first in the playoffs, and like last year, he won’t do anything since he can’t hit elite pitching.
Grisham’s eighth-inning solo home run on Sunday was so perfectly Grisham: he does nothing for seemingly weeks then hits a home run then does nothing and so on. Here is what I have written about many times this season:
Grisham always seems to do just enough to reset his place atop the order. After a bad week, he’ll hit a ball out or pick up a pair of doubles to maintain his place in the lineup and then suck for the next week and then do something positive, over and over.
When the postseason starts, when the Yankees face a right-hander, be prepared for Grisham to be in the lineup and leading off.
Joe Girardi won a World Series as manager in 2009, yet he got fired after 2017. Aaron Boone was hired after that, and up until now, has failed to lead the Yankees to a championship, yet he is still the manager. Why and how is he still here while he’s won nothing? – Mark
Hal Steinbrenner won the birth lottery and inherited the Yankees. He doesn’t care about the Yankees. If he did, his father’s plan would have been to leave the team to his son instead of his son-in-law before a divorce ended that. Hal got stuck with the team and views it as a business and only that. Business is good. (The Yankees reported a 4% increase year-over-year on aggregate ticket sales for the first half of 2026 and just made a $2.6 billion financing deal.) The Yankees are making a lot of money and revenue is up again. Why would Hal want to disrupt a business that continues to grow?
Hal allows Cashman to run the team as he sees fit. Hal only intervenes when he needs to sign off on a nine-figure, free-agent deal. Cashman has been with the Yankees since 1986. Cashman is 59 and Hal is 56. They have known each other since they were 19 and 16. They are practically brothers. Hal will never fire Cashman and because Cashman prefers Boone, Boone won’t be fired until Cashman decides it’s time for a new manager. Cashman has said multiple times in the last six years that his hope is that Boone lasts as long as Joe Girardi did, which was 10 years. Cashman doesn’t have to hope for it since he’s the one who would make the decision. That means Boone will at least be the manager through the 2027 season.
There’s nothing Cashman despises more than having to admit a mistake. It’s why the team was so right-handed-heavy from 2017 until the 2021 deadline. It’s why Volpe was just finally sent down after four years of failures. Cashman having to move on from Boone without a championship is his worst nightmare because it’s another L for him, and he’s taken a lot of Ls in recent years.
Aaron Boone cannot lead us to a championship. Who would you like to see as manager of the Yankees? – Robert
Anyone? I’m not kidding. Think about this: If nine years ago I said to you “Joe Girardi should be fired,” and you asked, “Who would you like to see as manager?” and I answered, “Aaron Boone,” you would have laughed at me. Offering a TV analyst with no coaching or managerial experience at any level the job would have seemed absurd. He had zero qualifications to take over a team that came within one win of the World Series with a young, likable core, and yet he did. He turned that core into an unlikeable group that was mostly eventually released, non-tendered or traded.
I love Yankees fans who get confrontational about Boone and say, “If you get rid of Boone, who are you hiring?” as if there’s no one else in the world who could possibly manage a Major League Baseball team. Boone isn’t some 1-of-1 surgeon who can’t be replaced. There are unlimited candidates for the job. Many of whom wouldn’t use Nestor Cortes for the first time in six weeks to try to retire Freddie Freeman in the World Series and who wouldn’t think of stealing outs with Ryan Yarbrough in the eighth inning of an August game in the middle of a pennant race.
Last modified: Aug 11, 2026
