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Yankees Thoughts: Trounced by Tampa on Trade Deadline Day

The Yankees had a chance to upgrade their roster for the remaining two months of the season before Tuesday’s trade, or a chance to start building for next season. They did neither, then lost another game to the Rays and another game in the standings as well.

The Yankees had a chance to upgrade their roster for the remaining two months of the season before Tuesday’s trade deadline, or a chance to start building for next season. They did neither, then lost another game to the Rays and another game in the standings as well.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I knew the Yankees were going to do nothing before Tuesday’s trade deadline, and yet, it’s unbelievable that they did nothing before Tuesday’s trade deadline. The same problems that existed for the Yankees yesterday morning exist this morning. Those same problems have existed for several years, and they continue to go unresolved.

After letting the deadline pass with only trading for an unnecessary middle reliever just before the clock struck 6, Brian Cashman spent the early innings of Tuesday night’s game speaking with the media about what went into the organization’s decision to do nothing. They didn’t buy. They didn’t sell. They did nothing.

2. “We were in play on a lot of different levels … all the way through until the clock stopped,” Cashman said. “Reinforce pitching, positions players, it didn’t matter.”

Cashman didn’t actually say that. Well, he did say it, he just didn’t say it yesterday. He said those words at last year’s deadline, when the same exact problems the Yankees face today were also problems.

“We were entertaining a lot of different concepts and ideas. We were throwing ideas that didn’t find success and receiving ideas that we didn’t gravitate to at the end.”

That was also said last year.

3. Here’s what Cashman said on Tuesday.

“We were being opportunistic buyers if anything made sense, and opportunistic sellers.”

Apparently, nothing made sense. Nothing.

“With the frustration of how we played recently, we became cautious buyers,” Cashman said. “There were a lot of clubs we were heavily discussing things with that I think their intention was potentially sellers, but their teams got hot and they became buyers.”

Cautious buyers is one thing. The Yankees are the couple that goes dealership hopping every week for a new car for years and never pull the trigger, choosing instead to keep driving their same, old car with 190,000 miles and rust all over the exterior.

The only club that fits the description of being a seller-turned-buyer is the Cubs, and Cashman is so clearly talking about Cody Bellinger. Guess what? The Yankees could have had Bellinger in the offseason, just like the Cubs, and all it would have cost them was money. Not prospects, not trying to line up with the Cubs’ needs, not needing the Cubs to go on a losing streak to be sellers. Just money, and the Yankees passed.

4. “I’d say it wasn’t a deep trade deadline in terms of options,” Cashman said. “Navigating it wasn’t easy.”

I think navigating it was easy for the Yankees since they didn’t navigate it. They stood on the side and watched it go by.

Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Jordan Montgomery, Aaron Civale, Jordan Hicks, Kendall Graveman, Lance Lynn, David Robertson C.J. Cron Jack Flaherty, Josh Bell, Carlos Santana, Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Jorge Lopez, Dylan Floro, Amed Rosario, and many others were traded. I’d say it was deep enough in terms of options. 

5. “No one was able to pry anything away from us that we felt was more valuable than where we’re sitting in the standings a 3.5 games out still.”

No one is ever able to pry anything away from the Yankees. No one could pry away Eduardo Nunez until the Yankees finally released him for nothing. No one could pry away Miguel Andujar until he was released for nothing. No one could pry away Clint Frazier until he was released for nothing. No one has been able to pry away Oswald Peraza, who like the others is too good to trade and somehow not good enough to play for this shitty team. I look forward to the Yankees eventually releasing Peraza for nothing someday.

6. “We stayed the course with what we had because we felt that given the options that were available coming our way … this was the best play for us.”

What you have is the worst team nearly $300 million can buy. The Mets may have a higher payroll and waved the white flag by trading away Scherzer, Verlander, Robertson and Mark Canha, but at least they have a plan. The Yankees have no plan. Outside of Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole, the team is a collection of underachieving, disappointing, oft-injured players and pitchers. The bullpen is fine, but what’s the point of having a great bullpen if they never have a lead to protect?

To think about where the Yankees were seven years ago today after having sold off every tradeable asset to start playing for the future, and to think about where they were six Octobers ago, coming within one game of the World Series with a roster littered with mid-20s everyday players, and now where they are today is beyond disturbing. The Yankees accomplished nothing during this time, and the only player still standing and playing well for the Yankees from that exciting 2017 team is Judge (unless you think Severino is still standing and doing well for the Yankees).

The dark ages are looming for the Yankees. Stanton and LeMahieu aren’t going anywhere. Rizzo has another year. Torres continues to evade every trade opportunity. Anthony Volpe is more likely to turn out to be a bust than a generational talent, and again, somehow Peraza isn’t good enough to play for this team. The Yankees aren’t going to be able to address their offensive needs this coming offseason because the non-Shohei Ohtani star of the free-agent class is Bader, and the last thing the Yankees should do is bring back the right-handed, oft-injured, can’t-hit-righties and can’t-get-on-base Bader.

What you have is what you get with the Yankees, and the roster that is 47-51 this season against teams not named the A’s and Royals is the same roster that will try to overcome a 3 1/2-game playoff berth deficit over the remaining 55 games, and it’s mostly the same roster you will see on Opening Day 2024. (I’m a little surprised the Yankees didn’t send out one of their clearly-can’t-read-the-room season ticket email offers immediately after the trade deadline ended.)

7. As for Tuesday’s game, like the Orioles, the Rays are so much better at everything than the Yankees. From the last man on the roster through the front office, there’s nothing the Yankees do better than the Rays. You can’t even use the ‘bullpen building’ card when it comes to comparing the Yankees and Rays because the Rays are even better at that.

The Rays traded for the Pirates’ Tyler Glasnow. The Yankees traded for the Pirates’ Jameson Taillon. The Rays gave Zach Eflin a three-year, $40 million deal this past offseason. The Yankees gave Rodon a six-year, $162 million deal this past offseason. The Rays do everything better and more efficiently than the Yankees, and like the Orioles, who have the league’s third-lowest payroll, the Rays’ have the league’s fifth-lowest payroll.

8. The Yankees lost 5-2, and the offense no-showed until there were two outs in the ninth inning, and Rodon no-showed for the fourth time in five starts as a Yankee. But he did clear just over $800,000 in salary for last night’s four-inning, 97-pitch effort, so good for him.

The Yankees were getting shut out until there were two outs in the ninth when they managed to score two runs on four hits. With two on and two outs, Stanton came up as the tying run, but Kevin Cash stopped joking around with Colin Poche and brought in Pete Fairbanks to blow Stanton away with fastballs.

9. The loss was the Yankees’ third straight and fourth in five games in this crucial stretch against the Orioles, Rays and Astros. The Blue Jays hold the final wild-card berth, and they lost for a third straight game as well, so the Yankees have now wasted three days of trying to overcome the Blue Jays.

The division path to the postseason is not an option as the Yankees are 11 games behind the Orioles. The first wild card is not an option as the Yankees are 9 1/2 games behind the Rays. The second wild card is not an option as the Rangers just traded for everyone and the Astros just returned Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez from the injured list and brought back last year’s AL Cy Young winner. That leaves the third wild card as the Yankees’ only viable path to the postseason, and “viable” may as well be sarcastic in that context.

10. The Yankees are now two games behind the Red Sox, who also don’t hold a playoff spot, and a 1/2-game behind the Angels. The Yankees have the same record (55-52) as the Mariners, who sold at yesterday’s deadline, while the Yankees stood pat.

“We know that we have better baseball in us,” Cashman said yesterday, “although, we haven’t shown that and proven that.”

I don’t know that the Yankees have better baseball in them. Since July 3 of last season, they are 99-100. They have been a below-.500 team for the equivalent of a full season and then 23 percent of another season. Why should Yankees fans think the remaining 55 games of this season will be different? They shouldn’t.


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Yankees Thoughts: There’s Always Tomorrow

The Yankees opened a season-defining, seven-game homestand with a 5-1 loss to the Rays. The offense was nowhere to be found and the pitching decisions were beyond puzzling as they fell even further behind in the postseason race.

The Yankees opened a season-defining, seven-game homestand with a 5-1 loss to the Rays. The offense was nowhere to be found and the pitching decisions were beyond puzzling as they fell even further behind in the postseason race.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Earlier this season, a friend of mine told me he believes the 2023 Yankees are a social experiment: a test to see how far the organization can push its fans while still maintaining a fan base. At first I laughed because of the comedic way it described this Yankees season, but as the season has progressed, it has become hard to ignore as a possibility. Maybe the Yankees are just fucking with all of us? It sure would explain a lot of decisions they have made this year, and none more than Monday night’s pitching decision.

2. Leading up to first pitch against the Rays, Domingo German was scratched with “discomfort in his armpit area.” An odd and untimely injury that prevented German from playing catch on Sunday forced the Yankees to call up Jhony Brito to start in his place. Aaron Boone said German felt good, but was expected to see a doctor, and if he turned out to be OK, he would slotted back into the rotation within the next few days.

Brito started and got rocked. He gave up five runs and four home runs in four innings, and after giving up back-to-back bombs in the fourth inning, German started warming up in the Yankees bullpen. Yes, German. The German that was scratched a few hours earlier and was said to need to visit a doctor for an evaluation. Just about an hour after the first pitch of the game that German was supposed to throw but didn’t throw due to injury, he was warming up to enter the game in relief of Brito.

3. How could this be? How could German go from being unable to play catch on Sunday to being scratched on Monday to suddenly being healthy enough to enter the game he was supposed to start? What happened to seeing a doctor? Did he have a telehealth appointment during the second inning?

“He got cleared with Dr. Ahmad after he saw him in the 5:00 hour,” Boone said after the Yankees’ 5-1 loss.

Every single day the Yankees create at least one bizarre headline that borders on the unbelievable. Watching this team is like watching a cheesy, unrealistic soap opera in which the plot makes little to no sense.

When I saw German warming up, I thought maybe the decision to flip Brito and German was Boone trying to pull a fast one on the Rays like he tried in Game 2 of the 2020 ALDS with Deivi Garcia and JA Happ.

I wasn’t the only one to think that as he was asked by the media if he was using the same strategy from 2020 on Monday.

“No,” Boone said emphatically, shaking his head in disgust that the question was asked.

The fact multiple people had the thought Boone was trying to be strategic with the starting pitching change and that the question was reasonable to ask him sums up his era of managing the Yankees well.

4. German ended up pitching more innings in relief (5) than Brito pitched as the starter (4). German held the Rays scoreless for his five innings and allowed just two hits. Good thing he didn’t start.

Had he started, he would have had to be as dominant as he was in relief because once again the Yankees offense failed to show up. One run on three hits and three walks is all the Yankees were able to “mount” (to use a Boone buzz word).

5. The Yankees had their chances to get back in the game. In the third inning, trailing 3-1, with Aaron Judge at the plate representing the tying run, Tyler Glasnow gladly threw four pitches out of the zone to walk Judge. The Rays put the tying run on base to pitch to Anthony Rizzo and Glasnow struck him out on four pitches.

Why does Boone think Rizzo will come out of this slump that is more than two months old?

“He’s Anthony Rizzo. He’s healthy.”

Well, OK then! Who am I to question Boone with that kind of analysis?

Has Boone thought about moving him down in the lineup?

“It’s something I have considered,” Boone said. And yet, he hasn’t done it.

6. Boone’s carefree attitude has rubbed off on Rizzo to the point that Rizzo now sounds like Boone. Here are some quotes from Rizzo from Sunday night in Baltimore.

“The beauty of this game is you get to come in tomorrow and keep working,” Rizzo said of his slump. “Just keep working, it has to turn. Just keep on working.”

The reference of “tomorrow.” The idea that “it has to turn.” It’s like Boone wrote out Rizzo’s answers on notecards for him.

“We have the guys in here,” Rizzo said of needing to add at the deadline. “The production can come from within here.”

Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like Boone claiming the guys in the room are more than capable.

“We have 50 plus games left,” Rizzo said of urgency. “With this division we can get hot and teams can get cold.”

You have to love the urgency of the Yankees. It’s as if the season doesn’t have a finite amount of games and will just continue until they have claimed a playoff because they’re the Yankees. I was waiting for Rizzo to throw out “It’s all in front of us,” as a tip of the cap to his manager.

7. Joe Girardi was fired for being too tense, as Brian Cashman was worried Girardi’s intensity was rubbing off on the roster. So he went out and hired a guy who experiences as much comfort in losing as he does blowing bubbles and fidgeting with his oversized watch in the dugout. Why do you think the Yankees continue to make foolish mistakes on the basepaths? Why do you think mental errors are swept under the rug? It’s because there’s no accountability on the team. There are no repercussions for poor play. Boone will concoct a lie how he likes a player’s aggressiveness when he is thrown out by a mile trying to take an extra base, and he’ll defend the team’s big free-agent starting pitcher signing after he blows a kiss to heckling fans because blowing a kiss is better than getting into an altercation.

8. Hal Steinbrenner doesn’t hold Brian Cashman accountable. Cashman doesn’t hold Boone accountable. Boone doesn’t hold his players accountable. When Cashman spends $300 million on a roster that is 47-50 against teams not named the A’s or Royals, he keeps his job. When Boone uses the Yankees’ 2004 ALCS loss as motivation for the 2022 Yankees’ ALCS deficit or says his offense had “good at-bats” after striking out 18 times in game, nothing happens to him. When Rizzo has one home run in 10 weeks, he stays hitting in the top four spots in the lineup, and when Josh Donaldson weigts more than his batting average, he still hits fifth.

The Yankees replaced a manager from the tough Midwest who knew how to win as a player and manager and did both with the Yankees with a laid-back Southern California Pollyanna who’s more concerned with getting the lowest rarity score in a clubhouse Immaculate Grid competition than beating the Orioles or Rays and who has never won anything as a player or a manager.

9. After Rizzo failed to get the Yankees back in the game in the third, they had one more chance in the sixth. Trailing 5-1, Giancarlo Stanton came to the plate with Judge on third and Rizzo on first. Stanton could keep the rally going or possibly even get the Yankees to within one run with one swing. Except his one swing came on the first pitch he saw and that swing resulted in a weak 72.8 mph ground ball into a 5-4-3 double play to end the threat and the inning.

It was another banner night for the Yankees’ 3- and 4-hitters of Rizzo and Stanton, as they combined to go 1-for-8 with three strikeouts. Judge was given three free passes, and the embarrassing protection behind him couldn’t do anything. Rizzo now sits at 0-for-30 with two outs and runners in scoring position for the season and the 0-for dropped Stanton’s batting average to a humiliating .198.

10. The Yankees lost for the third time in four games in a crucial 10-game stretch against three teams that are direct competition for a playoff berth. Do they care? Not really. There’s always tomorrow as Annie Boone preaches to his players. Except there isn’t. The Yankees are running out of tomorrows to count on, and if the rest of the week at Yankee Stadium against the Rays and Astros goes as badly as Monday night, the rest of the season will be a meaningless formality.


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Yankees Thoughts: Luis Severino Sucks, Offense No-Shows and Aaron Boone Lies in Baltimore

The Yankees went to Baltimore needing to win series and stack wins. Instead, they leave Baltimore having dropped another series and remain in last place and out of a playoff spot.

The Yankees went to Baltimore needing to win series and stack wins. Instead, they leave Baltimore having dropped another series and remain in last place in the AL East and out of a playoff spot.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I didn’t know what to expect from Luis Severino on Sunday night. I had a fear he wouldn’t be good because he has been mostly not good this season. But I hoped for the best and braced myself for the worst.

Well, maybe I didn’t exactly brace myself for the worst because for as bad as Severino has mostly been this season, what unfolded in the first inning isn’t one of the scenarios I visualized taking place: single, single, double, double, walk, home run to open the game. The first six Orioles Severino faced all scored. The Yankees trailed 6-0 before they could record an out, and just like that, the game was over.

2. I knew what to expect from Dean Kremer: a few runs at best and a lot of strikeouts. It was just over three weeks ago that Kremer went to Yankee Stadium and struck out 10 in seven innings of one-run ball. The Yankees had won the first two games of that four-game series, and Orioles legend and broadcaster Jim Palmer told Michael Kay on the day of that July 5 game that it was the biggest game of the season for the Orioles to prevent a second-half tailspin. Kremer stepped up, shut down the Aaron Judge-less Yankees and the Orioles went on an eight-game winning streak that eventually led to them taking over first place in the AL East.

With Kremer once again facing a Judge-less Yankees lineup, Sunday’s offensive performance wasn’t just expected, it was inevitable.

3. Kremer struck out seven Yankees and the Orioles bullpen struck out another 11. In an immensely important game, Aaron Boone sat Judge and gave the finally-heating-up DJ LeMahieu the night off and the rest of the Yankees struck out 18 times.

“Outside of the strikeouts, I thought at-bats were building off of last night,” Boone said. “I thought we grinded out really well.”

Outside of the team striking out for 18 of their 27 outs, Boone thought the offense did a good job grinding out at-bats. There’s no end for how far this idiot will will go to spin something into a positive.

“We made it really tough on Kremer,” Boone said.

Two weeks ago, the Yankees were shut down by Griffin Canning in Anaheim as Canning recorded a career-high 12 strikeouts. What did Boone say about his offense that night? “At least we made Canning work hard to do it.”

There was Boone again on Sunday night, citing the Yankees making Kremer work hard as a reason to be pleased with his team losing a game to the Orioles, losing the season series to the Orioles and losing on a day in which the Blue Jays, Rangers, Astros and Red Sox also lost.

4. “I thought we carried some of that momentum in from last night,” Boone said.

“Last night” refers to Saturday night. On Saturday night, the Yankees scored eight runs against a starting pitcher who was sent down to Double-A immediately after the game and a starter-turned-reliever due to performance with a 5.93 ERA. There was no momentum carried over because there is no momentum with this team. Unless they’re playing the A’s or Royals they can’t win back-to-back games. And now they are 47-49 when they play teams other than the A’s or Royals.

Since winning two of three against the A’s in the last week of June, the Yankees have lost two of three to the Cardinals, split a four-game series against the Orioles after winning the first two, lost two of three at home to the Cubs, lost two of three to the Rockies, got swept by the Angels, swept the Royals, split two with the Mets and lost a series to the Orioles. The Yankees finish July having won one series in the month and have lost four straight rubber games.

5. I have always liked Severino. Even when he couldn’t get out of the first inning in the 2017 wild-card game. Even when he sucked in the second half of 2018. Even when he didn’t know the start time for Game 3 of the 2018 ALDS and couldn’t get a 10th out in that game. Even when the injuries started piling up in 2019, forced him to miss all of 2020 and nearly all of 2021. Even when more injuries forced him to miss most of 2022. Even when he cited exit velocity and the Crawford Boxes in Houston as the reason for him losing Game 2 of the 2022 ALCS. Even as he has pitched as bad as any Yankees starter in the team’s history has pitched this season, allowing 108 baserunners in 57 2/3 innings.

When news broke in 2015 of a 21-year-old Severino getting called up to the Yankees, I anticipated him one day being the ace of a championship Yankees team. Instead, I will have to settle for him being one of the faces of the Baby Bombers era that once has so much hope and promise and instead turned into an unmitigated disaster. On Sunday, Severino allowed at least nine runs in a game for the second time in July becoming the first Yankee since 1934 to have two of those starts in a calendar month. It’s hard to believe Severino will get the ball in five days against the Astros.

6. It’s hard to believe Anthony Rizzo is under contract next season with the Yankees at $17 million and then has a $17 million option or $6 million buyout for 2025. Rizzo isn’t just bad, like most of the Yankees lineup he’s unplayable, and yet he has to play. When you miss on all of your free-agent signings, bring in a litany of oft-injured players and fail to develop your own talent, you get stuck with a lineup full of underachieving, unplayable players that then have to play. In a season in which the Yankees began paying Aaron Hicks to play for the first-place Orioles and continued to roster, play and bat Josh Donaldson fifth in the lineup, Rizzo has become the face of this historically bad Yankees offense.

Rizzo has one home run since May 20, a wall-scraping, short-porch job at Yankee Stadium that wouldn’t have been out of any of the other 29 stadiums in the majors. That home run came off of Jordan Lyles, whose season is making Severino’s look 1999 Pedro Martinez’s. Since that home run, Rizzo has a 53 wRC+, which is the lowest among qualified hitters in that time, making him the worst hitter in the majors for more than 10 weeks now. On Sunday night, Rizzo went 0-for-5 and his OPS fell to a career-worst .710.

7. Not far behind that abysmal OPS is Giancarlo Stanton with a .722. ESPN showed a graphic on Sunday night letting viewers know Stanton has homered in seven of his last 15 games. Here is the list of pitchers he hit those seven home runs off of.

Drew Smyly
Michael Rucker
Austin Gomber
Connor Seabold
Chase Silseth
Dylan Coleman
Tyler Wells

Smyly is the closest thing to a household name of those seven and you would have to be from a household that really follows baseball to know who he is. Smyly is on his fifth team in five years and seventh in 10 major-league seasons.

Rucker has a 5.03 ERA.

Gomber has a 5.83 ERA.

Seabold has a 6.95 ERA.

Silseth was making his ninth career start.

Coleman has a 9.95 ERA.

Wells was sent to Double-A after his performance on Saturday.

So if you’re a journeyman hanging on to a major-league career, the 26th man on a roster, a rookie trying to learn how to pitch at this level or an arm so out of whack you get demoted two levels down, and you throw a middle-middle fastball or hang a breaking ball, Stanton may take you deep. Other than that, Stanton isn’t going to do anything.

With or without Judge, these two have to hit. It’s been the same rhetoric all season and the season is dwindling down. It could be the last week of September and the Yankees could be eliminated from postseason contention and Boone will still be saying the Yankees just “need to get a few guys going” and that “they are going to get on a roll.”

8. No one is asking Rizzo to be and no one thinks he can be the .901 OPS player he was for the Cubs from 2014-19. No one is asking Stanton to be and no one thinks he can be the .908 OPS player he was for a decade from 2012-21. All anyone is asking is that they don’t be automatic outs, which is what they have been for the majority of this season, and what Stanton has been since the start of last season.

As for the rest of the lineup? There’s no hope outside a possibly-returning-to-form LeMahieu or the occasional few-game streak from Gleyber Torres. Jake Bauers plays infrequently, Harrison Bader is at best a fourth outfielder on a good team, Anthony Volpe is a disappointment and Kyle Higashioka and Isiah Kiner-Falefa will again be disappointments once their playing time increases and they are exposed like their career numbers suggest.

9. Boone continues to preach that the rest of the season and the Yankees’ path to the postseason is “right in front of them” to take advantage of. The only thing that appears to be in front of the Yankees is more losing. They have three against the Rays and four against the Astros. Next week’s “break” in the schedule comes against the White Sox, who took two of three from the Yankees in the Bronx earlier this season. Then it’s nine straight against the Marlins, Braves and Red Sox.

10. On Monday night, the Yankees will face Tyler Glasnow, a real, legitimate starting pitcher with ace-like stuff.

“We need to be ready to go,” Boone said of the upcoming series against the Rays. “Obviously, with the urgency of where we’re at in the season.”

“Where we’re at in the season” wouldn’t happen to be with 57 games remaining and the Yankees in last place in the AL East and 3 1/2 games out of a playoff spot, would it? The “urgency” Boone speaks couldn’t be sitting Judge and LeMahieu on Sunday, could it?

With the way the offense has performed against back-of-the-rotation arms and now-out-of-the-league starters, it’s difficult to envision a scenario in which Glasnow doesn’t dominate the Yankees lineup. If he does, Boone will be there after the game to tell us at least they made Glasnow work hard.


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Yankees Thoughts: ‘Bronx Bombers’ Actually Look the Part

The Yankees offense actually looked like Bronx Bombers for the first time in a long time in their 8-3 win over the Orioles. It was a much-needed win, and they’ll need to do the same on Sunday night.

The Yankees offense actually looked like Bronx Bombers for the first time in a long time in their 8-3 win over the Orioles. It was a much-needed win, and they’ll need to do the same on Sunday night.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I want to thank Brandon Hyde for waving the white flag early on Saturday night. With his Orioles trailing 3-2 in the third inning, Hyde removed starter Tyler Wells after just 2 2/3 innings and asked the lesser, backend arms of his bullpen to get 19 outs.

There was no way the Orioles were going to be able to navigate the middle innings relying on the soft-throwing, unable-to-strike-anyone-out, left-handed Cole Irvin against the all right-handed lineup (except for Anthony Rizzo) of the Yankees. Hyde let Irvin face 10 batters and six of them reached and four of them scored.

2. It was Giancarlo Stanton who gave the Yankees an early lead when he was able to clear the mile-long left-field wall in the first and it was Aaron Judge who got them the lead back in the third, but it was Isiah Kiner-Falefa who broke the game open with a bases-clearing double in the sixth.

Kiner-Falefa had impressive plate appearances throughout the game, going 1-for-3 with the three-RBI double and two walks. He saw 36 pitches in his five plate appearances and for the first time in his Yankees career, I found myself thinking he looked good. (Now if only he could that with some level of consistency.)

3. “Guys were giving really tough at-bats,” Aaron Boone said after the 8-3 win. “And that’s us and that’s who we want to be.”

Well, that’s not the Yankees. Yes, that’s who they want to be, but it’s not who they are. They haven’t been that type of offense in a long, long time.

The Yankees improved to 45-12 when they score four or more runs. Their pitching is so good that they just need to score four runs to have a really strong chance of winning, and yet, it’s so hard for them to do.

4. “That’s what it’s supposed to look like,” Boone said of the offense. “That’s what we’re working to.”

That is what an offense that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars should look like. Unfortunately, the offense rarely looks the way it did on Saturday.

Because of the offensive outburst, the Yankees were able to save their elite relievers, only needing to use Ian Hamilton and Nick Ramirez each for a pair of no-hit innings. Like the Orioles bullpen, the Yankees bullpen will be well rested for the crucial rubber game on Sunday Night Baseball.

5. Judge may be well rested too, as Boone said he plans on giving Judge the series finale off.

“Right now I’m leaning towards no,” Boone said of playing Judge for a third straight game. “But we’ll see.”

It’s inexplicable that Judge may not play on Sunday. He just missed two months and has been deemed healthy to play, but only healthy enough when Boone feels like it?

6. “As much as I want to run him every day, forget the toe,” Boone said, “He hasn’t come close to playing games for almost two months.”

If you’re saying “forget the toe” and that he needs a break because he hasn’t played, well, that’s the single dumbest idea I have ever heard from a man who once secretly used Deivi Garcia as an opener in playoff game, only to turn to JA Happ.

7. “I want him every game,” Boone said. “We have 13 in a row. Hopefully, he’s in a position to start nine or 10 of them.”

Or how about all of them? The Yankees are 31-20 when Judge plays and 24-29 when he doesn’t. Every game he doesn’t play greatly diminishes the Yankees’ odds of winning. When you’re in last place in the division (eight games back) and not even holding a playoff spot (3 1/2 games back), you can’t afford to greatly diminish the odds of winning any game.

8. “As much as I want him in there, we’ve got to be smart here,” Boone said. “If we get through these 13 days into the off-day and hopefully we’re in a good spot to where we can now roll.”

Judge’s toe isn’t completely healed or healthy. He has made it known he’s not 100 percent and yet he’s playing on it and so far has played extremely well, reaching base in six of nine plate appearances. Both Judge and the Yankees have said it’s not going to heal until the offseason and it’s about pain tolerance. If he’s not going to get better than how does it make sense that at the end of this 13-game stretch he will magically be better to play every day.

If Judge is out of the lineup on a given day and says it was his own call, then so be it. If he’s not in the lineup on a given day, and it’s not his call on how he feels about his own toe, then that will be incomprehensible.

9. “If we get through these games” is what Boone said. If the Yankees don’t get through these games by winning the majority of them, the final six weeks of the season will be a formality. These 13 games are against the Orioles, Rays, Astros and White Sox. The Yankees are already 1-1 in the 13, having wasted the first two games running in place in standings with now two less games to play this season. By the time these 13 games are over, the Yankees could be facing a mathematical unlikelihood of reaching the postseason. It’s possible that could be the case even if Judge plays every game, but why wouldn’t you want to do everything you can to give yourself the best chance to win?

10. The Yankees haven’t done everything they can to give themselves the best chance to win for a while now. It all started 13 years ago they wouldn’t include Eduardo Nunez in a trade for Cliff Lee and then admitted down the stretch of that season that they didn’t care if they reached the postseason as a division winner or wild-card winner. Since then their lackadaisical approach to winning has reached unbelievable levels.

The Yankees have done enough losing over the last 13 months. Their ownership, front office, managerial, coaching, roster and in-game decisions have proven they’re comfortable and OK with losing. If they think they can clinch a postseason berth without Judge, we’ll know they’re still OK with it.


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Yankees Thoughts: Aaron Judge Can’t Do It Alone

The Yankees arrived in Baltimore needing to cut into their division and wild-card deficits and prove between now and Tuesday they are a team worth adding to by the trade deadline. Instead, they were shut out.

The Yankees arrived in Baltimore needing to cut into their division and wild-card deficits and prove between now and Tuesday they are a team worth adding to by the trade deadline. Instead, they were shut out.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Friday night in Baltimore had the feeling of a postseason game, as it should with the Orioles trying to win the AL East for the first time in a decade and reach the playoffs for the first time in seven years, and the Yankees trying to overcome a loss column deficit for the final wild-card berth. And like a playoff game, the Yankees’ offense was nowhere to be found.

    2. Grayson Rodriguez entered the 2023 as the sixth-best prospect in all of baseball by Baseball America. He was part of the Orioles’ rotation out of spring training, but after getting knocked around to the tune of a 7.35 ERA through 10 starts, the Orioles sent him down to Triple-A at the end of May. While Baseball America’s sixth-best prospect apparently needed more refinement in the minors, the publication’s preseason 14th-ranked prospect Anthony Volpe has not only remained at the major-league level all season long, but has played in all 103 Yankees games, despite hitting a paltry .210/.284/.376.

    Rodriguez was recalled last week and in two starts since that call-up, he allowed another six runs in 10 2/3 innings (5.06 ERA). Through 12 major-league starts, he had produced inconsistent results, pitching like someone with no major-league experience entering the season. Then the Yankees came to town.

    Rodriguez retired the first 10 batters of the game on Friday night. He produced arguably the most pathetic at-bat of Anthony Rizzo’s career with an effortless three-pitch strikeout in the first inning, and it wasn’t until Aaron Judge walked with one out in the fourth that a Yankee reached base.

    3. Having not played since June 3, Judge returned on Friday and made sure to let everyone know his toe isn’t 100 percent. He jumped on the first pitch he saw and ripped a 104.4-mph line drive to right field that was unfortunately hit right at right fielder (and eventual Orioles hero) Anthony Santander. That would be the only hittable pitch Judge would see all night because from that moment on Rodriguez and the Orioles decided ‘Nope, we’re not going to let the one guy in the Yankees lineup beat us.’ The type of smart, logical decision-making the Yankees refrain from using. It’s how they let Pete Alonso beat them on Tuesday and let Shohei Ohtani beat them in Anaheim and continue to let Rafael Devers humiliate them every time they play the Red Sox. For the rest of the night, the Orioles pitched around Judge and put him on base with three walks in his other three plate appearances.

    The idea Judge was going to come back and elevate the Yankees offense from being one of the worst in the league to one of the best hasn’t been wishful thinking all along by Yankees homers, it’s been idiotic thinking. While Judge is great even with one big toe, the rest of the lineup sucks and just putting him back in it wasn’t going to change that.

    4. It wasn’t going to change because the opposing game plan Yankees fans witnessed last season has returned along with Judge’s return to the lineup: don’t pitch to Judge. It’s not strategic, it’s obvious, like utilizing the center square in Tic-tac-toe if you have the first move. The Orioles aren’t the first team to avoid pitching to Judge, and they won’t be the last, not with Rizzo and Giancarlo Stanton serving as his protection.

    Rizzo went 1-for-4 in the game with that pathetic strikeout and a bloop single off the end of his bat, and Stanton went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. When the protection for the best hitter in the league is the equivalent of a pair of weapon-less security guards defending the Hope Diamond, you get the kind of result the Yankees offense provided on Friday: no runs.

    5. No runs and four singles. That’s what the Yankees offense produced in their biggest game of the season to date.

    “These are all big important, a lot-on-the-line games,” Aaron Boone said. “That’s just the nature of the beast at this time of the year.”

    It’s not just “this time of the year,” when games are important, it’s all year. When the Yankees lost out on home-field advantage for the one-game playoff in 2021, it wasn’t because they lost two of three to a Rays team that had nothing to play for in the final three games of the season. They lost it all season, losing to inferior competition by underachieving. And if the Yankees miss out on the playoffs this year by a game or two, it won’t be because of what happened in the final weekend of the season, it will be because of what happened all season: the underachieving, the mismanagement, the blown leads. It will be because of games like Friday night.

    6. Not only was is a struggle to get baserunners, when the Yankees did get them, they erased them with double plays. Harrison Bader (whose time with the Yankees can’t end fast enough) and Stanton both banged into inning-ending double plays in the game. But if you remember what a wise man once said back in June 2021, hitting into double plays isn’t necessarily bad.

    “Typically, the better teams are going to hit into double plays,” Boone said on June 4, 2021 after a loss to the Red Sox. “You know you’re going to be asking me that same question when we get it rolling here.”

    The Yankees never got it rolling in 2021 like Boone tried to manifest. They never got it rolling in the second half of 2022, like he also predicted, and what do you know, the same “get it rolling” line has amounted to nothing in 2023.

    8. In these type of postseason-like games, everyone needs to be at their best: the offense, the defense, the starting pitcher, the bullpen and especially the manager.

    The offense clearly wasn’t at their best. Boone wasn’t at his, choosing to remove Wandy Peralta from the game after a single pitch with switch-hitting Orioles due up in the ninth and a chance to get them to hit to the cavernous left field. And Tommy Kahnle wasn’t at his, throwing only changeups, eight of them in his ninth-inning appearances. When there’s no fastball to differentiate Kahnle’s changeup from, his changeup becomes his fastball, and an 89-mph changeup from Kahnle to Santander immediately following two other changeups was foolish, and it ended the game.

    9. “You cannot waste Gerrit Cole outings when he throws the ball as well as he has,” John Flaherty said on the YES broadcast, forgetting that one thing the Yankees are extremely good at is wasting Cole starts.

    Not even two weeks after losing a Cole start in which he allowed one run and racked up 11 strikeouts in Colorado, the Yankees couldn’t win a game in which he gave them seven shutout innings against the best team in the AL. When you waste Cole starts and you leave yourself open to the unknown that are starts by everyone else in the rotation, you end up in last place, which is where the Yankees remain.

    10. On a night in which the Yankees couldn’t mount a single run, every other team in the AL East won. The Orioles beat the Yankees, the Blue Jays beat the Angels and the Red Sox beat the Giants. The Yankees lost a game on everyone in the AL East and lost a game on the wild-card race, a race they are now 3 1/2 games out of.

    Another game off the schedule. Another loss closer to missing out on the postseason in a format in which 40 percent of the league makes the playoffs. Another loss to a team that is on the right path to annual contention for the foreseeable future from a team that is on the path to dark days of unproductive, old players, bad contracts and basement baseball.


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    My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers
    is available as an ebook!

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