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

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe Boone is getting smarter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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