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

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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