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Yankees Thoughts: Wild Weekend in Bronx

The Yankees opened the season with a sweep of the Brewers, outscoring them 36-14. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I feared Nestor Cortes shutting down the Yankees on Saturday at the Stadium the way so many ex-Yankees have over the years. My fear was all for nothing as Cortes did his best to repay Yankees fans for the Freddie Freeman walk-off grand slam he allowed in Game 1 of the World Series. Cortes will never be able to completely make up that moment to Yankees fans (though the blame is really more on Aaron Boone for using Cortes in that spot after he hadn’t pitched in weeks), but his performance in the second game of the season was a good start.

2. The first three pitches Cortes threw were all hit out of the park. First, it was Paul Goldschmidt, then it was Cody Bellinger, and finally, Aaron Judge. My four-year-old son who was in attendance with me and taking in his second game in the Bronx was stunned. As “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” played again and again and again and the crowd enjoying the 80-degree March weather went wild, my son trying to process what was happening looked at me with an expression of ‘Does this happen at every game?’

Sadly, it doesn’t. But after the back-to-back-to-back home runs had Cortes sitting on an infinite ERA three batters into his season, Austin Wells hit one out three batters after Judge. The next inning, Anthony Volpe did the same. Cortes was removed from the game after facing one batter in the third, and left having allowed eight earned runs, 11 baserunners and five home runs, while recording just six outs.

3. Amazingly, the power barrage didn’t end there. After Cortes was removed for walking Jasson Dominguez, Connor Thomas entered for his major-league debut and allowed a Trent Grisham single then hit Paul Goldschmidt with a pitch. Bellinger singled in Dominguez and Judge followed with a grand slam. Three pitches later with the crowd still celebrating Judge’s slam, Jazz Chisholm drilled a solo homer. The Yankees led 13-3 and had hit seven home runs. It was the third inning.

The next inning, Bellinger drove in another run and Judge hit another home run, his third in as many at-bats. The Yankees led 16-4 and had hit eight home runs. It was the fourth inning.

In the seventh, Oswald Peraza hit the Yankees’ ninth home run of the day, setting a franchise record for a single game.

4. After surviving the ninth inning on Opening Day, the Yankees blasted the Brewers 20-9 on Saturday. In a game that was essentially over in the second inning and had the floodgates blown open in the third inning, it wasn’t a game that lacked criticism for the Yankees. The same type of sloppy defense that we saw throughout 2024 (and have seen throughout the Boone era) was on full display in this one. The Yankees made five errors in the game, had trouble fielding ground balls and throwing to first base. Max Fried wasn’t sharp (4.2 IP, 7 H, 6 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 4 K), but he got zero help behind him.

5. During the game, the YES booth went into the Yankees’ use of the “torpedo” bat designed by an MIT physicist and former Yankees employee. They explained how the team had developed new bats based on where their players were most likely to make contact with the ball. For players like Anthony Volpe and Jazz Chisholm who were shown using the bat, that happened to be on the label.

The Yankees’ analytics team has finally used their intelligence for good. After years of creating fictional stats to try to sell on the fans on the notion Gleyber Torres is among the best defensive second basemen in the game, that Joey Gallo is worth trading for and that taking on the $53 million owed to Josh Donaldson would be worth it, the brains behind the scenes did something great with the invention of the torpedo. With it, Volpe (.952 OPS) is a major-league hitter and Chisholm (1.667 OPS) is hitting like the left-handed Judge. Bellinger (1.057 OPS) is using some form of it, as is Goldschmidt (1.250 OPS). I love the torpedo bat.

6. Maybe the Yankees were going to destroy Brewers pitching to open the series no matter what. (It’s not like the trio of Freddy Peralta, Cortes and Aaron Civale is anything special.) And maybe with the weather being what it was on Saturday, feeling like mid-June in late March, the ball was going to fly out of the park with 90-mph middle-middle meatballs being thrown. But I would like to think the torpedo bat is what led to this because I want to be proud of the Yankees’ analytics department.

7. After going 4-for-6 with a double, three home runs and eight RBIs on Saturday, Judge, who isn’t using the torpedo bat, homered in his first at-bat on Sunday, which made the wind in the Bronx less annoying as the weather had turned back into what late-March weather is expected to be.

The two-run shot gave the Yankees a 2-1 lead after Marcus Stroman unsurprisingly allowed a first-inning run. The Yankees added to their lead in the second when Ben Rice hit a solo home run, and added more in the third when Chisholm hit a two-run home run. After homering on Saturday and in the third inning on Sunday, Chisholm, the face of the torpedo bat, hit his third home run of the weekend in the seventh inning, and the Yankees went on to win 12-3. Again, I love the torpedo bat.

8. I’m sure by the end of this week (and maybe by Monday’s games) many players throughout the league will be trying out a version of the torpedo bat. When you hit 15 home runs and score 36 runs in 24 innings at a time of year when pitching is supposed to dominate, people tend to notice.

9. Going into this season-opening series I figured Boone would be able to lean on Luke Weaver and Devin Williams more than he normally would with a day off on Wednesday and Friday and Monday. Williams took himself out of the equation for the rest of the weekend with his Opening Day performance and Judge and the torpedo made it so Weaver wasn’t needed for the rest of the weekend as well.

Aside from Williams’ self-created mess on Thursday, the bullpen (including only real relievers and not Carrasco who threw two innings on Saturday) shut out the Brewers. Weaver, Tim Hill, Mark Leiter Jr., Yoendrys Gomez, Fernando Cruz, Brent Hendrick and Ryan Yarbrough combined for this line: 9.1 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 14 K. For a bullpen that lost Clay Holmes and Tommy Kahnle and is waiting on Jonathan Loaisiga and Jake Cousins, that will work.

10. I don’t think the Yankees can count on double-digit runs this Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night against the Diamondbacks. In the Yankees’ favor is the Diamondbacks having to go from spring training to their indoor home in Arizona to now the freezing Bronx where temperatures are supposed to be postseason-like aside from Thursday. In the Diamondbacks’ favor is the trio of Corbin Burnes, Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly, who are all scheduled to start. The Yankees plan to counter with Will Warren, Carlos Rodon and Carlos Carrasco. At best, the pitching matchup in the second game of the series is even, otherwise the Diamondbacks have a massive edge on the mound with their three best. But their best has yet to face the torpedo bats.

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Yankees Thoughts: All’s Wells on Opening Day

Five months after losing Game 5 of the World Series, 2025 opened with a win. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. The last nearly five months were long. Sure, the Yankees’ offseason was shorter than every team other than the Dodgers, but it didn’t feel that way.

First, it was the depression of reaching and losing the World Series, and losing it in such embarrassing and humiliating fashion. Then there was losing it to the Dodgers, my wife’s team, her family’s team. The team I have spent the 13 years I have known her chirping her for having never won a “real” World Series in her life and having not won a “real” one since 1988. (Of course that drought ended at the Yankees’ expense.)

The weeks following the World Series were filled with hearing her watching the Freddie Freeman Game 1 grand slam on a seemingly endless loop on the other side of the bed and listening to countless interviews of Dodgers players mocking the Yankees for their fifth-inning meltdown in Game 5.

I have spent some part of every day since thinking about what could have been in the World Series. What could have been if Aaron Boone hadn’t pulled Gerrit Cole early in Game 1 and gone to Nestor Cortes instead of Tim Hill. What could have been if Aaron Judge could catch a fly ball, if Anthony Volpe could make a basic throw to third base and if Cole could have covered first. Twenty years after the Yankees performed the only 3-0 series collapse in baseball history, I still believe they would have pulled it off if not for that fifth inning. My belief was only made stronger when Dave Roberts agreed over the winter, saying his team’s pitching would have been in a bad place if a Game 6 had been forced.

Then came the departure of Juan Soto. Then there was the Yankees’ disregard for signing a healthy, proven starting third baseman. While the offseason was technically the shortest the Yankees have experienced in 15 years, it felt a lot longer. I needed the 2025 season to start. I needed the Yankees to have a new last game that wasn’t the Game 5 of the World Series. I needed Opening Day.

2. I was in complete agreement with the Yankees when they announced Austin Wells would be their leadoff hitter this season (at least against righties). Unlike Yankees’ lineup decisions in the past like making Aaron Hicks the No. 3 hitter in 2021 (and then laughing at the media for questioning it when he started that season 1-for-15 with seven strikeouts, only for him to be removed from the spot two weeks into the season) or making Volpe the leadoff hitter despite being one of the worst everyday hitters in the league or rolling with Alex Verdugo as the cleanup hitter for an extended period despite being the actual worst everyday hitter in the league, putting Wells at leadoff made sense.

“It’s kind of exciting just getting to hit in front of Aaron Judge and trying to get on base for him,” Wells said of hitting leadoff. “I think that’s helped me a little bit mindset-wise, just getting on base any way I can.”

Wells at leadoff makes sense, simply because of his on-base percentage. The Yankees are starved for bats that get on base consistently, and outside of Judge, Wells is the next best on the team at it. Add in his power and the threat of giving the Yankees an early lead and Wells at leadoff works.

It certainly worked on Opening Day when he gave the Yankees that early lead, sending the third pitch of the year from Freddy Peralta into the short porch.

“To go out there and give us an early lead with that swing, we’ve seen it all spring,” Judge said. “He set the tone for the whole day for us.”

It wasn’t just a day of offense for Wells. Behind the plate he called a game that produced 13 strikeouts.

“I thought Wells was great with the pitch calling,” Carlos Rodon said. “He calls the pitches and I just roll. There’s not much decision-making on my part.”

3. If Rodon being able to have facial hair is all he needed to unlock the pitcher he was before he became a Yankee then they should have changed the policy two years ago. Rodon was getting swings and misses from all over the Brewers’ lineup, finishing with seven strikeouts and only one earned run on six baserunners across 5 1/3 innings.

“Really sharp command-wise,” Boone said of Rodon. “Good presence with everything. I thought he was really in command of his motions.”

Not only his motions, but Rodon kept his emotions in check and prevented the patented unraveling that seems to come in all of his starts when things don’t completely go his way from start to finish. Instead of letting a couple of baserunners turn into a crooked number, he kept getting outs.

4. If you thought Boone’s latest contract extension would change him as a manager, there he was sending Rodon back out for the sixth inning to face the 2-3-4 hitters for a third time. With a day off on Friday and one coming on Monday, the Yankees would be able to use their bullpen more than they would at most parts of the season. When Rodon went back out for the sixth, the Yankees held a one-run lead. I thought after he walked Christian Yelich he would be pulled, but he wasn’t. I thought after he retired William Contreras he would pulled, but he wasn’t. Boone then let him face the right-handed Rhys Hoskins, who has the most career plate appearances of any Brewer against Rodon and has had concerning success against him in those plate appearances. Rodon walked Hoskins and then Boone pulled him.

5. The middle relief of the Yankees was outstanding. Tim Hill got the last two outs of the sixth and keep Rodon’s ERA in tact. Mark Leiter Jr. pitched a perfect seventh, striking out two. Luke Weaver pitched around a walk in the eighth and struck out two. And then there was Devin Williams.

I called Williams the best reliever in baseball when the Yankees traded for him this winter. He came to the Yankees with 375 strikeouts and a 1.83 ERA and 1.023 WHIP in 235 2/3 career innings. In his Yankees debut, it felt like I was watching Clay Holmes still. (It was refreshing to see Holmes struggle in his Mets debut as their Opening Day starter in Houston.)

A three-run lead in the cold with the Brewers’ 6-7-8 hitters due up is as optimal as it gets for making your debut with a new team on a new mound in a new uniform in a new stadium. It couldn’t have been a better situation for Williams to ask for to get his feet wet as a Yankee, and he nearly ruined it.

A single, double and walk loaded the bases with no outs for the Brewers. The game had gone from nice, smooth Opening Day win to the tying run being on base and the winning run being at the plate. It’s not an exaggeration to think if the Brewers took the lead against Williams and went on to win that it would end up being the worst loss of the season.

Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Williams got a sacrifice fly for the first out and then went on to strike out Jackson Chourio and Yelich to end the game, almost as if he was fucking with everyone to that point. After throwing 36 pitches in winter-like weather in the first game of the season, it wouldn’t surprise me if Williams is now down for the rest of this series.

“Love that he didn’t break,” Boone said (as we all know Holmes would have broke last year). “I was getting very uncomfortable to where he was from a pitch count standpoint.”

6. The Volpe we watched in the first two series of 2024 (against Houston and Arizona), and the Volpe we watched in the postseason in October is unlike the Volpe we have seen in roughly 94 percent of his 333 career games. The six-percent Volpe is the Volpe that played on Thursday. He may have only gone 1-for-4, but the one was a home run, and he saw 20 pitches in his four at-bats.

Volpe had an 83 OPS+ in his first two seasons. At 17 percent worse than league average, he is much closer to being a bust at this point than the franchise shortstop the Yankees have made him out to be over the last two years. For Volpe to take that next step, he’s going to need to have a lot more games like he had in Houston and Arizona to open last season and in the postseason and on Thursday.

7. Paul Goldschmidt, wearing No. 48, may as well be the right-handed Anthony Rizzo: a once-great player who became a Yankee in the middle of an obvious decline in abilities. Goldschmidt did his best to honor Rizzo’s 48 in the field by not taking the ball to first himself with Rodon on the mound and at the plate by going for 0-for-4 with two strikeouts in four non-competitive at-bats. Sure, it’s one game, but when you have been in decline for two full seasons as a player and when you have been scarred as a fan by recent organizational belief in Hicks, Josh Donaldson and DJ LeMahieu, it’s hard not to think about Goldschmidt not working out.

8. Goldschmidt wasn’t the only hitless Yankee in the opener. Jazz Chisholm was swinging for the fences like he did in October and Jasson Dominguez went 0-for-3 before being removed for defense late in the game. I understand wanting to get Grisham into games as often as possible to keep him fresh (he picked up a single in his only at at-bat), but is Dominguez going to be removed early in every game the Yankees lead? Based on Cody Bellinger’s comments after the game saying he knew he would be shifting from center to left late, it seems like that is Boone’s plan.

9. Judge and Bellinger both had hits in the game and the duo extended the Yankees’ lead from one to three in the seventh. Ben Rice looked good at the plate (double and walk), Oswaldo Cabrera hit a few balls on the screws and picked up a single. Overall, it was a pleasant first game of the season aside from the first three batters Williams faced in the ninth.

10. It’s annoying there’s no game on Friday for the scheduled day off in the event of an Opening Day rainout. But there’s a game on Saturday and another on Sunday. And another on Tuesday and Wednesday and so on. Yankees baseball is back, and after the way last season ended, the first game of this season and the way it went was needed.

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No Options for Brian Cashman to Evaluate

Yankees general manager met with media yet again to talk about state of pitching staff

It’s weird when a day of spring training goes by and a Yankee isn’t injured. It’s been a weird few days made weirder by Brian Cashman seemingly meeting with the media daily when such occurrences have always been infrequent throughout the year. That’s what happens when your roster is falling apart with two weeks until Opening Day.

“We’ve taken a number of hits in the starting rotation,” Cashman said. “We certainly can’t afford to take too many more.”

“Too many more?” The Yankees can’t afford to take one more. As it stands, either Will Warren or Carlos Carrasco is going to be in the rotation to start the season. One more injury and both of them will be in the rotation.

“Every pitcher is one pitch away,” Cashman said of potential injury. “You certainly hope you can avoid injuries, but injuries are also part of this.”

The free-agent options available aren’t appealing. For the Yankees to think Carlos Carrasco (who has a 5.02 ERA in 547 1/3 innings since the start of 2019) is better than any still-available arm tells you all you need to know about what’s available.

Because Hal Steinbrenner is reluctant to solve his team’s problems with money, if the Yankees are to sign an arm now it will prevent them from trading for an arm actually worth something later. That’s not to say the Yankees shouldn’t be adding to their depth by any means possible right now, it’s just the way it is for the Hal Steinbrenner Yankees. It’s why Cashman said it’s “less likely” the Yankees will add more payroll at the moment. This comes a day after it was reported the Yankees made a franchise record $411.7 million off of ticket and suite revenue last season, including $101.9 million from the postseason alone. The $411.7 million was a 40 percent increase from 2023.

The Yankees’ 2025 payroll is currently the same as it was in 2024 (and actually even a few million fewer). Despite record revenues, the payroll is staying the same, even though ticket prices, concessions, merchandise and advertising costs won’t.

Because the Yankees were planning on Gerrit Cole to pitch on Opening Day, Max Fried’s current schedule doesn’t like up with him being available for Game 1 of 162. Odds are Marcus Stroman is going to get the ball for the first game of the season against the Brewers. (Last April against the Brewers, Stroman blew a 4-0 lead and put 12 baserunners on in four innings.) The same Stroman who showed up to spring training expecting to be traded and who had spent the first day of his spring answering questions about a possible trade and the possibility of him moving to the bullpen. Now it’s likely Stroman will throw the first pitch of the Yankees’ season and the likelihood of him throwing 140 innings and guaranteeing himself $18 million for 2026 grows. All Yankees fans need to be Stroman fans and forget about the possibilty of Stroman being a part of the 2026 roster, the way Cashman forgot about Cole’s elbow issues last season when he brought him back this offseason.

“I think, ultimately, when you get enough distance between episodes,” Cashman said of Cole, “you start to forget a little about things that have happened in the past.”

Only the man who creates the roster would say, think and operate like that, despite age, a decline in strikeout and a decline in velocity serving as reminders for him.

“We’ll evaluate again what we have here,” Cashman said. “We’ll also evaluate what’s available outside camp.”

There’s not much left here. There’s nothing outside camp. The Yankees’ rotation is going to have to stay healthy and stay afloat until July when Gil is expected back and when teams are willing to move reliable starters.

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Yankees’ Actual Offseason or Juan Soto for 2025?

For at least this season, the Yankees may be better off without Juan Soto

On New Year’s Day, I wrote the following:

Since Juan Soto left for Queens, the Yankees have made themselves into a better team. That’s not to say losing Soto doesn’t suck or that he would have prevented them from being a better team (the Steinbrenners would have prevented the Yankees from being a better team with Soto because they would have been reluctant to add more to their payroll). But the Yankees now have a deeper rotation with the signing of Max Fried. They have a stronger bullpen with the trade for Devin Williams and re-signing of Jonathan Loaisiga, and they are much better defensively with Aaron Judge back in right field, Cody Bellinger now in either center or left, Paul Goldschmidt at first base and Jazz Chisholm back to second base.

On Tuesday, Michael Kay posed a question asking if the Yankees are better off for 2025 with the roster they built following Soto’s signing with the Mets given the litany of injuries that have decimated their roster. The answer is an obvious yes.

Of course I wanted Soto back. I would have given him $100 million per year. I would have given him ownership stake. Who cares? It’s not my money. Long term, Soto is the right decision every time, whether he gains 50 pounds and becomes a full-time designated hitter or not. But for 2025, not having Soto and having the depth (as shallow as that depth is) they created is more important.

With Soto, there’s no Bellinger. There’s likely no Williams. There’s probably no Goldschmidt. (There’s still no third baseman, since apparently fielding an everyday player at every position wasn’t an option for this season.) Yes, Soto, who represents a Top 3 bat in the game would be there, but the defense (which is now a necessity) would be worse, the game’s best closer wouldn’t be on the roster and DJ LeMahieu (who’s unsurprisingly injured) or Ben Rice would be expected to be the team’s first baseman. But most importantly, with Soto, there’s no Fried.

No Fried. No Gerrit Cole. No Luis Gil for at least three months. That makes Carlos Rodon the team’s No. 1 starter. That makes Clarke Schmidt the No. 2. That makes Marcus Stroman (who three weeks ago arrived at spring training assuming a trade was imminent) the No. 3. The 4 and 5? A combination of Carlos Carrasco and Will Warren.

Rodon has made 30-plus starts in two of his 10 seasons, Schmidt is 29 with one season of more than 16 starts in the majors to his name, Stroman pitched to a 5.88 ERA and put 131 baserunners on in 75 innings over his final 16 starts last season, Carrasco has a 5.02 ERA in 547 1/3 innings since the start of 2019 and Warren put 44 baserunners on in 22 2/3 innings with a 10.32 ERA last season.

The same gambles for 2025 of needing Austin Wells to build on his rookie season, Anthony Volpe to build anything, Jasson Dominguez to become an important bat who could catch routine fly balls and one of Oswaldo Cabrera or Oswald Peraza to be close to league average as an every third baseman would exist if Soto were here. But the defense would be worse. The rotation would be a laughingstock and the bullpen would be weaker.

With Soto, the Yankees would still have the greatest offensive duo since Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris with he and Judge. But with Soto and no one else from this offseason, the Yankees would be closer to being the Angels teams of the Mike Trout/Shohei Ohtani era than they would a postseason team in 2025. (Again, the question was asked about 2025 only.)

I completed the five stages of grief when it comes to Soto no longer being a Yankee a couple months ago. It took me a couple of weeks to move through the first (denial) and second (anger) steps, but I was only briefly in the third (bargaining) and fourth (depression) steps. Acceptance (the fifth step) is where I remain, and seeing what the Yankees’ roster has become this spring and knowing what it would look like if the offseason had been Soto and nothing else has only made the acceptance grow.

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Same Old Yankees

An abundance of expected injuries has thinned out the trustworthy portion of the Yankees’ roster.

“Just dealing with some crankiness,” Aaron Boone said rather nonchalantly about Aaron Judge on Feb. 18, 2020. “I guess a little soreness in the shoulder.”

That was the start of spring training five years ago.

“I feel like it’s a pretty minor thing,” Boone said of Judge back then. “Probably in the next couple days, start ramping him back up.”

Judge showed up to spring training with a nagging injury from the past season.

“We did put him through a battery of tests,” Boone said. “He had the MRI.”

“It was kind of what his shoulder has always been,” Boone said in regard to the MRI results, which made it seem like Judge’s shoulder hasn’t always been in the best of conditions.

“It probably started a couple weeks ago, when I first got down here,” Judge said. “I’ve been hitting since early November, and working out since early November. Once I got down here, hit on the field, hitting outside I just felt a little soreness up in the shoulder.

“Nothing alarming, nothing that I was like, ‘Hey, we need to really check this out,” Judge continued. “So I said, ‘We got plenty of time going into spring training. Let’s take it slow these next couple days, make sure everything’s right, and then kind of go from there.”

“I don’t anticipate it will delay the start of the season,” Boone said. “We will treat it very conservatively.”

Not even two weeks later on March 1, Boone told YES that Judge is going through “testing” to find out why his shoulder is still bothering him. The injury Boone described as “minor” and the one Judge thought didn’t need to be checked out had not progressed in 12 days.

Two days later, Brian Cashman referred to the injury as “pec area” after it had originally been called a shoulder injury.

“They are optimistic that it’s a muscle, but it’s premature,” Cashman said. “I know he feels much better and optimistic.”

Later that week, Boone said the injury “shows signs of healing” even though no one seemed to know if it was a shoulder injury or pec injury or muscle injury.

“I wouldn’t say [surgery] is off the table,” Boone said about the unknown injury, but you wouldn’t want to go to that right now especially if the bone is healing.”

Suddenly, it was bone-related.

Finally, two weeks later on March 20, the Yankees announced that in addition to Judge dealing with a fractured rib, he was also suffering from a collapsed lung. It took 31 days from Judge’s shoulder “crankiness” for the Yankees to announce a complete diagnosis.

Judge suffered the injuries diving for a ball in September 2019 and somehow it went undiagnosed for six months. This came after the ‘Next Man Up’ season of 2019 when the Yankees completely overhauled their entire medical and training staff. Here we are five years later and not much has changed with injuries still being handled and diagnosed with Google searches and WebMD visits.

On top of the odd approach to diagnosing and treating injuries, the Yankees’ continued lack of care for creating depth on their roster has compounded the issue that has been a staple of Cashman’s roster building for a decade.

It’s unfortunate Giancarlo Stanton continues to deal with injuries to both elbows that he dealt with last season, which went untreated from the end of the World Series until the start of spring training. It’s not unfortunate Stanton is injured again, since Cashman himself said a little more than a year ago getting hurt “seems to be part of his game.” But did Cashman prepare for the inevitable Stanton injury? Of course not! Why would he? Why build roster depth and invest in proven major-league talent when you can take a chance on Austin Wells being the hitter he was from the end of April until the end of August and not the hitter he was in March, April, September and October? There’s no need to spend anymore when you can pray Anthony Volpe finally takes a step forward after 1,290 plate appearances. There’s no need to do anything when you’re banking on Paul Goldschmidt to turn back the clock a couple of years, DJ LeMahieu to turn it back five years and for Jasson Dominguez to be a generational talent. (Well, so much for a LeMahieu revival as he was injured more than a week ago and no strategy or timetable for his return have been given.)

“Dealing with it at the end of last year, I thought we were in a good place,” Cashman said of Stanton’s elbow problems. “Three weeks before camp it came up.”

Except it didn’t come up three weeks before camp. It came up last year, like you just said. Guess what else came up last year? An elbow injury to Gerrit Cole that kept him out for the first half of the season.

The Yankees know Cole’s age. They know his decreased strikeout numbers and velocity. They know what they saw on those MRI results a year ago. And they still took him back after he opted out. Maybe the Yankees were always going to take him back if he opted out, or maybe they took him back to keep as many names as they could in their effort to entice Juan Soto to re-sign. No matter the reason, it was a regrettable decision in real time, and now that Cole is going to be out until the middle of the 2026 season, it looks like idiotic.

Last year when Cole went down, Luis Gil won the job to replace him in the rotation. The oft-injured Gil hadn’t pitched in the majors in two years, but was awesome in his first full season at age 26, winning Rookie of the Year (despite leading the league in walks). Between injuries and performance, Gil’s stock would never be higher, so it made sense for everyone to agree putting him in a deal for one year of Kyle Tucker was worth it. The Yankees balked at the Cubs’ ask of Gil and kept him. He’s now hurt and expected to miss half of the season.

“Thankfully, as long we handle it right, we’ll get him back sometime in the summer,” Cashman said of Gil.

Not a whole lot of trust in thinking the Yankees will handle Gil’s lat injury properly. Six years ago, Luis Severino went down with a lat injury in spring training. The Yankees let him start to ramp up before doing an MRI to see how his injury was progressing and he was re-injured. Cashman said in hindsight the team should have imaged Severino again. Apparently, Cashman won’t let that happen again with Gil.

“Being a starter he has minimum of six weeks no throw, Cashman said. “They’ll re-image, re-MRI it during that rest period.”

That’s good. But it’s not all good, as Cashman then decided to get flexible with the six-week no-throw period that has been recited countlessly of late.

“Is it six weeks, is it seven weeks, is it eight weeks?” Cashman asked as if he were playing “How Old Are You Now?” after singing “Happy Birthday”.

“You’re talking about three months you’re not going to see him,” Cashman said. “That’s unfortunate, but that’s also part of the existence of pitching.”

Yes, that is the existence of pitching, and that’s why when you have the opportunity to trade it for a superstar bat in its prime, like Tucker, you do it.

“You can never have enough [pitching],” Cashman said, “and hopefully we have what we need.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say Max Fried, Carlos Rodon, Clarke Schmidt, Marcus Stroman and either Carlos Carrasco or Will Warren isn’t all that you will need. Fried has a history of elbow injuries, Rodon has made 30-plus starts in two of his 10 seasons, Schmidt already had a back issue this spring after missing half of last year with a lat injury, Stroman pitched to a 5.88 ERA and put 131 baserunners on in 75 innings over his last 16 starts last season, Carrasco has a 5.02 ERA in 547 1/3 innings since the start of 2019 and Warren put 44 baserunners on in 22 2/3 innings with a 10.32 ERA last season.

This isn’t pessimism, this is realism. Everything written to this point has been fact, either a quote said by a Yankees employee or a stat produced by a Yankees player. If it paints a dark picture of where the Yankees stand with a little more than two weeks until Opening Day it’s because it is a dark picture. The trustworthy part of the Yankees’ lineup is Aaron Judge, Cody Bellinger and Jazz Chisholm. The trustworthy part of their rotation is less than that. At this rate, Devin Williams and Luke Weaver shouldn’t be allowed to throw another pitch in spring training.

The Yankees’ win total has plummeted from 92.5. to 88.5. Despite all of these issues, I still like the over. Despite all of their issues, I still think this Yankees team is a playoff team. It’s not because I think they still have a well-made roster without Cole for the entire season, without Gil for half of it and without Stanton until who knows when. It’s not because I believe in Volpe’s bat or think Goldschmidt will experience an MVP-like resurgence because he puts on the pinstripes or because I think either Oswaldo Cabrera or Oswald Peraza will become a trusted, everyday major leaguer. No, it’s because the American League isn’t very good.

For years now, the Yankees have operated under the idea of why use our vast financial resources and unrivaled revenue to build the best possible roster when the other 14 teams in the AL aren’t building the best possible rosters they can? The Yankees know they don’t have to be the best team in the AL to consider their season a success. They just have to be better than nine teams in the AL. Even with all of these injuries, they still are.

Good enough to make the playoffs? Yes. Good enough to win the World Series? Not without an inordinate amount of luck. But that’s good enough for the Yankees since that’s what they believe is needed to win in October anyway.

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