1. Vacation is over and so is the vacation from the Thoughts. A vacation that started out with five straight Yankees wins over teams counting down the days until the end of the season fell apart over the weekend against a team the Yankees can’t seem to solve. Even though the Yankees won the last two days, what transpired from Thursday through Saturday negated the run before the Red Sox series and its stench has lingered into the Nationals series.
The Yankees are bullies. They beat the crap out of the league’s worst teams and the moment a team equal to or better than them comes around they run away and hide. Of course they had a 10-run lead over the Nationals until the ninth inning on Monday, the same way they hit nine home runs in a game against the Rays last week and hung 24 runs on the Cardinals the weekend before. That’s who the Yankees are. They are also the team that lost three of four at home to the Red Sox, lost eight straight to the Red Sox prior to Sunday’s win and are 2-8 against the Red Sox on the season. The Yankees are the team that is 6-19 against the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Tigers and Astros.
2. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if the Yankees win five or more games this week against the last-place Nationals and last-place White Sox. I’m expecting the Yankees to do exactly that. That’s what bullies do. I’m also expecting them to then get put in their place like bullies do when they go to Houston next week and follow that up with series against the Blue Jays, Tigers and Red Sox.
3. At this point, the Yankees are going to the playoffs. They lead the Royals by five games in the loss column, the Guardians by six and the Rangers by seven. Those teams aren’t capable of erasing those deficits with a month to play, and the Yankees have 19 games remaining against the Nationals, White Sox, Twins and Orioles to bully their way into the playoffs.
4. It took nearly three full seasons, but Anthony Volpe was finally “benched” earlier this week. It wasn’t a traditional benching since he entered Sunday’s game as a defensive replacement (which is beyond absurd) and was already told he will be back in the lineup on Tuesday. It was a fake benching to give Volpe time to rest as he’s mired in yet another ridiculous slump that has left fans booing him at the plate and in the field. Volpe has one multi-hit game in August and that came on August 1. Since then he’s 8-for-66 and hitting .121/.171/.242. Yes, he has a .414 OPS for nearly a month.
“It’s just been a scuffle offensively here over the past week, 10 days,” Aaron Boone said of Volpe’s performance.
Ah, yes, it’s only been a week to 10 days of no offensive production for Volpe. That must be why he’s at the bottom of every offensive statistic for everyday players in the league since the start of 2023. No other player gets to play every day with numbers like his over the last three years.
Volpe is a .222/.284/.380 hitter in 1,799 career plate appearances with an 84 OPS+. This is who he is. A fake, not-even-two-full-games benching isn’t going to change him from being the worst everyday hitter in baseball to the player the Yankees told us he would be when they passed over the deepest free-agent shortstop class in history for him. He will be back in the lineup now every game and continue to do nothing nearly every game.
5. Volpe has the second-worst batting average (.208) in the majors and is just one point off the lead. Ryan McMahon is third at .216. That’s quite the left side of the infield Brian Cashman has built. At least McMahon makes every single play and then some at third. Recently, Nathaniel Lowe was between the two with the third-worst average in the majors, but after a big weekend against the Yankees, Lowe is now only the fifth-worst hitter in the league. You have to love that a player the Rangers paid to go away and the Red Sox picked up off the scrap heap only so they could stop playing Abraham Toro at first base was responsible for two of the Red Sox’ wins over the weekend.
6. Monday’s win was enjoyable because it was a relaxing blowout win. Cam Schlittler was awesome, the Yankees hit a bunch of home runs and Volpe and Austin Wells didn’t play. What more could you ask for?
Schlittler is my favorite Yankees pitcher because he isn’t out there trying to fool anyone. Everyone knows his fastball is coming and no one is hitting it. In eight starts he has allowed three runs or fewer each time out and he has allowed one run over his last starts 22 1/3 innings with 25 strikeouts.
“It’s just important for me to do my job,” Schlittler said. “I try to get six, seven innings and put the team in a spot to win.”
Boone called Schlittler “a future staple of our rotation.” Umm, he’s in the rotation in the present and hopefully it’s not “your” rotation for much longer (though we all know it will be.)
If the playoffs started next week, he would be my Game 1 starter because even when he doesn’t have his best stuff, he can still get outs. Unfortunately, the Yankees don’t make on-field decisions based on performance. Money owed, name and reputation will always supersede actual results.
7. Max Fried finally looked like himself on Friday and Carlos Rodon finally beat a good team on Sunday. But one start from each doesn’t make me feel better about either. I’m going to need to see it every fifth day for the rest of the season to believe they can win in October, considering the postseason histories for both aren’t exactly glowing.
8. It was just last week Boone was using Yerry De los Santos in the sixth inning of a tie game at home the Yankees would lose because he couldn’t retire a hitter, and then on Monday, Boone used him in a 10-run game and De los Santos couldn’t close that out. I laughed at the people who were upset I complained about De los Santos being used in the spot he was in the series finale against the Twins and I’m laughing at them again. De los Santos is fine as a last or second-to-last relief option. He should have been nowhere near that game last week and his season ERA (which the Boone Fan Club cited as a reason for him being in the Twins series finale) has more than doubled since he ruined the Twins series finale.
9. The best hitter on the Yankees doesn’t get to play every day in Giancarlo Stanton. He’s hitting .306/.383/.638 and is the best he’s been as a Yankee and since his 2017 NL MVP season. And yet, he didn’t play on Monday, didn’t start on Friday or Wednesday and got one at-bat in St. Louis. Stanton not being the designated hitter so Judge can is so perfectly the Boone Yankees. Judge is hitting .210/.380/.403 since coming off the injured list on August 5. In that same time, Stanton is hitting .441/.525/1.029.
Stanton has been hitting and hitting no matter who the opponent is, while Judge went 2-for-14 against the Red Sox and 2-for-9 against the Astros — the only two teams with winning records the Yankees have faced in August. One extra-base hit (a double) for Judge in this seven games. It’s a precursor of what to expect in the playoffs, which is what has always happened in this era in the playoffs: Stanton shows up and Judge doesn’t. When we look back on this era of the Yankees, one that is unlikely to include a championship, we’ll know it wasn’t because of Stanton.
10. MacKenzie Gore gets the ball on Tuesday and while he has been bad in July and August, any starting pitcher with a hint of ability is capable of stopping this Yankees’ offense, especially a left-hander with the ability of Gore who is one of the game’s best when he’s on. Here is what I think Boone will do on Tuesday:
Paul Goldschmidt, 1B
Aaron Judge, DH
Cody Bellinger, CF
Giancarlo Stanton, RF
Ben Rice, C
Amed Rosario, LF
Jazz Chisholm, 2B
Anthony Volpe, SS
Jose Caballero, 3B
It’s another big game for the Yankees as they are tied in the loss column with the Red Sox and need to finish one game ahead of them because of the head-t0-head tiebreaker to avoid playing a best-of-3 on the road in the playoffs. Luis Gil needs to be as good (5 IP, 1 ER) as he was on Thursday because we all know first-half Gore — All-Star Gore — is going to be who the Yankees face or make him out to be.
Last modified: Aug 27, 2025
