1. The Yankees’ season was supposed to change by 6 p.m. on August 3. Even without Aaron Judge (due to a rib injury), Giancarlo Stanton (due to a ridiculous calf injury that is in its fourth month) and Cody Bellinger (due to a hamstring injury), August 3 was going to be the day the Yankees got a new catcher, added to their bullpen and got a right-handed bat. For weeks, the Yankees were connected to Tarik Skubal and Adley Rutschman, and even the great Mason Miller. But when 6 p.m. came on Monday, the Yankees had added only a right-handed bat (with poor defense) and a left-handed bat (with poor defense). The right-handed bat (Heliot Ramos) crushes left-handed pitching, but can’t hit right-handed pitching, and the left-handed bat (Luis Garcia) crushes right-handed pitching, but can’t hit left-handed pitching, and neither has a position.
2. There was no new catcher when the clock struck 6. The Rays — the team the Yankees have been chasing for essentially three months — got a new catcher. The Red Sox — the team that the Yankees once led by 15 games in the loss column and now lead by one game — got a new catcher.
There was no bullpen help. Despite an abundance of high-end relievers being dealt, the Yankees didn’t add a single arm to their overworked, top-heavy bullpen.
3. The Yankees needed a right-handed bat because Judge is out indefinitely and Stanton heals at a glacial pace. They needed a right-handed bat because Anthony Volpe is no longer a major leaguer and neither is Jasson Dominguez. They needed a right-handed bat because they believed Paul Goldschmidt could withstand a six-month season. They needed a right-handed bat because Amed Rosario isn’t hitting lefties. They needed a right-handed bat because they designated Randal Grichuk for assignment in April after very little playing time. (Grichuk started 0-for-13 as a Yankee then went 6-for-18 with four doubles before being DFA’d. He has an .880 OPS since.) So the Yankees traded their No. 5 and No. 13 prospects for Ramos.
The Yankees didn’t need another left-handed bat, but what they did need was offense, any semblance of major-league offense after scoring 32 runs during their 10-game road trip. You may think 32 runs in 10 games and abysmal, but it’s actually worse than it looks. Nine of the 32 runs came in one game and one of the runs was an automatic runner in extra innings. Not only that, but the Yankees played four extra innings on the trip and scored the automatic runner once. So the Yankees traded for Garcia to give them a quality major-league hitter not named Ben Rice in their current lineup.
Off the field, the deadline was a disaster for the Yankees. On the field, it was worse.
4. After walking 26 batters in 23 starts this season, Cam Schlittler walked five Cardinals in three innings on Monday. He walked the first batter of the game on four pitches and gave up a one-out, two-run home run. He then walked the fourth batter of the game and gave up a line-drive single before getting out of the inning with a double play.
In the second, Schlittler walked the leadoff hitter again and then gave up a run-scoring double on an 0-2 pitch. He walked another hitter, sandwiched between striking out the side.
In the third, Schlittler walked the leadoff hitter for the third straight inning and allowed that run to score on a two-out single. After three innings, nine baserunners and 81 pitches, Schlittler was removed from the game.
The Yankees trailed 6-0 after four innings. Four earned runs against Schlittler and another two from Tim Hill after Hill allowed his latest home run. But the Yankees fought back in the fifth with back-to-back home runs: a two-run home run from Austin Wells and a solo home run from Trent Grisham to make it 6-3.
5. Still trailing 6-3 in the seventh, Ryan McMahon and Jose Caballero went back-to-back to lead off the inning and make it 6-5. Grisham hit a one-out double and Garcia brought him in with a two-run home run to give the Yankees a 7-6 lead. After last year’s post-deadline debacle in Miami, the Yankees were going to have a memorable deadline day performance on the field to make up for the shortcomings in the front office off it.
Except they weren’t. Aaron Boone had Ryan Yarbrough get the final two outs of the seventh when the game was still 6-3. It made sense to pitch Yarbrough with a three-run deficit and let him eat up the final innings if the score remained the same. But when the Yankees took the lead and were six outs away from a win in a game in which they had trailed by six runs, sending Yarbrough out for the eighth to protect the one-run lead should have never been an option. But it was for Boone. In Game 113 with the Rays having already won on the day, Boone tried to steal outs with Yarbrough. Sure enough, Yarbrough allowed a leadoff triple to begin the eighth.
6. Due to recent workloads, even though neither Fernando Cruz, Paul Blackburn, Brent Headrick nor David Bednar had pitched on back-to-back days, Boone stayed away from all of them. The Yankees’ rule that relievers can’t pitch three straight days remains idiotic and unscientific as a way of preventing injuries, but in this instance, Boone wasn’t even following that rule, he was simply not going to his best relievers because he felt they had thrown too much lately. In a winnable game against an inferior opponent, Boone was willing to lose instead of use two of his best four arms. And lose they did. Angel Chivilli relieved Yarbrough and allowed three home runs in the eighth. The Cardinals entered the inning trailing 7-6 and left it leading 13-7. Chivilli was sent down after the game. Good enough to pitch in high leverage at 10:30 p.m. Not good enough to be a Yankee at 11:30 p.m. Just like Max Schuemann was good enough to bat LEADOFF for the Yankees multiple times in the last week and then wasn’t good enough to be a Yankee after the trade for Garcia. Chivilli wasn’t the only one sent down. Volpe was sent down along with Dominguez.
7. It was a bad start for Schlittler, but it was going to end up being a good win against a bad team. Instead, it was undone by a bad manager. Everything about the day was so perfectly the Cashman/Boone Yankees. Cashman didn’t just fail to get any game-changing talent at the deadline, he failed to fulfill the few needs the Yankees absolutely had to address. Needs that exist because of moves he has made. Boone was willing to lose a winnable game and play for tomorrow to protect the arms of impending free agents when it’s unknown if they will even be needed to protect small leads in the coming days.
8. Ben Rice went 0-for-4 and is 4-for-29 with 10 strikeouts since the start of Chicago week. Jazz Chisholm went 0-for-4 and is 4-for-31 with 15 strikeouts since the start of the 10-game road trip. Maybe Chisholm just needs his teammates to remind him again that he’s “the best player in the world.” He only has 49 games remaining to hit 34 home runs and steal 20 bases.
9. The Yankees went 6-4 on the 10-game road trip to Philadelphia and Chicago. I wrote that I would have signed up for 5-5 before the trip started, but once the trip started 3-1, going 5-5 was a disappointment. The Yankees had extra-inning leads in two of the games against the White Sox and had a seventh-inning lead on Saturday against the Cubs and they lost all three games. It could have been an 8-2 or even 9-1 road trip. But much like everything with these Yankees, it was a disappointment. A disappointing road trip, followed by a disappointing deadline, followed by a disappointing game on Monday in what is becoming a disappointing season now that they are four games behind the Rays in the loss column again and just one game up on the Red Sox in the loss column. They had a 15-game lead in the loss column over the Red Sox in late June.
10. It will be Ryan Weathers against Hunter Dobbins on Tuesday. Weathers was outstanding against the Phillies and White Sox. Dobbins is the former Red Sox, who said he hated the Yankees and that his dad was drafted by them, even though his dad wasn’t drafted. The Cardinals are a bad team headed nowhere other than to the offseason after Game 162. They sold at the deadline and have no business winning a series against the Yankees in the Bronx with the Yankees in the middle of a pennant race. But if you haven’t learned by now, and if the road trip, deadline and Monday’s loss weren’t reminders, always be prepared to be disappointed by these Yankees.
Last modified: Aug 4, 2026
