1. The Yankees beat a team with a winning record! Their 2-1 win over the Guardians on Thursday marked their fourth win of the season against teams better than .500 (though that stat is somewhat misleading since they lost a series to the Athletics in April when the A’s were over .500). The Yankees are the only team in the majors with fewer than eight wins against winning teams.
2. It wasn’t easy. The Yankees produced only five hits (one for extra bases) and two walks in the game. Slade Cecconi started for the Guardians with the third-worst ERA in the American League, and despite Michael Kay and Paul O’Neill spending multiple innings talking about how bad Cecconi has been and how he can’t strike anyone out, Cecconi threw six innings of one-run ball with four strikeouts. Unfortunately, that’s going to be life for the Yankees’ offense without Aaron Judge.
3. Judge is likely to be out for more than two months with a stress fracture in his ribs that the Yankees needed multiple days to diagnose. That’s not anything new for the Yankees when it comes to diagnosing an injury for Judge. Judge punctured a lung in September 2019 and it wasn’t diagnosed properly until spring training in 2020. The Yankees’ offense has gone as Judge has gone for the last decade and now it’s hard to see it going anywhere often without him.
4. The idea Judge is “expected to return this season” inspires very little confidence. The Yankees are batting close to 1.000 in being wrong on injury diagnoses and injury timelines during the Aaron Boone era. It’s why Boone freaked out on reporters asking him about what the latest specialist Judge is expected to see specializes in. It was a bad look for Boone made worse when he had to check with the team’s public relations head, only for the public relations head to say he didn’t know and would have to look into it. Not knowing what the specialist specializes in who your best player — whom you still owe more than $200 million — is going to visit isn’t a big deal. Nothing to see here. Maybe they can start ramping Judge up in a couple of months without re-imaging him like they did Luis Severino in 2019, only to eventually say in hindsight they should have re-imaged Severino before starting his throwing program.
5. The last time Judge missed an extended period of time was during 2023. Judge got hurt at Dodger Stadium on June 3, wasn’t in the lineup the next day and didn’t play again until July 28. The Yankees went 19-23 in his absence. He went on the injured list on pace to challenge his record-setting home run total from the year before. When he came back, his OPS dropped by 113 points and the Yankees went 27-30 and missed the playoffs.
6. These Yankees aren’t going to miss the playoffs, but they may not win the division without Judge for so long. The Yankees’ roster is built under the assumption that Judge won’t just be a superstar, but an otherworldly, once-in-a-generation player. When he’s anything other than the best hitter on the planet, the Yankees are just another team. It’s not a coincidence the Yankees are 11-12 since May 6 and that during that time Judge has a .677 OPS. He’s the single-most important player on the roster.
7. The Yankees as a whole are better equipped to handle life without Judge than they were in the past. They have the best rotation even without Max Fried. That alone is enough to prevent lengthy losing streaks and keep them in nearly every game. But the way they will have to win now will look a lot like it did on Thursday when they eked out two runs and needed a strong starting effort and a shutdown relief effort. The new expected ceiling of runs for the foreseeable future is four. Anything more than that will be a surprise and anything less than that should be expected. But as I wrote last week, the Yankees are dominant when they score four runs. It didn’t show against Cleveland because Cam Schlittler had the worst start of his career and Gerrit Cole was serving up batting practice, but the Yankees are 32-9 when they score four runs. That’s all they need to do: score four runs and have a 78 percent chance of winning.
8. If you thought the Yankees’ lineup was inconsistent and frustratingly bad before, well, you’re about to see a whole other level of it. The lineup went from three hitters to now two (Ben Rice and Cody Bellinger). There’s possibly a third in Paul Goldschmidt until the clock strikes midnight on his turn-back-the-clock production. Efforts like the one Cecconi had on Thursday are going become the norm. A lineup made up of two-thirds of batters who would do anything to have and maintain league-average metrics is going to be less fun to watch than it has been. The Yankees desperately need Giancarlo Stanton and Jasson Dominguez to return and they needed them back yesterday.
9. Ryan Weathers will get his first taste of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry on Friday night. Weathers has only faced three current Red Sox before, and they have all homered off of him. Weathers has allowed five earned runs in two of his last three starts, and that’s not going to cut it ever, let alone without Judge. Weathers needs to be the pitcher who’s capable of dominating like he did two weeks ago against the Rays or something close to that.
10. Former Yankee Sonny Gray goes for the Red Sox. Gray deserves to be booed endlessly. Not for his performance with the Yankees necessarily (which was good in 2017 before being putrid in 2018), but because of how he would assess his horrible performances with the team, always citing “good stuff” no matter how atrocious he was, and for the way he talked about his time with the Yankees this past winter, saying he never wanted to be traded there in 2017, even though he wrote a piece in The Players’ Tribune following the trade stating the opposite. I’m expecting Gray to pitch extremely well on Friday because that’s what ex-Yankees do against their former team. Weathers needs to be just as good, if not better, for the depleted offense.
Last modified: Jun 5, 2026
