1. I have heavily criticized Trent Grisham continuing to bat leadoff in the Yankees lineup, and rightfully so. Grisham is a really bad leadoff hitter. He’s hitting .098/.225/.180 in 72 games as the first batter of the game, and he’s hitting .165/.289/.281 when leading off any inning. He hasn’t led off a game with a hit since July 3 and has led off one game since then with a walk (July 22). There is no metric to support Grisham batting first.
2. On Tuesday, Grisham led off the game with a strikeout. Orioles starter Shane Baz struck out the side in the first and picked up two more Ks in the second. This is what I wrote about Baz before the game:
Baz is as average as it gets as a major-league starter. He’s also the exact pitcher who will hold the Yankees scoreless for six innings because many pitchers like him have done just that this summer.
Baz didn’t hold the Yankees scoreless for six innings, but he did pitch into the seventh and did rack up a season-high 10 strikeouts, the most he’s ever had as an Oriole. But the reason he didn’t throw six scoreless innings is Grisham.
Grisham homered in the third inning as the third batter of the inning and hit a two-run single in the seventh inning as the sixth batter of the inning. Grisham finished the game 2-for-4 and drove in all three Yankees runs.
3. I get that Grisham is batting first in the order right now because he and George Lombard Jr. (and Ben Rice at times) are the only hitters capable of hitting on the team at the moment. But as I have written many times, I analyze the Yankees with the big picture in mind, with the postseason being the big picture . And we all know Grisham will be leading off in the postseason even if the Yankees are at full strength because he did so last postseason and the only thing Aaron Boone hates more than change is change backed by data.
4. Grisham went 2-for-4 with a strikeout on Monday and the rest of the Yankees went 3-for-28 with 13 strikeouts. Rice’s 10th-inning home run on Sunday did nothing to get him going as he went 0-for-3 with a strikeout. Heliot Ramos inexplicably batted third again and went 0-for again, this time going 0-for-3 with a walk and two strikeouts. I was skeptical of the trade for Luis Garcia because while he led the NL in slugging at the time of the deal with an .843 OPS, he had a .709 OPS in his first six seasons in the majors. He has a .608 OPS as a Yankee. Spencer Jones went 1-for-4 with two strikeouts. Boone stayed true to his word that no matter how well Jose Caballero played on Sunday (and he single-handedly allowed the Yankees to avoid a sweep on Sunday), Jazz Chisholm would return as the starting second baseman on Tuesday. Chisholm went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and added an error in the field because he didn’t know to communicate to the umpire where he was positioned. I can’t believe not playing baseball for two days didn’t magically make him good at baseball. Chisholm is down to an 88 OPS+ on the season. Lombard Jr. went 2-for-4 with a strikeout and continues to turn in the most consistent plate appearances on the team despite having played 12 major-league games. Ryan McMahon went 0-for-1 with a walk and a strikeout before being removed from the game and Austin Wells went 0-for-2 before being removed from the game.
5. If a major-league team scores four runs a game for an entire season, they will score 648 runs for the season. Only one American League team fell short of that mark last year: the 102-loss White Sox who finished one run shy at 647. The other 14 AL teams all finished with more than 648. The 92-loss Twins? Yes. The 90-loss Angels? Yes. The 87-loss Orioles? The 86-loss Athletics? Yes and yes. Why did every AL team other than the White Sox average four or more runs per game? Because it’s easy to score four runs per game in the major leagues.
6. The 2026 Yankees are 54-16 when they score at least four runs in a game. That’s a .771 winning percentage. That’s a 125-win pace in the regular season. Do you know how absurd that is? If you gave the Yankees four runs in all 55 of their losses this season, they would have 14 more wins. Fourteen! So if the 2026 Yankees played with the 2025 White Sox offense in their 55 losses this season, they would have a nine-game lead in the AL East. If the Yankees scored just four runs per game since the All-Star break, they would have six more wins and would have a one-game lead in the AL East. I’m not asking this Yankees offense to be great or good or average or slightly below average or moderately below average or severely below average. I’m asking this Yankees offense to just suck and not be historically inept. Just suck and with this pitching staff you’re guaranteed the first wild card and may even prove the division math wrong and pass the Rays. JUST SUCK!
7. But the Yankees’ offense doesn’t just suck and is in fact historically inept. On Tuesday against the Orioles, they failed to score a first-inning run for the 17th straight game. As Katie Sharp let me know, the Yankees’ franchise record is 24 games. So we are a week of first-inning zeros away from another new negative franchise record being set during the Boone era. (Funny enough, the current record is already from the Boone era from July 8, 2021 to August 6, 2021.)
8. The first inning presents the best chance for an offense to score. It’s the only guaranteed inning in a game in which your (supposed) three best hitters will bat in the same inning. But when your three “best” hitters are the worst leadoff hitter in the league in Grisham, swing-at-anything Rice and Jasson Dominguez’s replacement who is much worse than Jasson Dominguez, you get the kind of first-inning scoreless drought the Yankees are experiencing.
9. If the Yankees are going to end the drought on Wednesday, it’s going to come against Chris Bassitt. Bassitt has had a miserable season, and so, he’s the exact starting pitcher the opposition wants to pitch against this Yankees lineup. Would Bassitt pitching into the seventh inning with a lead on Wednesday surprise any Yankees fan? Not this one.
10. Will Warren was removed from the rotation for Carlos Rodon and then immediately added back because of Max Fried landing on the injured list. You would think that would be a wake-up call for the extremely mediocre Warren to turn in his best possible outing of the season against the Orioles. The problem is Warren isn’t very good. There’s a better chance he will ruin the bullpen for the next day than there is that he will shut down the Orioles, but there’s no other option to start. The only option the Yankees have is for their offense to go out and just suck and put up four runs and maybe it will be enough to outdo whatever Warren allows.
Last modified: Aug 19, 2026
