1. Another year, another team celebrating eliminating the Yankees at Yankee Stadium in some form. In 2022, the Astros won the American League pennant on the Yankee Stadium field. In 2024, the Dodgers won the World Series on the Yankee Stadium field. In 2025, the Blue Jays won the ALDS on the Yankee Stadium field. And on Tuesday, the Rays won the AL East on the Yankee Stadium field.
2. After losing the second game of Tuesday’s doubleheader, Aaron Boone was asked by Meredith Marakovits about losing the division to the Rays at Yankee Stadium and Boone was prepared with an answer since he answers the same question nearly every season.
“We wanted to push it off if we could,” Boone said. “They’ve put together a fantastic regular season to earn that.”
When the Rays bunted to squeeze in the second run in the division-clinching win, I couldn’t help but think about how many championships the Yankees would have if Kevin Cash had been their manager all these years. Two? Three? It’s certainly more than the zero they have won under Boone.
After the loss, the Yankees’ website put up the headline: ‘No East? No sweat: Yanks focused with Wild Card Series home-field clinched’ because not only are the manager and his team comfortable with losing, but so is the editorial side of the franchise.
3. “It kind of sucks,” Jazz Chisholm said. “That’s what we work on all season, but it’s not the end goal for us. The end goal is the World Series, so it doesn’t really affect us here.”
Actually, it does affect you. Because instead of having 10 days off between Wednesday and Saturday, Oct. 3 to rest anyone who needs it (like the Rays now have) and avoiding an entire postseason round, you have to play a best-of-3 beginning in six days against the Red Sox. And if you are fortunate enough to survive that round for a second straight season, you get to travel to Tampa to play at a venue where you rarely win and against a team you rarely beat. But yeah, it doesn’t affect you.
4. “You don’t want anyone to be celebrating at your stadium,” Max Fried said, even though all Fried has known as a Yankee is other teams celebrating at their stadium.
Fried wasn’t good, but it didn’t matter because the offense was worse. Drew Rasmussen no-hit the Yankees through six innings in what is likely a preview of what he’ll do to them in 10 days if they get a chance to play the Rays again. Cash let Rasmussen throw a career-high 114 pitches because he wanted to close out the division and not leave anything open to chance over the remaining five games. I can’t say the manager of the Yankees would have done the same thing if the roles were reversed and the Yankees were trying to clinch the No. 1 seed, a bye and home-field advantage throughout the AL playoffs.
But the roles weren’t reversed and the Yankees have now officially not won the division in six of nine seasons under Boone. It’s not nearly good enough for fans who expect more, though it’s clearly good enough for an organization that believes just getting to October is good enough, even if 40 percent of the league gets to October.
5. Why haven’t I mentioned the day game that the Yankees won? Because who cares? The entire offense was a two-run Cody Bellinger home run and Carlos Rodon was awesome again and will be rewarded by not getting to start a game in the Wild Card Series despite being more deserving of both Fried and Gerrit Cole. You could probably count on one hand the positive things I have written about Rodon in his four seasons as a Yankee (and you would likely have a couple of fingers left over), so for me to be advocating for him to start a postseason game despite a career of poor postseason performances, you know he’s deserving of it. (It will have to be Game 1 or 2 of the ALDS for Rodon, if the Yankees get there.)
6. Will they get there? Who knows. They are without their two biggest power threats, have a lefty-heavy lineup that is about to face nearly all left-handed pitchers from the Red Sox, have one starter you can truly count on, a bullpen that is running on fumes, the same old shitty defense and the same old shitty manager. The Red Sox aren’t any good (they went 32-46 then 32-5 then 20-22) and needed an all-time, six-week run to save their season, and I’m sure their fans don’t feel confident about a team that has been mediocre the last six weeks, but it’s the shortest of series and anything can happen. The Yankees lost three-game series this season to the Athletics, Angels, Reds, Tigers, Twins and Cardinals. At 8 p.m. on Tuesday both teams will be excited about the start of the postseason, and by the end of the night, one team will be on the brink of elimination.
The next five days represent meaningless games. The Yankees’ only goal between now and the end of the regular season is to not suffer another injury to anyone. Pull Bellinger and Ben Rice early from games since those two will represent the entirety of the Yankees’ offense next week, limit innings for starters and don’t let Brent Headrick, Paul Blackburn or David Bednar pitch more than once.
7. The Yankees will carry 14 position players and 12 pitchers for the Wild Card Series and these are likely the names at the moment:
- Austin Wells
- Ali Sanchez
- Ben Rice
- Luis Garcia
- Paul Goldschmidt
- Jazz Chisholm
- George Lombard Jr.
- Anthony Volpe
- Jose Caballero
- Cody Bellinger
- Spencer Jones
- Heliot Ramos
- Amed Rosario
- Ryan McMahon/Trent Grisham
- Cam Schlittler
- Gerrit Cole
- Max Fried
- Carlos Rodon
- Will Warren
- David Bednar
- Brent Headrick
- Paul Blackburn
- John Schreiber
- Tim Hill
- Clarke Schmidt
- Michael Fulmer/Ryan Weathers/Carlos Lagrange
I don’t care if Grisham doesn’t play before the postseason begins, I’m taking him over McMahon, who isn’t a major leaguer and should no longer be a Yankee. The $16 million owed to him next season is a sunk cost. Move on.
The bullpen is trickier. If Weathers is healthy, put him on the roster. If Lagrange gets a chance in the last five games and knows where the ball is going, put him on. The goal needs to be to get Fulmer out of the equation as a possibility because if he’s on the roster, Boone will use him. There’s nothing Boone loves more than using someone who has no business pitching in an enormous spot in said spot. He went to Lance Lynn with the 2018 ALDS on the line. He turned to J.A. Happ for the 10th inning in Game 2 of the 2019 ALCS. There’s the 2020 ALDS Game 2 debacle. His love of Albert Abreu in the final weekend of the 2021 season is why the wild-card game that year was played at Fenway Park. He used Schmidt instead of his closer in Game 3 of the 2022 ALDS (Schmidt got walked off on) and then had Schmidt be the first guy out of the bullpen in a 1-1 game in Game 1 of the 2022 ALCS (Schmidt allowed two home runs to the first three batters he faced). He went to Nestor Cortes, who hadn’t pitched in 37 days, with a WORLD SERIES GAME ON THE LINE. He pulled Fried after 6 1/3 scoreless innings with a 1-0 lead in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series last year for Luke Weaver, who had a 7.36 ERA over the final month of the season. Weaver faced three batters, allowed two runs and didn’t get an out. If you’re on the postseason roster as a pitcher, Boone will have you pitch, and you’re likely going to be put into a situation in which you are unlikely to succeed. That’s why Fulmer needs to be unseated.
8. The Yankees operate under the philosophy that if you continue to get into the postseason year after year, eventually everything will break right and you will win it all. It’s the same philosophy the Dodgers live by. Except the Dodgers won one fake World Series in the first 11 years of this current run. They needed to change managers, trade for Mookie Betts, sign Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani and get Yoshinobu Yamamoto to agree to take less money to go to the West Coast over the East Coast to win a real one. They started winning when they stopped running it back. They started winning when they made changes.
The Yankees don’t believe in change. Not in the front office, not in the dugout and not on the field. They took a team that wasn’t good enough to win the division last year and ran it back, and shockingly, that team wasn’t good enough to win the division this year.
9. “Hopefully, we get another crack at them in the next couple of weeks,” Boone said of losing the division to the Rays.
The 2025 Yankees got beat up all season by the Blue Jays and then got beat up by them in the postseason. The 2026 Yankees are 4-7 against the Rays and it’s possible we’ll see if the same year-over-year roster is good enough to win a round in the actual postseason and not just the Wild Card Series.
But first, they’ll have to win the Wild Card Series. The 2025 Yankees were able to, but they also faced a Red Sox team that had Jarren Duran as its leadoff hitter, a team that gave two of three postseason starts to Brayan Bello and a rookie with a handful of career starts and a team that was without Roman Anthony and didn’t yet have Willson Contreras.
10. I will spend the next five or six days trying to make myself believe this season won’t end exactly like last year’s did (losing in the ALDS) or worse (losing to the Red Sox), and ultimately the same way the last 16 Yankees seasons have ended: without a championship.
Last modified: Sep 23, 2026
