The Yankees split Wednesday’s doubleheader with the Angels, winning the first game 5-2 and losing the second game 8-2.
Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.
1. I don’t know how you bat a player with an OPS of .650 or .668 leadoff and consider your team to be a championship contender, but that’s what Aaron Boone did on Wednesday in the doubleheader against the Angels.
Alex Verdugo and his .660 OPS got the leadoff spot for the first game of the day. Facing the Angels’ Davis Daniel and his 34 1/3 career innings, Verdugo did hit a pair of doubles in the Yankees’ 5-2 win, but no matter how much Boone likely thinks it’s a sign of things to come for Verdugo, it isn’t. It was one game in the rain against a pitcher with rookie status. There won’t be a Davis Daniel in October.
Gleyber Torres and his .668 OPS got the leadoff spot for the second game of the day (with Verdugo inexplicably getting the cleanup spot). Torres went 1-for-4 with a sacrifice fly to drop his OPS to .522 over the last two weeks. As expected, Torres did enough after his benching a few weeks ago and leading up to the trade deadline to make the organization believe he was figuring things out. Since the deadline he was benched for a lack of hustle and continues his season-long trend of being a zero at the plate.
2. Neither of these players deserves to lead off for the New York Yankees. The Yankees’ best leadoff options are Juan Soto and Aaron Judge, but it seems as though Boone would rather tell you one of his starting pitchers sucked before he would move them out of their 2- and 3-spots in the order. If Boone isn’t going to use Juan Soto or Aaron Judge as the leadoff hitter then there’s only one option right now … DJ LeMahieu.
3. Ten days ago, if Hal Steinbrenner was willing to eat the roughly $40 million owed to LeMahieu and the Yankees released him, no one would have criticized the move. After four injury-plagued seasons and this miserable season, the idea the 36-year-old LeMahieu would regain his old form and become even an average hitter again seemed like a thought only Boone could believe. But a lot has changed since July 31 in Philadelphia for LeMahieu and all of it good.
Here are the exit velocities of LeMahieu’s batted balls since July 31.
103.7 mph
98.3 mph
100.1 mph
98.4 mph
95.5 mph
94.9 mph
101.5 mph
101.4 mph
96.2 mph
108.4 mph
102.7 mph
69.7 mph
4. LeMahieu is hitting the ball and hitting it hard. The problem is he is rarely playing.
July 31: 2-for-4, double, home run, 6 RBIs
August 1: No game
August 2: Didn’t play
August 3: Defensive replacement with no plate appearances
August 4: 1-for-4, two RBIs (walk-off single)
August 5: No game
August 6: No game
August 7 first game: Defensive replacement with no plate appearances
August 8 second game: 2-for-4, double, RBI
LeMahieu has only played three games (not including his two defensive replacement appearances without a plate appearance) in the last eight days. If Verdugo or Torres had those exit velocities and LeMahieu’s recent production, they would be given contract extensions.
LeMahieu isn’t playing every day because of how bad he was up until recently, which was fair, but now that he is hitting, he deserves to play. Torres certainly isn’t enough to keep LeMahieu out of the lineup.
5. The Yankees need offense. Recent winning way aside, they are struggling to score runs consistently. On Wednesday afternoon, they got out to a 5-0 lead and then sat on it, but thankfully the Angels couldn’t get the big hit late with runners on to close the gap more than they did. On Wednesday night, they scored two runs against weak Angels pitching. On Sunday, they struggled against Yariel Rodriguez and a mediocre-at-best Blue Jays bullpen. The offense is still very top heavy, and the Yankees should be looking to get as many hots bats into the lineup each day as possible (even if they still don’t believe in the theory of being “hot”). LeMahieu is that bat.
6. Maybe these last few games from LeMahieu are serving as the latest Yankees version of the aging family dog that mostly wanders around aimlessly, goes to the bathroom all over the place, lies around and sleeps nearly the entire day, but every once in a while does something they did when they were younger to make you think for a moment that maybe they are coming around. That could be what’s happening with LeMahieu. It happened at the end with Jorge Posada and CC Sabathia and many others.
The Yankees owe it to themselves to find out. Boone was willing to bat LeMahieu recently when LeMahieu was going as badly as anyone in the majors, and yet, he’s not hitting him there now when LeMahieu is finally hitting. It’s possible (and even likely) LeMahieu is no better a solution at the top of the order than Verdugo or Torres have been, but it’s time to find out. LeMahieu was once one of the best in the league in that spot, which is more than Verdugo or Torres can say, and maybe he can be that again over these next two-plus months. Right now, LeMahieu should be playing every day , and he should be leading off when he plays (until Boone comes to realization that moving Soto and Judge up one spot each is the actual play). Let him play himself out of the lineup again.
“It would be huge if we can keep him going like this,” Boone said, “because obviously that role is there, an important one for us.”
What “role” is Boone talking about? Does he mean a utility/role player role where he plays sparingly at first, second and third and is a late-game defensive replacement? Or does he mean a role where he becomes an everyday player and the team’s leadoff hitter? Unfortunately, I think he meant the former.
7. My dream is that by the postseason LeMahieu has been so good that he is either the everyday second baseman or third baseman with Jazz Chisholm being the other and Torres is on the bench. There would be nothing better than Torres ending his Yankees tenure out of the starting lineup as an impending free agent.
The second part of my dream is for Jasson Dominguez to continue mashing Triple-A pitching, getting a call-up either this month (unlikely) or next month (likely) and hitting major-league pitching the way he did for those eight magical games last summer. That would set up Dominguez to be one of the Yankees’ three starting outfielders, forcing Verdugo to the bench and creating this postseason lineup:
DJ LeMahieu
Juan Soto
Aaron Judge
Austin Wells
Giancarlo Stanton
Jazz Chisholm
Anthony Volpe
Jasson Dominguez
Ben Rice
(Now that’s not the lineup I would create, but it’s the best possible lineup Boone is capable of creating with those nine names.)
8. It will take a lot for this dream to come true. LeMahieu will have to stay healthy and be outstanding. Not just good or great, he will need to be something close to his 2019-20 self for the Yankees to bench Torres permanently. Seven years of moronic mistakes, loafing it, a low Baseball IQ, and lack of hustle every day got Torres benched for not even a full game last week. The Yankees have catered to Torres his entire career (moving LeMahieu off second when Torres couldn’t play short, moving Gio Urshela off third when Torres couldn’t play short, making Chisholm play a position he never had to keep Torres at second) and that’s not going to change now with two months to go as a Yankee. He survived every trade deadline and offseason as a Yankee to this point, has been defended to no end by Brian Cashman and Boone, and was even defended and supported after last week’s half-assed benching.
The same goes for Verdugo. For more than a month he was the worst hitter in the majors and he kept on playing every day. No lack of production was enough to sit Verdugo down, and for a large part of that he hit cleanup. He’s having the worst season of his career as a Yankee and as an impending free agent and that didn’t stop him from batting first and fourth on Wednesday. Like LeMahieu, Dominguez is going to have to be otherworldly for Verdugo to not be hitting in the top half of the lineup come October.
9. I don’t expect my dream to come true. I expect Verdugo to bat leadoff against righties in the postseason and Torres to do the same against lefties. The Yankees would rather not field the best team possible than cause friction in relationships with two players they owe nothing to after this season. (Like these two Clay Holmes will be the closer in October because Boone would rather lose a game than sour his relationship with the impending free agent.)
10. I hope I’m wrong. I hope for the Yankees’ 163rd game of the season, the best nine baseball players are on the field and the best possible lineup using those nine players is what is used. But everything I know about the Yankees, how they operate and how they are currently using players leading up to that 163rd game suggests otherwise.
Last modified: Oct 23, 2024
