1. The Yankees are the best team in the American League, but they didn’t play like the best team in the AL from mid-June to mid-August and it cost them the division. During those two months, they lost series to the Angels, Reds, Mets, Marlins, Rangers and Astros and went 1-6 against the Red Sox and 1-6 against the Blue Jays. They kept DJ LeMahieu on the roster and played him at second base over Jazz Chisholm, let Devin Williams blow games at a 2024 Clay Holmes-like pace and allowed Anthony Volpe to play every day as arguably the worst everyday hitter in the league for a third straight year. That’s why the Yankees lost the division, not because of anything that happened on Sunday.
The Yankees have no one to blame other than themselves for having to play a best-of-3 against their worst possible matchup this week. Not the Rays, who sat their three best hitters in Game 162 on Sunday with the Yankees needing them to win to win the division. Not the Tigers, who sat their best players as well with the Yankees needing them to win to avoid the Red Sox. The Yankees did this to themselves when they started the season 2-8 against the Red Sox and when they got swept in a four-game series in Toronto during the first week of July.
Even though the Blue Jays kept the Yankees in the division race until the last game of the season, and even though the Tigers had a chance to win the second wild card over the Red Sox, in the end, it’s Yankees-Red Sox, the scenario we all figured it would be for the last nearly three months. The worst-case scenario.
2. If the Yankees had to play the Red Sox in a best-of-5, my confidence would be much greater than it is now. If they had to play them in a best-of-7, my confidence would be through the roof. But in a three-game series? I don’t know if there is any measurable confidence in this situation.
That’s not because the Yankees are an inferior team. Quite the opposite. When they’re not beating themselves, the Yankees are a much better team than the Red Sox, especially with Rafael Devers in San Francisco and Roman Anthony on the injured list. The difference is the Red Sox have Garrett Crochet and the Yankees don’t.
3. Crochet made four starts this season against the Yankees and the Red Sox won all of them. In 27 1/3 innings against the Yankees, Crochet allowed just four walks to 39 strikeouts. The Yankees hit .200/.231/.370 against him for a .601 OPS. J.C. Escarra had a .629 OPS this season, so Crochet turned the Yankees collectively into a worse hitter than Escarra.
If Crochet goes out and dominates the Yankees like he just did the Blue Jays in his final start of the season with eight scoreless innings, the Yankees will face elimination in Game 2 with Carlos Rodon pitching for their season. Rodon may have had a great year, leading the league in hits per nine innings with a measly 6.1, but I have seen enough Rodon over three years to know I don’t want him on the mound with the season on the line.
4. Enter, Max Fried. Fried was signed to win the exact game he will start on Tuesday, and he has to be as good as Crochet on Tuesday for as long as Crochet. Rob Refsnyder and Connor Wong can’t be hitting doubles down the left-field line against Fried. He has to be at his absolute best to avoid needing to trust the emotionally-unstable-on-the-mound Rodon to save the season on Wednesday.
5. Two weeks ago, the Yankees lost to Crochet at Fenway Park, and in that game, Aaron Boone had Austin Slater bat leadoff. Slater repaid him by going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. Slater is 3-for-25 with a .240 OPS as a Yankee. He’s not a major-league player, let alone someone who should be on the postseason roster or playing in a postseason game. In Crochet’s other starts, Jasson Dominguez, DJ LeMahieu, Oswald Peraza and Pablo Reyes started games. The former doesn’t get to play anymore and the latter three aren’t even on the team. But it’s not like the Yankees’ regulars hit Crochet. No one hits Crochet.
After looking at every Yankees individual plate appearances against Crochet this season, this is the lineup I believe would give them the best chance to win on Tuesday:
Amed Rosario, LF
Aaron Judge, RF
Cody Bellinger, CF
Giancarlo Stanton, DH
Anthony Volpe, SS
Jose Caballero, 3B
Ben Rice, 1B
Jazz Chisholm, 2B
Austin Wells, C
This lineup may seem insane because I’m stacking three lefties in a row at the bottom of the order against Crochet, which sets up a magnificent lane for him to get outs, but the disparity in numbers for righties against him and lefties is so great that you need all righties at the top to get them the most at-bats possible. (Righties have a .654 OPS against him and lefties have a .455 OPS against him.) Get the righties as many at-bats against him as you can, and then remove them as you see fit. Trent Grisham for Rosario when a righty comes in. Ryan McMahon for Caballero or Volpe when a righty comes in. Paul Goldschmidt for Rice for defense when Rice is guaranteed to not have another at-bat.
I’m willing to bat three lefties in order against Crochet because Rice has never struck out in eight at-bats against him and has a double. Seven groundouts in eight at-bats with a double and no strikeouts is impressive against Crochet. Maybe Chisholm can work a walk and use his legs or go the other way for a single and not think he’s going to plant one in the second deck off Crochet? And Wells has a home run and double off Crochet, so the ability to get to him is there.
I realize the Yankees would never use this lineup. It makes too much sense for an organization and front office that started Kevin Brown in Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS and used Deivi Garcia as an opener and J.A. Happ as a bulk reliever n Game 2 of the 2022 ALDS. Instead, Boone will bat Goldschmidt at the top of the order (despite the narrative Goldschmidt hits lefties well being untrue for months now) and use lefty-right alternation throughout the bottom half and Crochet will carve them up just like he did twice in June, once in August and once in September.
6. There are two ways to beat Crochet: multi-run home runs or working the count. The first is extremely hard to count on, but Crochet can be prone to the long ball. Run into a three-run home and you can win Game 1. Try to string together walks and singles and you will be playing for your season on Wednesday. Because planning for or counting on home runs isn’t wise, the Yankees’ best course of action is to tire Crochet, get his pitch count up and hope he’s out after six innings. Crochet had a 3.55 ERA in September, which was his highest ERA for a month this season and after leading the league in innings and strikeouts, there has to be some level of fatigue involved. Here are Crochet’s innings by season:
2021: 54.1
2022: 0
2023: 12.2
2024: 146.0
2025: 205.1
That’s quite the year-over-year jump since he missed all of 2022 due to injury. This is the farthest into a season Crochet has ever pitched and this will be the biggest game he has ever pitched. He wouldn’t be the first all-world starter to poop his pants in his first taste of the postseason.
7. Fried knows a lot about pooping his pants in the postseason with a 5.10 ERA in 67 postseason innings. His postseason history was my single-biggest when the Yankees signed him. I hope he’s past it. He knows what to expect on Tuesday, having pitched (and pitched well) in a World Series clincher. The moment won’t be too big for him, and if he’s locating, he should have no problem going through the weak Red Sox lineup.
8. The Yankees lineup producing in the postseason is what keeps me up at night. No matter what happens during the regular season, the entirety of the Yankees’ season each year hinges on whether or not the bats will be there in October.
The dynastic Yankees of the late-‘90s and 2000s won in the postseason because their stars remained stars in October. When the 163rd game came, there was no drop-off in production despite only facing the top teams and elite pitching each game. Look at these regular season vs. postseason career numbers.
Derek Jeter regular season: .310/.377/.440
Derek Jeter postseason: .308/.374/.465
Bernie Williams regular season: .297/.381/.477
Bernie Williams postseason: .275/.371/.480
Paul O’Neill regular season: .288/.363/.470
Paul O’Neill postseason: .284/.363/.465
That hasn’t happened with this Yankees core. When October comes, these Yankees have always disappeared, and Aaron Judge has been as big of a problem as anyone.
Aaron Judge regular season: .288/.406/.604
Aaron Judge postseason: .205/.318/.450
Judge has the home run record. He has the captaincy. He has the long-term contract and life-changing, generational wealth. The only thing missing is a championship. Unfortunately, he’s not the only Yankee whose postseason OPS is nowhere near their regular-season OPS, and not in a good way as the only two Yankees who have a higher postseason OPS than regular-season OPS are Stanton and Volpe. They are the two hitters on the Yankees I trust most going into the postseason because Stanton always shows up and Volpe will do enough to make everyone think 2026 will be his year and then he will go on to post a .680 OPS while playing every day next season.
9. Then there’s the managerial mismatch between Boone and Alex Cora. Boone is 1-4 in the postseason against Cora and after being worried about Crochet pitching against the 2025 Yankees like 2009 Cliff Lee and the Yankees’ offense performing their annual postseason disappearing act, I’m most worried about Boone and what he’s capable of in the postseason.
Boone has been exceptionally bad in the bad postseason. In his first postseason in 2018, in the pivotal Game 3 at home, his starting pitcher didn’t know the start time of the game. In that same game, he let that starting pitcher go back out for a third inning despite giving up piss missiles all over the place in the first two innings. By the time he decided to make a pitching change, the Yankees were down 3-0 and the bases were loaded with no outs. Despite having a stable of strikeout arms in his bullpen, he went to a starter with mediocre strikeout ability and it ended in the Yankees suffering their most lopsided home postseason loss in franchise history.
The following night, facing elimination, he let CC Sabathia face the entire Red Sox lineup a second time because he liked the matchup of Sabathia against Jackie Bradley Jr., who was batting ninth. The Yankees were eliminated.
The next October, he used Happ in relief in extra innings in Game 2 of the ALCS. Carlos Correa walked off the Yankees and the Yankees went 1-4 over the final five games of the series.
In 2020, there was the Garcia-Happ debacle in the ALDS.
In 2021, he led the odds-on favorite in the AL to a third-place finish in the division and a fifth-place finish in the AL. Their postseason lasted nine innings (and really just a half-inning of those nine thanks to Gerrit Cole).
In 2022, he changed his starting shortstop daily, somehow made Clarke Schmidt the first guy out of the bullpen in Game 1 of the ALCS, kept batting Josh Donaldson fifth and eventually used video from the 2004 Yankees’ ALCS collapse to motivate his own Yankees team.
Last year, his decision to have Nestor Cortes face Freddie Freeman will be part of postseason promos and lore for as long as baseball is played.
The Boone Yankees are 22-23 in the postseason. His Yankees have never won a series against a non-AL Central team. A lot of it is because of the offense’s annual disappearing act, but Boone hasn’t done anything to elevate the chances of his previous six postseason teams. If anything, he has hindered their chances of winning.
I like to say the Yankees need to outhit their own manager to win games to prevent him from having an impact on close games. That’s not possible in the playoffs where games are low scoring and close. Every decision Boone makes from the moment he starts to fill out his lineup card until the final out of each postseason game is crucial, and he has been incapable of handling the pressure that comes with making many consecutive correct decisions, which is what it takes to win in October.
I want nothing more than for the Yankees to win and for Boone to win. I don’t want to sit through another end-of-the-season press conference with him telling everyone how close the team is and how sweet it’s going to be once they do win it all. “The top of the mountain” as he likes to say. Just win for the first time in his eight-year tenure and the first time in 15 years for the franchise, so I can stop dreaming about the day he’s no longer employed by the team.
10. The only way for Boone and every Yankee other than Bellinger and Fried to do what they have never done is to now do what they couldn’t do over the last six months: beat the Red Sox and Blue Jays. The reason the Yankees are playing their first postseason game on Tuesday instead of Saturday is because they couldn’t beat the Red Sox and Blue Jays. They’re only guaranteed Tuesday and Wednesday as of now. To get to Saturday they’ll have to make the best of the worst-case scenario they created for themselves.
Last modified: Sep 29, 2025
