Yankees Limp Into All-Star Break with an Inexplicable Series Loss

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What a deplorable way for the Yankees to close out the pre-All-Star Game portion of the schedule Sunday afternoon, losing that game in that way to the mediocre Cubs.

Talk about turning what should have been a cruise-control win into one of the worst losses of the season, that’s what the Yankees did. They literally said to the Cubs, “Hey, you want this one, you can have it.”

Look, those of you who have been here for a while at Pinstripe People know that I’ve been down on this team all season. I really didn’t like their roster when the year began, even before all the injuries, because it was essentially the same as last year, a team that played .500 ball after the All-Star break, then had to rally to squeak past the Guardians in the divisional round before getting their asses handed to them by the Astros in the ALCS.

Their offense screamed for change, especially since you knew Aaron Judge, healthy or not, wasn’t hitting 62 home runs this season. But they did virtually nothing. The only change to the core lineup was adding rookie Anthony Volpe and if they seriously thought that was going to make a big difference in a division that was going to be vastly improved, Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone are more delusional than I thought.

At least the first scapegoat for this offensive nightmare was identified. The Yankees announced Sunday that hitting coach Dillon Lawson has been fired. Honestly, the real move Cashman should be making is to rid the team of Boone, and then Steinbrenner should dump Cashman, but you know it’s always the underlings that go first. I have nothing to say about Lawson because I know nothing about him except for the fact that under his tutelage and watchful eye the Yankees rank 28th in average (.231), 26th in on-base percentage (.300), and 21st in OPS (.710).

Given how truly horrible the offense has been, coupled with the usual avalanche of injuries that always derail one of baseball’s most fragile teams, it’s somewhat shocking the Yankees are 49-42. However, what has that 49-42 record gotten them? They’re still eight games behind the first-place Rays, even though Tampa Bay just ended a seven-game losing streak Sunday. During the Rays’ first bad week of the season, the Yankees gained almost no ground.

But forget the division because the Yankees aren’t winning it. In the race for the three wild card bids, they’re currently outside the playoff bubble because they have fallen into fourth place in the division behind the Rays, Orioles and Jays, and they’re just one game ahead of last-place Boston. Think about that for a second.

So now they take a few days off before getting back into action Friday when they start a six-game West Coast trip. The first stop is Colorado to play the Rockies who at 34-57 are the third-worst team in MLB. After that it’s on to Los Angeles for three games against the crumbling, Mike Trout-less Angels who are 45-46 and go into the break having lost five in a row and nine out of 10, no matter how great Shohei Ohtani is. And when they come home, they play the woeful Royals who at 26-65 are the second-worst team in MLB at

If ever there’s a chance to kickoff the second half with a little run, this is it. But given what we’ve already seen this year, and knowing that Judge is still not close to a return, is it even wise to get our hopes up?

Remember when former Yankees manager Joe Girardi used to drive us nuts when he repeated the same line, over and over, when things didn’t go well. “It’s not what you want,” Girardi would say. Now, Boone is grating my nerves with his, “We gotta do better” and his fall back, “We gotta get them going.”

Yeah, no shit. They have 71 games remaining to figure things out. Will they do better? Will they get going? I sure have my doubts.

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Here are my observations on the three games against the Cubs.

July 7: Cubs 3, Yankees 0

➤ Welcome to the Yankees, Carlos Rodon, where if you don’t pitch pretty much perfect, you’re probably not winning, and most likely, you’re losing. One night after getting thoroughly embarrassed by the Orioles in a 14-1 loss, the Yankees were just as bad in the opener against Chicago as they managed a whopping two hits, a new season low, and not one runner even touched second base.

➤ Rodon pitched well, 5.1 innings allowing two runs on four hits and two walks, before Boone pulled him at 69 pitches which was expected. Ian Hamilton, Tommy Kahnle and Clay Holmes went unscathed, but Ron Marinaccio struggled again as he gave up the third run, and three runs was way too much for this team to overcome.

➤ This lame offensive performance came against ex-Yankee Jameson Taillon who entered with the worst ERA (6.93) among all starting pitchers in MLB. He’s been awful, but all he needed was to face the Yankees and now he’s spectacularly back on track. Eight shutout innings allowing one hit, that by Gleyber Torres in the first inning. That’s right, no hits and just two walks in his last seven innings. The Yankees could have worn blindfolds and not done any worse.

➤ Taillon is a good guy who was a pretty good Yankee, but he wasn’t worth re-signing as a free agent so he moved on. He didn’t gloat after mystifying his former team, but you know it meant a lot to him. “I just needed an outing like this period,’ he said. “I have a lot of love for those guys over there, so it’s not like I wanted to stick it to ‘em. This wasn’t like any sort of revenge game. But it does feel good on this stage in NYC to have a good night.” He became the 21st starting pitcher to go at least seven innings and allow two earned runs or fewer against the Yankees, most of any team in MLB. The A’s have had it happen the second-most times at 16.

➤ For Christ’s sake, Franchy Cordero was back up from Scranton because Jake Bauers is now on the injured list. I say that, but he had one of the two hits, a single leading off the ninth against closer Adbert Alzolay. Of course he was wiped out on a double play ball by Volpe one pitch later. So much for that heroic rally. “If you score zero runs, I think it’s typically impossible to win,” Kyle Higashioka said.

➤ If the Yankees are thinking about acquiring Cody Bellinger at the trade deadline, he gave them a nice preview. Home run in the third (his swing is tailor made for the short porch), single, stolen base and a run scored in the seventh, walk in the ninth. He did more in this game than the entire Yankee lineup.

➤ Anthony Rizzo has now gone 38 games without hitting a home run. By game’s end, three players - including the absolutely useless Giancarlo Stanton - were hitting sub-.200 and the highest batting average in the lineup was Harrison Bader at .259. Best part of this game: It took only two hours, 15 minutes. I hope everyone took their Luis Severino bobbleheads that were passed out and just chucked them in the garbage.

➤ Granted, the Cubs haven’t played too often at Yankee Stadium, but believe it or not, this win was their first ever in the Bronx. The Yankees swept the Cubs in the 1932 and 1938 World Series, and since interleague play began the Yankees had won all eight games.

BOX SCORE

July 8: Yankees 6, Cubs 3

➤ Hey, Stanton showed a little life, finally. He hit a massive home run that hit off the facade of the upper deck in left in the first, then added a cheap (but they all count!) two-run porch job that clanged off the foul pole in right in the fifth. It was Stanton’s first two-homer game since May 12, 2022 against the White Sox. Imagine that for a slugger like him.

➤ Stanton has been pretty lousy for more than a year now. Last year, from May 22 to the end of the season (74 games) he hit a laughable .158 with a .266 on-base percentage, 20 homers and 43 RBI. This year, he’s hitting .208 with a .278 OBP, 9 homers and 23 RBI. It’s amazing how non-productive he’s been so we can only hope this is the start of one of his occasional hot streaks because to this point he has failed miserably in helping pick up the slack for the absence of Judge.

➤ Gerrit Cole was excellent. It’s too bad he threw a lousy changeup in the eighth that ex-Yankee Mike Tauchman hit for a two-run homer, but otherwise, Cole did exactly what an ace is supposed to do. With the team on a three-game losing streak, he righted the ship, at least for one day.

➤ Josh Donaldson hit his 10th home run of the year, but it was just his 14th hit. No player in MLB history has ever reached 10 homers with fewer hits, so congrats to him, I guess.

➤ Bader had another big hit, a two-run single in the third that stretched the Yankees lead to 4-1. Bader is hitting .289 with runners in scoring position and that’s a key reason why he has 30 RBI in just 147 plate appearances. By comparison, Stanton’s 23 RBI have come in 158 plate appearances, and LeMahieu has 27 RBIs in 301 PA’s. It used to be that you wanted LeMahieu at the plate in a big spot, but he’s hitting .233 with RISP.

BOX SCORE

July 9: Cubs 7, Yankees 4

➤ I have run out of words to describe my irritation with Boone. He just continues to make stupid decision after stupid decision and he costs the Yankees games. Domingo German was dominating the Cubs for six innings. He gave up a home run to Seiya Suzuki in the fifth and that was it. The All-Star break is on the horizon so there’s plenty of time for German to rest up, but what does Boone do? At 74 pitches, after a leadoff walk in the seventh, he pulls him. Why? Tell me, why did that have to happen? So he could bring in Ian Hamilton, as if he was gonna be a better option? And if you had it in mind to pull him, why not just do it after six and give Hamilton a fresh start? But Dillon Lawson is the guy that gets fired.

➤ Boone said he wanted to get German out of the game “on a high note heading into the second half.” Jesus Christ, are these players that mentally weak that they need protection like that? I’m just so tired of it.

➤ Now, even with that moronic decision, and the fact that Hamilton promptly gave up a one-out single to Bellinger, Boone should have been off the hook. But it wouldn’t be a series if Torres didn’t make at least one boneheaded play and here it was. He booted an easy double play grounder which, rather than end the inning, loaded the bases, and of course all three runs ended up scoring because Kahnle finally had his first hiccup of the season. One run scored on a fielders’ choice and the other two on a bloop two-run pinch single by Yan Gomes. Just a ridiculous half inning for the Yankees.

➤ For some reason, Boone still has faith in Marinaccio even though he has not been reliable lately. So in he comes for the eighth, he faced three batters and all three reached - single by Tauchman and two walks. Now it was Holmes’ turn and he gave up a sacrifice fly and threw a wild pitch to put the Cubs up 6-4. The game was as good as over at that point.

➤ In the ninth, the Cubs scored a run on Nick Ramirez, and then the so-called meat of the order - Stanton, Rizzo and Bader went 1-2-3 on seven pitches to end the game. Again, you walk away from this loss wondering how the hell did that just happen? This game should have been put away so easily after Volpe hit a two-run homer and Higashioka went back-to-back for the 4-1 lead in the sixth. Instead, they lose the game and the series to the Cubs for God’s sake.

BOX SCORE

 ➤ July 9, 2011: Throughout his iconic 20-year career with the Yankees, the one thing you just came to expect from Derek Jeter was that when the moment arrived, he would rise up and meet it. They didn’t call him Captain Clutch for nothing, and all you have to do to understand why he deserved that moniker was to pore through all the huge postseason hits he delivered.

As for personal milestones, Jeter was never really into any of that. He was all about the team, all about winning, and not just games, but championships. But on this day 12 years ago, Jeter rose to the occasion with a monumental milestone in reach and in true Jeter fashion, he knocked it out of the park. Literally.

When Jeter crushed a breaking ball off Tampa Bay’s David Price in the fourth inning, sending it over the fence in left-center at sold out Yankee Stadium, he became the 28th player in MLB history to reach 3,000 career hits, the 11th player to reach that plateau with one team, and the first Yankee to do it. And he joined former teammate Wade Boggs as the only players at the time whose 3,000th hit was a home run, though another teammate, Alex Rodriguez, joined them in 2015 when he homered for his 3,000th hit, too.

“Hitting a home run was the last thing I was thinking about,” Jeter said. “It’s something I will remember for the rest of my life.”

Oh, but the 37-year-old Jeter wasn’t done. He would ultimately go 5-for-5 in the game - just the third five-hit game of his career - and it was his RBI single in the eighth inning that pushed across the winning run in New York’s 5-4 victory. Man, this guy was just built for the big stage.

Here’s a video of all five hits:

“It would have been really, really awkward to be out there doing interviews and waving to the crowd if we would have lost,” Jeter said. “If we didn’t win, it definitely would have put a damper on things.”

That was Jeter; always team first.

By the time his career ended, all 3,465 of his hits came in pinstripes and only Stan Musial hit more for one team, 3,630 with the Cardinals.