Alexander Wilson
Seven wins in nine games is a strong start by any measure. The New York Yankees are doing this without Gerrit Cole, without Carlos Rodon, and with a shortstop who is hitting .129. When the rotation is as good as it has been, and when Aaron Judge and Ben Rice are producing at the top of the lineup, a team can absorb a lot of underperformance elsewhere. But the Yankees are not a team built to coast. They are built to compete in October, and October does not forgive the kind of holes that currently exist in three specific spots on this roster.
Ryan McMahon
There is no comfortable way to frame what McMahon has done with the bat through nine games. Two hits in 29 plate appearances. A 31 wRC+, which is 69 percent worse than the average major league hitter. A 37.9% strikeout rate that ranks in the 6th percentile. His past profile shows a player who has never posted an above-average offensive season, but this start has been worse than anything he has produced in a full year.
The stance adjustment was supposed to fix this. The Yankees’ coaching staff spent the entire offseason narrowing McMahon’s base, working with him to improve hip rotation and shorten his path to the ball. For two plate appearances in San Francisco on Opening Night, it looked like it might work. He drove a two-run single through the infield and the early reports were cautiously optimistic.
Since then, the swing has looked tentative, like a player caught between trusting an adjustment and reverting to old habits. Boone acknowledged as much recently, saying McMahon has been “a little in-between, not wanting to chase or make a bad decision.” That self-consciousness is costing him at-bats he should be winning.
His defense, historically his most reliable asset, has also been inconsistent. The glove will correct itself. McMahon is too accomplished defensively for this to persist. The bat is the conversation that has no clear resolution yet.
Ryan Weathers
Weathers is the player I am most conflicted about among this group because the raw material is genuinely impressive and the early struggles are explainable. He needed 88 pitches to record 11 outs in his start against Miami, which is the kind of efficiency problem that gets a pitcher in trouble before the lineup even turns over. His velocity has been up around 98 mph when he is fresh. The problem is that it does not stay there. By the third inning, his fastball settles, his secondary pitches lose their edge, and lineups start catching up to sequences they were overmatched by in the first.
Weathers told reporters after his Marlins start that he has been trying to punch hitters out instead of pitching to contact, which is the exact wrong approach for a pitcher with a 57% ground ball rate who is working behind a Gold Glove-caliber infield. He has the stuff to generate weak contact on the ground. When he is going after strikeouts he does not need, the pitch counts balloon and the game unravels. If Aaron Boone can get him back to trusting his defense, the results will improve. The injury history, four seasons without cracking 100 innings, is the longer-term concern that nobody should pretend does not exist.
Camilo Doval
Doval presents a more nuanced problem than the other two. He struck out the side on 12 pitches in his first appearance of the year and looked like exactly the high-leverage bridge arm the Yankees needed behind the rotation. Since then, he has allowed two runs apiece in consecutive outings, and the command issues that limited him in San Francisco last season have resurfaced at inconvenient moments.
His metrics show a pitcher with legitimate swing-and-miss stuff who has always walked too many batters for extended stretches to be clean. The Yankees knew that. They traded for him because they believed a full offseason of work with their pitching staff could narrow the command gap. Boone has noted that Doval has been facing tough left-handed hitters in his recent appearances, and some of the damage has come from balls catching too much of the plate rather than command breaking down entirely. That distinction matters, but it is still runs.
The Yankees are 7-2 and none of these three situations has cost them games they could not afford to lose. That calculus changes when Rodon and Cole return and the expectations genuinely escalate. By June, McMahon needs to be hitting. Weathers needs to be going deeper into games. Doval needs to be executing in high-leverage situations. The sample is small enough that all three can get there. It just needs to start happening at some point.
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