Alexander Wilson
Three straight losses. Friday night against the Tampa Bay Rays was another quiet night for a New York Yankees offense that has been productive enough at the top and completely dead from the middle down. Ben Rice came off the bench to deliver a pinch-hit home run and finished the night hitting .342/.490/.763, which is the kind of production that makes everything else in the lineup look even more glaring by comparison. Everyone around him is struggling, and the box score from Friday tells the whole story.
The Jazz Chisholm Problem
The most concerning number on the lineup card is not Randal Grichuk going 0-for-4. Grichuk is a bench piece filling a role nobody expected to carry. The most concerning number belongs to Jazz Chisholm Jr., who is hitting .170/.235/.234 through the first two weeks of what was supposed to be his defining season.
Chisholm is in a contract year. He wants $35 million annually. He posted a 30-30 season in 2025 and made his second All-Star team. The version of him that showed up last year was genuinely exciting and made a real case for the kind of money he is asking for. This version, the one hitting .170 with one walk in 34 plate appearances, is not making that argument.
The power he displayed last season, 31 home runs, has been completely absent. His slugging percentage of .234 is the most alarming number because Chisholm without power is a dramatically less threatening hitter. When he is going well, pitchers cannot afford to challenge him. When he is going badly, as he is now, pitchers challenge him and he either chases or makes weak contact. The strikeout rate and the lack of hard contact are both trending in the wrong direction for a player who needs a strong first half to build toward the payday he is chasing.
Chisholm addressed the slow start directly after Friday’s game, and his explanation was as honest as it was blunt. “It’s cold, it’s literally all it is,” he said. “I’m not using it as an excuse. As soon as the weather heats up, I heat up, that’s what it is. It’s hard to function when you can’t even feel the bat.”
That deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. Chisholm is a player built on explosiveness, bat speed, and timing. Cold weather genuinely affects grip and bat feel in ways that compound over a full game, particularly for hitters whose swing depends on quick-twitch mechanics rather than brute strength. The argument has merit. It also has an expiration date. April does not last forever, and if the weather warms up and the numbers do not follow, the conversation will shift from understandable to genuinely alarming.
None of this means Chisholm cannot turn it around. He is the kind of explosive player who can go on a two-week tear that makes the slow start irrelevant in the rearview mirror. But right now he is part of a bottom half of the lineup that is genuinely one of the worst in baseball.
The Full Picture Below Stanton
Look at what the Yankees are getting from the back end of this order. Caballero went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts Friday, sitting at .125/.186/.150 on the season. Austin Wells went 0-for-3 as well, now hitting .152/.263/.182 with no extra base hits to speak of. Grichuk is at .000/.000/.000 in a role that was never designed to carry lineup weight but is now being exposed because the players above him are not producing either.
Amed Rosario at third base has been the one bright spot in the bottom third, going 2-for-4 Friday and sitting at .300/.348/.700 on the year. His two-homer game against Oakland earlier in the week genuinely changed how Boone has been constructing this lineup, and Friday was another reminder that he is the most reliable bat in the bottom six right now. That is not a sentence anyone expected to write two weeks into the season.
What Has to Change
The Yankees are 8-5. The rotation has been good enough to keep them in every game, and the top of the order with Judge and Stanton has given them enough runs to stay competitive most nights. But that formula has limits. A team that goes one hit against Oakland on Thursday and cannot get production from Chisholm, Caballero, and Wells for any extended stretch is going to lose more games than it should against good pitching.
The best-case scenario is that Chisholm heats up in the next two weeks, Wells gets his timing back, and Volpe’s return around May 1 solves the Caballero situation at shortstop. That would transform this lineup from bottom-heavy liability into something that resembles the best offense in baseball from last year. Until it happens, the Yankees are asking their pitchers to do too much.
More about:New York Yankees
