Woeful Offense Dooms Yankees

By Sal Maiorana

April 10, 2026

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Sal Maiorana shares his thoughts on the Yankees.

Here is an edited version of Sal's latest article.

For Sal's complete analysis on the New York Yankees, you can subscribe to Sal Maiorana's free Pinstripe People Newsletter at https://salmaiorana.beehiiv.com/subscribe.

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A bad A's pitching staff completely shut down the slumping offense

which so far has the fewest hits in MLB

Well, if you’re looking for me to say anything uplifting about that three-game series against the A’s, I guess it would be that despite losing the final two games thanks to an offense that was abhorrently pathetic, the Yankees are still off to a decent start at 8-4, good enough to lead the Orioles by two games in the AL East, and the Blue Jays and this weekend’s opponent, the Rays, by three.

That’s all I’ve got for you because that was such a miserable, unenjoyable three games, it’s hard to even be happy that they avoided the sweep, even though that’s what they deserved.

Yeah, the Yankees should have lost all three to the A’s. They had one good inning in the entire series when they erupted for four runs in the eighth on Tuesday to turn a 3-1 deficit into a 5-3 victory, the big blow being a three-run homer by Amed Rosario, of all guys. And for that we had former Yankees batting practice pitcher Mark Leiter Jr. to thank as he reminded us how awful it was to have him in the Yankees bullpen for the season and a half he was in the Bronx.

Outside of that outburst, the Yankees had a grand total of three runs on nine hits in the other 25 innings in which they batted including a gruesome stretch from the fourth inning Tuesday to the seventh inning Wednesday when they were shut out on no hits for 11.2 innings.

I can’t even fathom how it was possible for them to be so horrid against a team that came into the series ranking 28th with a 5.51 full staff ERA and an MLB-worst 1.790 WHIP.

It’s obviously a small sample size and way too early to be panicking, but right now this offense stinks. The Yankees are hitting .204 as a team which ranks 28th in MLB, ahead of only the Angels and Mariners. They’re 21st in OPS at .655, and 15th in on-base, and what’s crazy about that is they’ve drawn the fourth-most walks with 60, yet their 78 hits are tied for dead last with Seattle.

Analytics people want to convince you that batting average doesn’t matter, but it does. Yes, on-base, slugging and OPS are more indicative of how a player is performing, but average still tells you plenty and what it tells me about the Yankees is that this team has automatic outs up and down the lineup, and that includes the three-time AL MVP, Aaron Judge, who is off to a lousy start.

Judge is hitting .222 with a .314 on-base, a .758 OPS, and a 28.8% strikeout rate, but the really alarming number is his batted ball hard hit percentage is 46.7%. For comparison, he has been at 58% hard hit or better every year since 2022. Judge has to be a human wrecking ball. If he’s not it’s trouble because there are very few other guys in this lineup that scare anyone.

Trent Grisham has been a disaster in the leadoff spot as he’s hitting .162 with no home runs, and didn’t we all figure that was likely to happen after he had the season of his life in 2025, a complete outlier to the rest of his career? I still say giving him that $22 million qualifying offer was one of the dumbest things Brian Cashman has done in recent years.

We’re now into Austin Wells’ fourth MLB season and nothing has changed - he’s a bad hitter, off to a .167 start with no homers and no RBI. Jazz Chisholm is hitting .186 with no homers; Jose Caballero has completely botched his chance to claim the shortstop job with Anthony Volpe sidelined, hitting .135 with no homers and playing shaky defense thanks to a scattershot arm; and Cody Bellinger is ho-humming with a .238 average including .200 with runners in scoring position.

As for Ryan McMahon, he is in a category all to himself. He’s sitting at .069, 2-for-29 with no homers and a strikeout rate of 39.4%. His at bats make you want to cry, just a clueless dude in the batters’ box who doesn’t seem to have any ability to snap out of it.

The only regulars doing anything are Giancarlo Stanton and Ben Rice. Stanton has a team-high 14 hits and is batting .326, but even that’s underwhelming because 11 of those hits have been singles and he has just one home run.

Rice, who like everyone else in this series was terrible, came out of it still slashing .324/.479/.676 for an OPS of 1.155, ranking top six in MLB in each category which only shows you how scorching hot he was before the A’s came to town.

“We got shut down today,” Aaron Boone said Thursday after watching his team get one-hit. “The previous games where we struggled scoring I felt like we were getting the traffic and were having quality at bats and today was a day we just got beat. We didn't generate much, we didn’t hit a lot of balls on the screws at all, and didn’t create much traffic. We’ll get this thing going, obviously we’ve got a few guys struggling to get on track a little bit and hopefully we can get things going down (in Tampa).”