New York Yankees v Washington Nationals / G Fiume/GettyImages
The most generous interpretation of Yankees infielder DJ LeMahieu’s struggles can be ascribed to the toe injury that threw off his mechanics and sapped him of his power, lingering from 2022 into 2023 without surgical repair. But a sore foot (fractured again this spring) doesn’t blind your eyes when you’re trying to field a simple ground ball.
Forget the Chicago White Sox. LeMahieu and the Yankees had their own 1962 Mets moment on Tuesday night, long before Clay Holmes took to the mound with a one-run lead, flop-sweated and “unlucking” his way back into the dugout, watching a walk-off grand slam (and his team’s AL East hopes) sail off into the sealed-in Texas night.
After Anthony Volpe’s dramatic, two-out, two-run, should’ve-been-three-run-if-our-third-base-coach-wasn’t-a-fired-Mets-manager single, the Yankees took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning. They didn’t make it one batter before halting their own momentum and giving fans pause, as LeMahieu attempted to field an easy chopper and came up empty.
According to Aaron Boone in the postgame, LeMahieu lost the fairly standard grounder in the lights, which just might be the tweet that ends up framed when this season, hurtling towards disaster, ends catastrophically.
Aaron Boone said DJ LeMahieu lost the ball in the lights on the error.
— Chris Kirschner (@ChrisKirschner) September 4, 2024
Yankees infielder DJ LeMahieu lost game-altering ground ball in the lights vs. Rangers
Sure. Fine. Lost a ground ball in the lights. Got it. Of all the nonsense we’ve been forced to accept this season, this spoonful of apple toilet water actually makes the most logical sense.
Because LeMahieu isn’t a first baseman. And while you might have to start him occasionally (you don’t), you certainly don’t have to keep him in while protecting a lead in the late innings, especially not since Anthony Rizzo returned over the weekend.
Not only did Boone keep his lineup intact, as if Andrew Heaney (ANDREW HEANEY!) were still pitching, but even after LeMahieu clanked the opening grounder, he was left in to finish the frame, despite a pitching change that would’ve saved Boone the embarrassment of yanking his favorite flailing veteran mid-inning.
The defensive alignment left more to be desired moments later when Gleyber Torres, fresh off preventing Corey Seager from coming to the plate Monday as the tying run (he would’ve tied it, he was facing Holmes) with a defensive stab at a hot shot, olé’d a hard Josh Jung grounder that might’ve been a double play with, say, Jose Iglesias manning the position. That is how you turn a 4-1 game into 4-3, and that is how you set Holmes up for a situation where, much like LeMahieu, he was deeply uncomfortable in front of the bright lights.
Once it became a one-run affair, after Torres was pinch run for by Necessary September Call-Up Duke Ellis (he didn’t run at all), the Yankees deployed Oswaldo Cabrera and Anthony Rizzo on the right side of the infield. Of course they did. Both men were surely thankful for the front-row seat to pure, unfiltered incompetence.
