NEW YORK — Yankees manager Aaron Boone pulled Ryan McMahon from the lineup on Tuesday and handed the third base job to Amed Rosario. The manager framed it as a matchup call. What followed made the conversation far more complicated than any one night of baseball could have been expected to produce.
Rosario hit two home runs, drove in four runs, and walked the Yankees back from a 3-1 deficit against the Athletics to deliver a 5-3 win. He finished 3-for-3. He was paid $2.5 million to be a utility option. McMahon was paid $16 million to be the Yankees’ everyday third baseman. He is hitting .087.
Tuesday accelerated a question that was already building. It did not create the problem. The problem arrived long before Rosario’s bat made it impossible to ignore.
How bad it has gotten for McMahon
Through the Yankees’ first 10 games, Ryan McMahon owns a .087 batting average, an .087 slugging percentage, and a 31 wRC+, meaning he has been nearly 70 percent worse than the average MLB hitter. His strikeout rate stands at 37.9 percent, ranking in the 6th percentile across all of baseball. His whiff rate falls in the 18th percentile.
He singled in his first at-bat of the season. After that, he went hitless over his next 22 at-bats before collecting another hit against the Miami Marlins on Sunday. The Yankees changed his stance over the offseason, narrowing one of the widest bases in the league to improve his hip rotation and hand path. Through spring training, he hit .170/.200/.277 in 50 plate appearances. The new stance has not yet translated into better results in games that count.
The one thread the Yankees can hold onto is his hard-hit rate, which still sits at 91 percent of his career level. Contact quality, when contact arrives, remains intact. The problem is that contact is arriving far too rarely. A 37.9 percent strikeout rate does not allow a hitter at 11th percentile sprint speed to survive in a major league lineup. McMahon cannot beat out weak grounders. He needs to barrel the ball to have value, and the barrels are not coming.
Before Tuesday’s game, Yankees’ Boone offered some context for his belief that McMahon would turn it around.
“He’s a little bit in-between,” he said. “He doesn’t want to chase or make bad decisions, which is great, but you’ve also got to go up there and let it rip. It’s an early-season scuffle. He’s really talented, has pop, does know the strike zone.”
The chase rate, at 27.9 percent, is slightly better than league average. Boone’s confidence is not empty. But the gap between what McMahon is and what the Yankees are paying for is widening by the day.
Rosario’s performance sharpens the contrast
Before Tuesday, Rosario had seven plate appearances and was hitting .167 with a minus-24 wRC+. His numbers were uninspiring. His role was to serve as a versatile Yankees bench piece while Anthony Volpe remains on the injured list with a shoulder issue and Jose Caballero mans shortstop.
Then Boone sat McMahon and started Rosario at third against the Athletics right-hander Aaron Civale. The matchup reasoning was clear. Civale carries reverse splits for his career, with a .733 OPS against right-handed hitters and a .716 OPS against lefties. McMahon hits from the left side. Rosario also bats left, but at 2-for-23, McMahon’s numbers had moved beyond a matchup conversation.
He at 2-for-23 changes the Yankees calculus regardless of who is pitching.
Rosario validated the decision in a way that no single game should be required to do. His first homer, a 399-foot solo shot off Civale in the second inning, gave the Yankees an early lead. His second, a 414-foot three-run blast off former Yankee Mark Leiter Jr. in the eighth inning, capped a four-run rally that erased a two-run deficit. He had batted against a right-hander, a left-hander, and delivered in both spots.
Rosario is under contract for $2.5 million. McMahon will earn $16 million this season and another $16 million in 2027 under the terms of the deal he carried when the Yankees acquired him.
The contract makes this harder, not easier
The financial structure of McMahon’s deal is the reason this conversation is difficult and also the reason it will move slowly. The Yankees have a documented history of absorbing poor production from expensive veterans rather than cutting their losses. The DJ LeMahieu saga consumed two seasons before the organization finally acknowledged the player was no longer viable at the major league level.
McMahon, unlike LeMahieu, has not yet given the Yankees a peak period to offset the decline. Since he arrived in the Bronx on July 25 of last year, he has hit .192/.304/.302 over 61 games and 214 plate appearances. A near-half season of evidence. His performance away from Coors Field as a Colorado Rockie was also well below average, at .216/.302/.362, which suggests the altitude-adjusted perception of his ability was always stronger than the underlying numbers supported.
His career best offensive season came in 2022, when he posted a 97 wRC+. He has declined in each of the three seasons since. He has never posted an above-average offensive year in nine major league seasons.
The Yankees entered the 2026 season having lost at least some internal urgency around the position after exploring but not executing a platoon arrangement over the offseason. The idea that Rosario could fill a split role was floated. With Volpe injured and Caballero struggling at shortstop, those plans collapsed before they could be tested properly.
What Tuesday changed and what it did not
Boone has not permanently benched McMahon. One game does not a decision make, and the Yankees organization does not make personnel moves on the basis of a single opponent’s reverse splits. McMahon will be back in the lineup. He may produce. If the contact quality his hard-hit metrics suggest is present translates into actual hits, the entire conversation changes quickly.
But Tuesday set a marker. Rosario, a player signed to protect roster depth rather than start 140 games, delivered the Yankees’ biggest offensive performance of the young season. He did it at the position McMahon was acquired to occupy. He did it for a fraction of the salary. And he did it on the same night McMahon sat watching from the dugout.
The Yankees will not panic in April with an 8-2 record and a 3.5-game lead in the AL East. But if McMahon’s numbers do not show meaningful improvement over the next several weeks, the trade deadline conversation will expand beyond starting pitching for the first time in recent memory. Third base is not a position where easy internal fixes exist. George Lombard Jr. profiles as a shortstop prospect. There is no obvious minor league answer at the hot corner.
Brian Cashman made the trade for McMahon. The Yankees made the financial commitment. Tuesday night, for four innings, a $2.5 million utility man outplayed that investment with three at-bats that will not be forgotten quickly. The math, as it stands, does not work. The time to fix it is shortening.
Should the Yankees give up on McMahon? What do you think?
