NEW YORK — The scouting reports on George Lombard Jr. always started with the glove.
The 21-year-old climbed the Yankees system as a shortstop whose defense was considered big-league ready long before his bat. When he reached the Bronx on Aug. 4, the safe assumption was that his leather would carry him while the offense caught up.
Nineteen days later, the script has flipped in a way almost nobody predicted.
In the Yankees’ 8-3 win over the Toronto Blue Jays on Sunday at Yankee Stadium, Lombard went 2-for-4 and scored two runs, extending a stretch of steady, advanced production at the plate. He beat out an infield single in a decisive sixth inning, raced the bases with purpose and looked every bit the polished hitter the Yankees hoped he would eventually become.
The bat, in other words, has arrived early. It is the defense that has suddenly turned into a question.
Three straight games with an error in the field
Lombard booted a routine grounder in the top of the fourth that should have ended the inning. With runners on first and second and one out, Ernie Clement hit a tailor-made double-play ball right at him. Lombard lost it on the transfer and recorded no outs, leaving the bases loaded instead of sending the Yankees back to the dugout.
Daz Cameron followed with a sacrifice fly that tied the game 2-2 and forced Yankees starter Carlos Rodon to throw an extra dozen pitches to escape the frame. It was the only error either team committed all afternoon, and it was Lombard’s third in three straight games.
For a rookie whose defense was billed as the surest thing about him, that is the first real adversity of his major league career. On the season he now has four errors in 17 games, and the recent run has drawn sharp scrutiny in a market with little patience for repeated lapses at a premium position.
Boone keeps pointing to the bat, not the glove
Manager Aaron Boone has spent the past week praising the part of Lombard’s game that was supposed to lag. Asked about the rookie’s hitting, the Yankees manager did not hedge.
“It’s been excellent,” Boone said. “He’s another guy that’s gotten a lot better on that side of the ball this year. He’s grown a lot as a hitter.”
Boone kept going, describing a hitter who now understands the strike zone and can shape an at-bat to the situation.
“He knows the strike zone. He’s strong and has some power, but I think the hit-ability piece is getting better,” Boone said. “We’ve seen him in a number of situations, kind of just punch one to the right side, where the situation kind of calls for it, too. He’s done a really good job.”
Rodon, who paid the price for the fourth-inning miscue, waved off any blame for the young shortstop.
“Just part of the game,” Rodon said. “He’s made some tremendous plays at short, especially lately. It’s my job to pick him up.”
The bat is carrying Lombard Jr.
The reason the errors have not cost Lombard his spot is simple. He keeps hitting. He is batting .288 with a .755 OPS through 17 games and recorded his fifth multi-hit game Sunday, a pace that outstrips the timeline the Yankees drew up for him.
His work fit neatly with the rest of a suddenly functional lineup. In the second inning, Lombard slashed a leadoff single to the right side and came around to score on Spencer Jones’ RBI double. In the sixth, he beat out a slow roller to third for an infield single, then Jones singled him into scoring position to help spark the three-run rally that put the game away.
Jones, hitting one spot behind Lombard, has enjoyed the front-runner’s speed and said the two keep repeating the same script.
“He told me after he scored, he’s like, ‘Man, I feel like we’ve been doing a lot of that,’ where he gets on base, I hit the ball in the gap and let him run around the bases,” Jones said.
The Yankees have leaned on that middle-of-the-order energy while Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton remain sidelined. Lombard is one of the reasons a battered lineup keeps finding runs.
The number the box score hides on Lombard’s glove
The errors are loud, but one metric argues the alarm is premature. Entering Sunday, Lombard had posted seven defensive runs saved through his first 16 major league games, an elite figure for that sample at shortstop. He also carried a positive 0.9 defensive WAR even with the miscues folded in.
The gap between those advanced marks and three straight box-score errors is the real story of his young career. It suggests the range, hands and arm that made him a top Yankees prospect are still there, and that the recent stumbles are lapses in focus rather than a collapse of ability. Even Sunday, around the error, Lombard flashed two more defensive highlights.
That is the tension the Yankees are weighing. The tools grade out as plus. The results, for three days, did not.
A shortstop the Yankees have searched years to find
He debuted at Yankee Stadium on Aug. 4 against the St. Louis Cardinals, going 1-for-2 with a walk and a solo home run, and hit two homers in his first five games. The start was clean in the field, which is what makes the current stretch stand out.
Lombard represents the latest attempt to settle a position that has churned since Derek Jeter retired. Didi Gregorius, Gleyber Torres, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Oswald Peraza and Anthony Volpe all cycled through without holding it long term. The Yankees optioned Volpe earlier this month and handed the job to Lombard.
The Yankees, 74-56, sit three games behind the first-place Tampa Bay Rays in the American League East and hold the top wild-card spot in the AL. They take Monday off before opening a three-game series against the Houston Astros on Tuesday night. For Lombard, the bat is ahead of schedule and the glove needs to catch up, an inversion of everything the reports promised.
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