Aaron Boone walked into Progressive Field on Wednesday and handed in a lineup card that read like a personal attack on Eric Hubbs. Volpe back at short. Jose Caballero, a middle infielder by trade, jammed into right field. One night after Spencer Jones and Jazz Chisholm Jr. carried a gutsy win in this same building, the manager looked at what was working and decided to keep running Volpe out there at the position he keeps trying to play himself off of.
Hubbs broke the lineup news with the appropriate level of dread.
Then the game started and, of course, the Yankees scored anyway. The bottom half of the order put together exactly the kind of inning the Guardians have built a whole identity around — contact, pressure, nothing fancy, just making the defense make plays. Jazz did Jazz things on the way to a 2-1 lead, pointing both index fingers at the dugout like he's still got Aaron Judge's bat hostage from the Brewers series.
Hubbs riffing that Judge is never seeing his lucky bat again as Chisholm keeps cashing in.
None of which made Hubbs any calmer about the Volpe situation. By the second inning he was already comparing the whole shortstop experiment to a bit from How I Met Your Mother — Ted, a parsnip, a grocery store, a promotion for sheer audacity. The point being: Volpe keeps getting rewarded with starts despite actively auditioning himself out of the lineup, and the brain breaks trying to reconcile it.
The parsnip theory of Yankees roster construction, fully formed.
The Volpe situation at short is like when Ted fucks a woman with a parsnip at the grocery store and gets promoted because that took guts. He is actively playing himself off the roster and continually gets rewarded with starts. My brain is broken.
The frustrating part is that the defense, when it actually shows up, looks like something. Hubbs himself conceded it during the game. But shoving Caballero — a guy whose entire value is up the middle — into right field just to keep Volpe at short is the kind of decision that only makes sense if you've already decided the answer and are working backwards. The Yankees are winning the game in Cleveland. They're also burning a roster spot to prove a point nobody asked them to prove.