ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It’s no longer a dark and dingy circus tent. It’s now bright and welcoming like a Ringling Bros. show.
The New York Yankees are back at Tropicana Field for the first time since 2024 after the Tampa Bay Rays played their 2025 season at George M. Steinbrenner Field. Multiple Yankees players and staff members remarked on the brightness inside a stadium that opposing players would always complain about because of how difficult it could sometimes be to see inside.
“I think it looks really good,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.
But the Yankees did not look good Friday. They lost 5-3 to the Rays as the offense continued to flail at the plate. Their batting average has dropped to an appalling .199 through the first 13 games, and they’re continuing to fall short when they need hits in critical spots.
“I don’t think there’s any concern,” Ben Rice said. “We got the team that can take us to where we want to go.”
Here are three takeaways from the Yankees on Friday.
Luis Gil looked more of the same, and that’s not a good thing
A second-inning at-bat against Taylor Walls told the entire story of Luis Gil’s season debut Friday.
Since Walls made his MLB debut in 2021, there are only three hitters who are worse in the batter’s box than Tampa’s shortstop: Austin Hedges, Nick Allen and Martín Maldonado. That means when Walls is hitting, it should be a crime to give him a free base. But that’s what Gil did in the second inning.
A 10-pitch at-bat led to Walls’ getting plunked in the leg. The worst part? Gil was ahead 0-2 in the count, and he could not put him away.
“That was the one that got away from him,” Boone said.
Gil went from having a go-to put-away pitch with his fastball in 2024 to not having one at all last season. In his first start in 2026, it was more of the same from 2025. It’s a problem, and it’s unclear how it will be fixed. Gil’s biggest issue continues to be his lack of command. That was the case in spring training, in his lone start in the minors to begin the season and his start Friday. He had three walks, a hit-by-pitch and a wild pitch across four innings. In the first inning, he got two outs in nine pitches and ended up throwing 32 by the time he walked back to the dugout. He was ahead of Jonathan Aranda 1-2 before walking him and then hung a slider to Yandy Díaz for a two-run home run.
“I think we just needed to do a little better job of being closer to the zone when we had the leverage,” catcher Austin Wells said of Gil.
Gil was one of MLB’s best strikeout arms in 2024, but his fastball velocity has dipped since then, and the effectiveness of his secondary pitches has also decreased. It’s not as simple as just converting him into a reliever when Carlos Rodón and Gerrit Cole return to the rotation. Relievers still have to know where they’re throwing the baseball, and for the past year now, Gil can’t hit his spots.
The clock is ticking on Gil’s future as a starter for the Yankees, and time is quickly running out. He needs to figure it out fast.
Anthony Volpe’s job to lose
Anthony Volpe is ready to begin the biggest step of his recovery from offseason shoulder surgery. He will travel back to New York with the Yankees on Sunday and be examined by team physician Dr. Christopher Ahmad on Monday. If all goes well with Volpe’s examination, he could start a rehab assignment with Double-A Somerset as soon as Tuesday. It’s expected Volpe will require a full spring training’s worth of games (roughly 55 at-bats) before he’s ready for his season debut.
This is a big year for Volpe. For the first time in his career, the Yankees have an adequate shortstop on the roster who could push him for playing time, José Caballero, but Caballero has done nothing through 13 games to indicate he should remain the starting shortstop when Volpe returns to the big leagues. Entering Saturday’s game, Caballero’s OPS was .336, and his defense at shortstop, particularly his throws, has looked shaky.
Anthony Volpe started 154 games at shortstop in 2025, including seven postseason games. (Mark Blinch / Getty Images)
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said Friday he expects Volpe to reclaim his starting shortstop job once he completes his rehab assignment.
“It’s always been the plan, but ultimately it’ll be the manager’s call,” Cashman said.
Volpe has yet to post an OPS over .666 in his major-league career, and his defense took a significant step back in 2025. Another season of underwhelming production, and the noise around his future as the starting shortstop will only grow.
Yankees offense is struggling with ABS
The Yankees’ batters have lost the most Automated Ball-Strike challenges in MLB. They’ve lost 11 of their past 13, including two in Friday’s game.
In the fourth inning with no runners on base, Jazz Chisholm Jr. challenged a strike call in an 0-0 count and lost. Caballero followed Chisholm in the fifth inning and challenged a strike call with no runners on in an 0-0 count. Boone has said numerous times he wants his team to have a deep understanding of leverage, and these challenges were the opposite. The only time challenging these pitches would make sense is if the call is so egregious it’s guaranteed to be overturned.
“Not very good ones,” Boone said of the challenges. “There’s going to be ebbs and flows of that. We’re going to be aggressive at certain times, and that’s razor-thin calls sometimes. There are going to be weeks where it’s not great. There are going to be weeks where you’re killing it. I think there’s going to be a lot of that, especially when you’re talking about razor-thin calls. Probably not great challenges there.”
We’ve already seen how not having challenges late in games could cost the Yankees more opportunities to win. In Sunday’s game against the Miami Marlins, multiple calls in the ninth inning would have been overturned if the Yankees had challenges remaining. Instead, the Yankees lost by one run with runners on first and second base.
“The only way we’re going to learn is if we fail sometimes,” said Ben Rice, who hit a pinch-hit home run in the eighth inning. “So those failures we’ve had so far in terms of understanding what the strike zone is for each guy are going to help us make the adjustments when it starts to matter even more later in the year.”
The Yankees should be one of the best teams at challenging. They chased the fewest pitches out of the strike zone last season, which means they have a good understanding of what they should and should not be swinging at. But one of the more alarming early-season trends for the Yankees, which possibly explains why the offense is struggling, is the Yankees are not swinging at pitches in the strike zone. The Yankees rank among the bottom three in Z-Swing and Z-Contact percentages, which measure swings inside the strike zone. That’s not a winning formula.