NEW YORK - George Lombard Jr. looked every bit like a shortstop the Yankees could trust for the long haul when he first arrived from Triple-A on Aug. 4. For his first week in the big leagues, the 21-year-old made the hard stuff look smooth, covered ground with ease and handled the routine work without a hitch.
Through his first 14 games, he had only one error in 64 chances.
Then the wheels started wobbling.
Lombard committed an error in five straight Yankees games through Wednesday night’s 9-3 win over the Astros, a stretch that has turned a clean early impression into a suddenly messy run at shortstop. Still, manager Aaron Boone isn’t sounding alarmed.
“I don’t expect it to be a thing that continues a lot,” Boone said. “He’s going to make errors at that position.”
The sequence has been unusual, and Boone described some of the mistakes as “funky.” It began Friday against the Blue Jays, when Lombard tracked down a popup in foul territory and dropped it. On Saturday, Miles Straw hit a two-hopper to short, Lombard moved one step to his right and reached down for a backstop stop, but the ball kicked off his glove and his throw to first came too late.
Sunday brought another rough one: Ernie Clement smoked a one-hopper right at him in the fourth inning, and Lombard booted it after holding his glove upward instead of down, a detail highlighted on the YES telecast by analyst Paul O’Neill.
The next night in the Astros game, the error column didn’t get tagged to him, but the play still turned messy. Jose Altuve reached on an infield single when a grounder behind second deflected off Jazz Chisholm’s glove and to Lombard. He scooped it barehanded and fired a one-hop throw to first that got past Paul Goldschmidt, letting Yordan Alvarez move from second to third.
Then Wednesday, the run of miscues reached five straight games when Christian Walker’s four-hopper near second base bounced off the heel of Lombard’s glove in the seventh inning, erasing a 3-2 Yankees lead and tying the game. That became Lombard’s sixth error of the season.
Boone said he’ll talk to Lombard “I’ll pick my spots” about the defense, but the Yankees are not backing away from him. He was back at shortstop Thursday night and hitting fifth.
The bat has held up just fine. Lombard is hitting .265 with two homers and six RBI in his first 19 games, giving the Yankees plenty to keep liking even as the defense has hit a rough patch.
Boone still believes the glove will settle down.
“His work’s great,’ Boone said. “He’s fundamentally very good, so I expect this to be a bump or a little blip on the radar. That’s my hope.”
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