ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - The Yankees can live with Ryan McMahon’s bat coming and going. What they can’t afford against the Rays is sloppy defense at third base.
That’s where the tension sits as New York gets ready for the AL Division Series opener Saturday at 6:30 p.m. ET at Tropicana Field.
Tampa Bay doesn’t rely on one swing to flip a game. It chips away, bunts, runs, and makes infielders hurry.
That kind of pressure can turn a routine inning into a mess in a hurry, and the Yankees saw a taste of it already when Taylor Walls dropped down a run-scoring bunt single in a 6-1 Rays win at Yankee Stadium in September.
The Rays led the majors with 45 sacrifice bunts, according to MLB’s official team statistics, and they spent the regular season forcing defenders to charge, throw on the run and make plays from awkward angles. That style helped them win seven of 13 meetings with the Yankees and finish 98-64 while taking the AL East. New York, meanwhile, comes into the series after overwhelming Boston in the two-game Wild Card sweep, but Tampa Bay presents a very different test.
Gerrit Cole will start Game 1 for the Yankees against Drew Rasmussen, and the matchup immediately puts the spotlight on the left side of the infield. That’s where McMahon’s recent work has created a real question for Aaron Boone.
McMahon was brought in during 2025 for exactly this kind of role: steady glove, premium defense, and a history of making life easier on the rest of the infield. He entered with four straight Gold Glove finalist nods through 2024, and in his final full season with Colorado, MLB credited him with seven Outs Above Average while Sports Info Solutions gave him 10 Defensive Runs Saved. That version of McMahon fits a series like this one.
But the Yankees haven’t consistently gotten that version lately.
On 10 regular-season bunts directed toward McMahon, he turned seven into outs. The problem is how the misses clustered.
Three of the failures came in his final four chances, and one of those was more on the pitcher than on McMahon himself. The most damaging one came Sept. 20 in Arizona, when Geraldo Perdomo bunted toward the left side with the Yankees leading 3-2 in the sixth.
McMahon got to the ball near the mound but couldn’t finish the transfer, and Arizona ended up loading the bases, tying the game on a sacrifice fly and winning 5-3.
Two days later, Walls punished him again. His seventh-inning bunt single scored Chandler Simpson and helped spark a four-run frame in Tampa Bay’s 6-1 victory.
The broader defensive numbers only sharpen the concern. Baseball Savant had McMahon at zero Outs Above Average at third base in 2026, and his September Fielding Run Value checked in at minus-2 for the month. That’s a sharp drop from the kind of defensive profile that made him such a natural fit for this roster.
His offense hasn’t given Boone much room to ignore the glove, either. McMahon finished the regular season at .213/.279/.357 with 11 homers and 41 RBIs over 124 games, and Statcast showed a .200/.259/.300 line in September with one homer. He did have a big night against Tampa Bay on Sept. 23, driving in five runs with a grand slam in a 9-2 Yankees win, and he went 1-for-4 with an RBI and a walk in the Wild Card Series sweep of Boston.
Boone has already shown he’s willing to move pieces around. Before the postseason, he said Anthony Volpe could get time at third and mentioned Jose Caballero as another possibility.
“Trying to be as flexible as possible,” Boone said Sept. 23. “There’s a lot of different [roster] iterations and ways we could go in the Wild Card Series.”
He followed through on that flexibility. Amed Rosario started at third against left-hander Payton Tolle in Wild Card Game 1, with McMahon entering later. McMahon then returned to the lineup against right-hander Sonny Gray in Game 2.
Rasmussen is a right-hander, which normally would favor McMahon’s left-handed bat. But Tampa Bay’s brand of offense makes that simple logic a little harder to trust. The Rays are built to squeeze extra value out of bunts, ground balls and speed, and that means the Yankees need clean outs more than anything else.
McMahon doesn’t have to carry the lineup. He has to make the routine play, cut off the small-ball damage, and keep innings from unraveling before the middle of the order even gets a chance.
If Boone decides to go in a different direction, it doesn’t have to mean McMahon is off the roster. It could mean a shorter leash, a late defensive replacement, or using Volpe, Caballero or Rosario at third.
The Yankees will set their ALDS roster before Game 1. And against a Rays team that lives on pressure, the decision at third base looms a lot larger than McMahon’s spot in the batting order.
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