Yankees have had too many defensive lapses in Toronto, and everywhere else, this season

The problem with the Yankees’ organization is it generally looks at the kind of game that occurred Wednesday night in Toronto as some kind of outlier.

The Yankees kicked the ball all over Eastern Canada in an 8-4 loss to the Blue Jays,  committing four errors. That gave them a remarkable seven in the three-game series loss and an even more remarkable 11 in the seven games they played at Rogers Centre this season.

The Yankees went 1-6 in those games. And they were fortunate to pick up Tuesday night’s 5-4 victory, in which Ben Rice’s ninth-inning homer provided cover for yet another error — this one by struggling shortstop Anthony Volpe in the sixth inning — that helped the Blue Jays score two unearned runs to pull even at 4-4.

Sure, no big-league team — the Rockies might be the rare exception — is truly that bad in the field, and the Yankees, despite their ham-handedness in the last three games and in a handful of others this season, certainly aren’t.

And for the most part, Aaron Boone wasn’t wrong when he said “we’ve got really good defenders” after Wednesday’s butcher-bowl.

But he went off the rails a bit when, multiple times in the same postgame news conference, he suggested that his club’s defensive issues during this stretch in which the Yankees have lost 21 of 35 games somehow were exclusive to the Rogers Centre. As if the grounds crew there strategically peppered the turf with pebbles and banana peels before each half-inning the Yankees went on defense.

“I think it’s here and I think it’s in this building we haven’t played well,” Boone said.

Yes, the Yankees had an inordinate amount of errors at Rogers Centre, but the bigger-picture issue remains: They have had far too many innings this season that resembled  the calamitous fifth inning of last year's Game 5 against the Dodgers in the World Series. That was when they committed two errors — and an unofficial third one when Gerrit Cole failed to cover first base — in flushing a 5-0 lead en route to a season-ending 7-6 defeat.

Much was made of some Dodgers players — though no player of real consequence — uttering some kick-dirt-on-their-grave comments in the aftermath about the Yankees.

Reliever Joe Kelly led the way, saying, among other things, during an appearance on the Baseball Isn’t Boring podcast: “We were saying every single game, ‘Just let them throw the ball to the infield. They can’t make a play.’ . . . It’s well-known. We all knew. I mean we’re the Dodgers, we know every little detail.”

Kelly’s gracelessness in victory aside, he voiced an element of his team’s scouting report on the Yankees.

But while that part of the Dodgers’ advanced scouting received the attention it did, it was just as much an aspect of the reports that Royals scouts put together before the Division Series and the ones Guardians scouts filed before the ALCS. It wasn’t just the Dodgers who “knew every little detail” in that respect.

The synopsis: put the ball in play, see what happens.

“Absolutely, that was a big part,” one Royals insider said.

Added a Guardians talent evaluator: “Really not much of a secret. We all were saying pretty much the same thing. Put it in play.”

The Yankees’ organization, almost always defensive about its defense and its lack of emphasis on it at all levels in recent years, did go about trying to upgrade that side of the ball last winter. They brought in players such as Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger — both Gold Glovers — not to mention Max Fried, a three-time Gold Glove-winning pitcher.

“Definitely better defensively than last year,” one National League talent evaluator said. “Good? I wouldn’t say that. Like a lot of teams, there’s just no consistency with some of the basic fundamental stuff.”

Volpe, a Gold Glover his rookie year in 2023, leads the American League with 13 errors and, because of his simultaneous struggles at the plate, is taking many of the arrows for the Yankees’ play of late.

But as a second NL scout said, “third base is just a mess” (the reason the club has been looking for a better option there since the beginning of last offseason) and “[Jasson] Dominguez isn’t good enough out there [in left] yet, but it is better than the spring.”

That, to this point, is where the Yankees are defensively. Better than last year.

But not good enough.

Maybe the trade deadline will fix some of that.

Maybe not.

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.