The Yankees’ postseason journey begins tonight, the Bombers facing off against the Red Sox in a rematch of last year’s AL Wild Card Series for their seventh playoff meeting of all time. We’ve got a few more hours to look back at the last week of games, which lets us fit in our final At-Bat of the Week of the regular season. Ryan McMahon earns the nod for powering the offense to victory, 9-2, over the Rays last Wednesday.
We join McMahon with two outs in the bottom of the third. The Rays had just clinched
the division in the previous game, prompting a short-notice switch of starting pitcher to swingman Mason Englert. It is pretty obvious why he has been used in a garbage time role this season, the Yankees jumping out to an early 3-0 lead on a Ben Rice home run to leadoff the first, a McMahon RBI single in the second, and a George Lombard Jr. home run to lead off the third.
Luis García Jr. followed with a single, but Englert struck out the next two batters. However, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and José Caballero kept the inning alive with a single and a walk, respectively, giving McMahon a chance to really blow the game open with the bases loaded.
The holes in McMahon’s swing are multitudinous, but certainly one of them is against the breaking ball below the zone. As such, it is no surprise to see Englert start this AB with a low curveball hoping for a chase.
Despite this pitch bouncing in the dirt just beyond home plate, it still requires a disciplined take from McMahon. Out of Englert’s hand, this pitch looks like a fastball that will tail back across the inside edge of the zone about belt high. However, McMahon reads the spin pretty early on and lets the pitch drop for ball one.
Despite not getting the chase he was looking for, Englert bets that McMahon can’t repeat the feat of a disciplined take if he can execute another curveball like the one he just threw.
This time, the ball almost slips out of Englert’s hand, missing its spot by multiple feet as it lands up and away out of the zone instead of down and in below the zone. The pitch is a ball for the entirety of its journey toward home, making for a stress-free take from McMahon.
Now that he has fallen behind, 2-0, Englert has to come into the zone with a fastball. However, he has options at his disposal with a four-seamer, sinker, and cutter in his arsenal. Englert opts for the high cutter, which makes sense for two reasons. First, the cutter thrown to an opposite-handed batter is much better at limiting damage than the other two fastballs. Second, following a pair of curveballs with a high heater should look like a third straight curveball, which has a chance of fooling McMahon to taking the pitch thinking it will break downward below the zone like the first one he saw.
Englert doesn’t miss the top ledge of the zone by much with this cutter, the pitch landing high by mere inches. It looks like a ball high out of Englert’s hand which explains why McMahon decides early not to swing, the late downward movement landing it much closer to the zone than it initially seems it will.
Englert has now thrown five straight balls if you include the final two pitches he threw to Caballero. With that being the case, the bases loaded, and a 3-0 count, McMahon is in full out take mode.
I don’t care how much of a cookie this four-seamer ends up being, there is no scenario where I want McMahon to be swinging here. Force the pitcher to prove he can throw a strike knowing you’re still in the driver’s seat, 3-1, even if he grooves one.
In this 3-1 count, however, I expect McMahon to be hunting a specific pitch in a specific zone. For him specifically, the bulk of his admittedly limited damage is done against fastballs middle-down.
Wouldn’t you know it, McMahon gets the one pitch he likes to hit the most… and tops it foul at home. I’ll concede this is a pretty nasty sinker with a foot-and-a-half of lateral movement away from McMahon, but surely it’s one he should be putting in play.
McMahon has now lost most of the count leverage he earned himself, going from 3-0 to a full count, the key pitch the sinker he just nubbed foul. He knows Englert still has to attack the zone with fastballs to avoid walking in the Yankees’ fourth run, but also has to contend with the defensive mindset of not being the one to strand the bases loaded.
Englert attempts to punch out McMahon looking on this front door sinker. It’s a doozy of a pitch, starting at McMahon’s front hip before fading 20 inches back across the inner half of the zone. McMahon reads the pitch all the way and does a good job to fight the pitch off foul and keep the AB alive.
After showing McMahon two straight sinkers with wicked arm-side movement, Englert tries to gas a four-seamer by him, a pitch he’s able to throw faster, straighter, and with less downward movement than the sinker.
McMahon sells out for a heater in the same spot as the prior sinker. He starts his swing early, catching this four-seamer out in front which allows him to pull it in the air down the line in right and over the short porch for the third grand slam of his career and the Yankees’ third grand slam in September after hitting none in the preceding five months.
Here’s the full AB:
McMahon just posted the worst full season of his big league career, multiple short IL stints interrupting any chance of establishing a rhythm and culminating in a 78 wRC+ in 124 games. Even worse, his reliably sterling defense at the hot corner regressed by an alarming amount — he had accrued at least six Statcast Outs Above Average at third in each of the last five seasons but was worth zero OAA at third in 2026. It got to the point where the Yankees were scrambling in the final week to get reps at third for Anthony Volpe, who had never played third in the majors and isn’t exactly renowned for his bat either. You wonder whether he played himself out of a starting job in the AL Wild Card Series, particularly with the historic number of lefties the Red Sox can throw at the Yankees. However, the one ace up McMahon’s sleeve is his sneaky aptitude for coming through with clutch hits — more so than many of his teammates this year — and I would not bet against him changing a playoff game with a swing like this.
