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Amid the jubilation, exuberance and general madness after Tennessee beat Alabama for the first time in 16 years last Saturday, one man stood in Neyland Stadium waiting on what loomed for him in the aftermath.

Darren Seybold grew up in Alabama. He knew what a life-changing event it was for Vols fans to see their team take down the Tide. So as he stood watching tens of thousands of Tennessee fans storm the field for the first time since 1998, he wasn’t surprised.

“That’s a storied program that has won a lot in the last 12 years. We haven’t,” Seybold said. “Everybody thinks [the big rivalry] is Tennessee-Florida, but it’s really not. It’s Tennessee and Alabama. I’m from there, I know. This was a big win. I mean, first time in 16 years, you knew it was coming right there. You can’t stop it. You just gotta let it go.”

Seybold understood the hysteria. But that doesn’t mean he had to like it. Because as the director of sports surface management for the Vols, this was his work under siege. He has overseen all the playing surfaces for Tennessee athletics, and has spent 12 years in Knoxville, but this was a once-in-a-quarter-century event. The goalposts? Gone, dunked into the Tennessee River. The school was fined $100,000 by the SEC for fans entering the field, which was littered with garbage, a plot of turf meant for 22 players instead mashed by thousands of delirious fans.

Tennessee put out a lighthearted plea for a crowdfunded replacement for the goalposts immediately after the game. But Seybold said he already had it under control thanks to years of watching and talking to other guys in his position of what to expect on Saturday. Turf managers live a behind-the-scenes life, and it’s a close-knit fraternity in the business.

“I probably heard from 90% of the SEC guys,” Seybold said. “The goalposts coming down, you kind of expect it. So we already had a set ready to go. We’ve been bad for so long that we watched a lot of goalposts come down in the 12 years that I’ve been here from afar. You just kind of learn from everybody like, all right, man, this is what you’re in for.”

He said he was flooded with congratulatory texts from across the country. “Then obviously, some were saying like, ‘Dang, man, nobody likes to see grass torn up anywhere,'” Seybold said. “Most of these guys have been through it.”

The celebration scenes dominated social media, but one in particular got the attention of his colleagues. There was a woman ripping up a huge chunk from the Vols’ trademark checkerboard in the end zone at Neyland Stadium. It inspired a fellow field manager at Oklahoma to consider his own reaction, saying, “If this happens to me, I’ll need bail money.”

So how did Seybold pull off a flawless field for a home game against UT-Martin with a noon kickoff Saturday, after it was trashed just a week prior?

“You’re going from the highs of beating Alabama that you hadn’t done in 16 years to playing an [FCS] team,” Seybold said. “But our fan base, buddy, they don’t care if we’re playing a high school.”

Seybold and his staff did it with the whole shed of lawn implements. We’re talking aerators, fertilizers, mowers, blowers and Shop-Vacs to vacuum the grass. A lot of vacuuming grass. Because when Tennessee beats Alabama, there’s a unique challenge after the crowd spills onto the field.

“When you first see all the cigars you’re like, what is all that? They got dropped, but then they got shredded. So we had all this tobacco laying everywhere,” Seybold said of the celebratory cigars the winners of the rivalry always smoke, in a thick Alabama accent. “But between shoes and cigar tubes … we couldn’t get over the amount of clothes. OK, what’d you do, walk out of here nekkid?”

Maybe so, because there was ample evidence that not many of those glass cigar tubes went home on anyone’s person.

Dr. John Sorochan, a distinguished professor of turfgrass science in the Department of Plant Sciences at Tennessee, witnessed the wreckage first-hand. Sorochan, a go-to consultant for the NFL Players Association for inspecting field safety at neutral-site games, like in London, happens to run an esteemed center for athletic field safety on campus in Knoxville, so he went to see the aftermath for himself.

“I went there and I literally picked up seven heaping handfuls of broken glass from the cigar tubes and cigar caps,” Sorochan said. “It was crazy.”

Seybold said his staff — Bryan Ogle, William Barnett, Cain Clifton, Marty Wallace, Brandon Frazier — all went out and walked the field, inch by inch, because a player getting cut was their biggest fear.

“We got six backpack blowers and we blew the entire field off by hand,” Seybold said. “Anytime we found a patch of glass, we’d flag it. Then we came back with Shop-Vacs and sucked up all the glass.”

Besides glass and clothes, there were a few other surprises. Apparently, the Vols are so cool, they wear their sunglasses at night. Well, wore.

“We were amazed,” Seybold said. “I’m telling you, Costa Del Mar, Oakley and Maui Jim. … I guarantee they had a lot of profits in Knoxville this week because we found a lot of ’em just smashed, lenses gone. Every time you pick up a frame, that’s $200. I’m like dang guys, this is adding up quick.”

Sorochan offered up his own surprise.

“They found a whole bottle, a big handle of Buffalo Trace bourbon that was empty,” he said. “Someone got that into the stadium somehow.”

The trash was one thing (the field crew stayed until about 2 a.m. cleaning up garbage). Then the real work started to get the green stuff growing again. His biggest concern was that the field is sand based underneath the turf, so he was worried about how compacted the surface would be by all those fans.

Sorochan has a doctorate, so we’ll let him do the calculations on how many of the 101,915 in attendance that day made their way down.

“It was shoulder to shoulder, and the average person is probably about one and a half square feet,” he said. “So there were probably 50,000 people on the field.”

There was also the matter of the agronomic catastrophe inflicted by fans looking to take home their own souvenir pieces of the field. Seybold said they know who the fan was who was helping herself to pieces of the checkerboard, even if he didn’t want to nark her out to a reporter. Several eBay listings soon popped up, with Neyland grass fetching anywhere from $3 for a few sprigs to more than $100 for one listing with an image of a fan holding up a picture of the grass with the field in the background.

“One thing about Tennessee fans, buddy, you don’t want to get on their wrong side,” Seybold said. “They’ve already found out who she is. Supposedly her answer was she did this in ’98 [when the Vols upset No. 2 Florida]. And that we had extra grass laying around anyway. I guess if that makes you sleep at night, we’ll go with that story.”

He didn’t have it lying around. But he knew who did. Seybold called in Carolina Green, a Charlotte company that specializes in athletic sod and sometimes will re-sod entire NFL fields in the middle of a season.

“It comes in big rolls and one big roll can weigh over 2,000 pounds,” Sorochan said. “But the small area that they patched, that piece will weigh about 80 pounds, maybe 100 pounds, and it’s really thick — probably an inch and three quarter thick piece of sod — and they put it in really tight that even a 300-pound football player running and stomping on it won’t dislodge it or pick it up.”

Sorochan is a grass guy. So he doesn’t see the appeal of taking that specific plot of turf home, getting into the, uh, weeds to explain why.

“It’s Latitude 36 Bermuda grass, overseeded with a perennial ryegrass — a cool-season grass,” Sorochan said. “You could go take it home and grow it, but it’s just Bermuda grass. You could buy it anywhere.”

But we know that doesn’t matter. The grass at Home Depot didn’t come from the same patch of sacred sod where Josh Heupel had just vanquished Nick Saban.

James Bergdoll is the director of park maintenance for the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is the current president of the Sports Field Management Association. He noted that he’s a Purdue grad who didn’t quite understand this level of obsession, coming from Big Ten country. He had sympathy for his fellow field managers across the state.

“It goes to a whole different level down in this part of the country, and it’s wild to see them do that,” Bergdoll said. “They’re seeing this as an opportunity to say, ‘Yeah, man, I was on the field when we beat Alabama for the first time in [16 years] and here’s a piece of the grass that came up from the field.’ You want the team to win and do well but in the end, for the fans to do what they’ve been doing at the cost of all that work that gets put into it, that’s a hard pill to swallow for anybody.”

But the Vols’ field crew made it look seamless. It was a week-long effort. Seybold said he started on the grass on Saturday night, spraying fertilizer.

On Sunday, his crew came back with the blowers to get it clean, then “aerified it, to get as much compaction off it as we could,” Seybold said. They covered the field — they’re called growth blankets in the business — on Monday, because the temperature didn’t get above 36 degrees Tuesday after a cold front moved in. They spent that Tuesday putting in the new goalposts they had painted the day before. On Wednesday, they sprayed more fertilizer, started painting the field and finished up the paint job Thursday. On Saturday, they kicked off at noon, checkerboards intact and a lush, green, glass-free field ready for a 65-24 win over the Skyhawks.

Seybold is fine with a wild week, as long as it happens only every 25 years or so. He said seeing Clemson fans on the field after every game would get old really fast for him. “If we beat UT-Martin and they stormed the field, we’d be like, ‘Come on everybody, what are we doing? Let’s be smart,'” Seybold said. “I’ve been proud of our fans. Six years ago, we beat Florida for the first time in 10 years, then beat them again this year for the first time since then and they didn’t rush it either.”

Now that it’s over, he can exhale. Even if he’s uncomfortable with the attention.

“I don’t want anybody to know my name to be honest,” Seybold said. “If they know my name, there’s a problem. Nobody knows it unless something bad happens.”

And Seybold can be proud that nobody knew his name this weekend.

“You figure, bud, in ’98 and 2022, I mean, that’s what, a 24-year difference?” he said. “We’ll take the $100,000 fine and move on.”

Sorochan doesn’t think there will be a reprise anytime soon because the Vols are back and can expect to win.

“They won’t be rushing the field anymore because it will go back to what it used to be in the heydays of the ’90s and early 2000s,” Sorochan said.

Just like that, the grass is greener at Neyland again.

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‘We had no choice’: Why Delaware felt the pressure to finally jump to FBS

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'We had no choice': Why Delaware felt the pressure to finally jump to FBS

NEWARK, Del. — Russ Crook has a shirt he likes to wear to Delaware football road games. He’s a lifelong fan and the current president of the Blue Hen Touchdown Club, but he knows the jokes, so he picked up the shirt a few years back when he saw it at the historic National 5 & 10 store on Main Street. It’s gray with a map of the state across the chest and the ubiquitous punchline delivered succinctly: “Dela-where?”

Yes, the state is small, though Rhode Island gets the acclaim that comes with being the country’s smallest. In popular culture, Delaware often translates as something of a non-place — cue the “Wayne’s World” GIF — and it’s widely appreciated by outsiders as little more than a 28-mile stretch of I-95 between Maryland and Pennsylvania that hardly warrants mentioning.

It’s a harmless enough stereotype, but Cook is hopeful this football season can start to change some perceptions. After all, in 2025, Delaware — the football program — hits the big time. Or, Conference USA, at least.

“Delaware’s a small state, but the university has 24,000 students,” Crook said. “Many big-time schools are smaller than we are. There’s no reason we can’t do this.”

When the Blue Hens kick off against Delaware State on Aug. 28, they will be, for the first time, an FBS football team, joining Missouri State as first-year members of Conference USA — the 135th and 136th FBS programs.

Longtime Hens fans might not have believed the move was possible even a few years ago, as much for the school’s ethos as the state’s stature. The university’s leadership had spent decades holding firm in the belief that the Hens were best positioned as a big fish in the relatively small ponds of Division II and, later, FCS.

And yet, just as the rest of the college sports world is reeling from an onslaught of change — revenue sharing, the transfer portal, NIL and conference realignment — Delaware decided it was time to join the party.

“Us and Delaware are probably making this move at one of the more difficult times to make the move in history,” said Missouri State AD Patrick Ransdell.

All of which begs the question: Why now?

Many of Delaware’s historic rivals — UMass, App State, Georgia Southern, Old Dominion, James Madison — had already made the leap to FBS, and the Hens’ previous conference, the Colonial, was reeling. Economic conditions at the FCS level made life challenging for administration. The NCAA was making moves to curb future transitions from FCS to FBS, and the school felt its window to make a move was closing.

“We had no choice,” Crook said.

And so, ready or not, the Hens are about to embark on a new era — a chance to prove themselves at a higher level and, perhaps, provide Delaware with a reputation that’s more than a punchline.

“We talk about doing things for the 302 all the time,” interim athletic director Jordan Skolnick said, referencing the area code that serves the entirety of the state. “We want everyone in the state of Delaware to feel the pride in us being successful, and we want people to realize how incredible this place is. It’s not just a place you drive through on 95.”


BACK WHEN MIKE Brey was coaching Delaware’s men’s basketball team to back-to-back tournament appearances in the 1990s, he would often swing by the football offices to talk shop with the Hens’ legendary football coach Tubby Raymond, who won 300 games utilizing a three-back offensive formation dubbed the wing-T. Brey recalls pestering him once about the new spread schemes being run at conference rival New Hampshire by a young coordinator named Chip Kelly. Raymond was a beloved figure at Delaware, and he had helped mentor Brey as a head coach, but he was notoriously old-school.

Raymond huffed, dismissing the tempo offense as “grass basketball,” all style and finesse without the fundamental elements of the game he had coached for decades. The mindset was often pervasive at UD.

“It was in the bricks there,” said Brey, who went on to a 23-year stint coaching at Notre Dame. “Tubby had his kingdom, and nobody was telling him what to do. It was, ‘Leave us alone. We’re good. We’ve got the wing-T.'”

Brey’s contract in those days technically referred to him as a member of the physical education department, and he and his staff had to teach classes during the offseason on basketball skills. Despite Raymond’s retirement in 2001 and an FCS national title in 2003, not much changed. By 2016, when Skolnick arrived to work in the athletic department, a number of coaches were still considered part-time employees, and several programs had to source their own equipment.

But change was brewing.

Old rivals such as App State, Georgia Southern and JMU had left FCS without missing a beat. Delaware had often punched above its weight and churned out genuine stars such as Rich Gannon and Joe Flacco, but the chasm between the haves and have-nots in football was growing. It was clear the Hens needed to invest, though the goal then was to take advantage of the power vacuum among east coast FCS schools.

“I think a lot of people wondered if we’d missed the window,” Skolnick said. “But at that time, the goal was to win as many FCS national championships as we can and resource our teams to be able to compete.”

Delaware football did compete, earning a spot in the FCS playoffs in four of the past six seasons, but another national title eluded the program, and by 2022, with rival James Madison moving up to the Sun Belt, then-AD Chrissi Rawak began to test the waters of a jump to FBS.

The school partnered with consultants who studied the economics of a move, both for the athletic department, which stood to see a $3 to $4 million increase in annual revenue, and for the state, which could enjoy a 50% uptick in economic impact from football alone. Meanwhile, Delaware looked at each FCS school that had made the leap up to FBS in the past 10 years to see how the Hens might stack up. What did Skolnick say the school found? Programs that had already been investing, had a solid recruiting footprint and were committed to football had success.

“We started to check a lot of boxes,” Skolnick said.

There were concerns, of course. The landscape of college football was roiling, and the expense of running a successful program seemed to grow by the day. But the opportunity to generate more revenue was obvious.

In the playoff era, 10 schools have made the leap from FCS to FBS, and nearly all have tasted some level of success. Overall, the group has posted a .548 winning percentage at the FBS level, and seven of the 10 have had seasons with double-digit wins. James Madison, who went from an FCS championship to the Sun Belt in 2022, is 28-9 at the FBS level and enters the 2025 season with legitimate playoff aspirations.

That success, however, is the result of a decades-in-the-making plan, said former JMU athletic director Jeff Bourne. The Dukes kicked the tires on an FBS move as early as 2012 but held steady as the program grew its infrastructure and, when the time came to make a move in 2022, it was ready.

“Before we made that decision, we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could support it financially,” Bourne said. “You had to have the fan base and donor base grow, have our facilities in a place so we could recruit. Looking at it from a broad perspective, it made our move not only prudent but ultimately helped us be successful.”

Off the field, the move has proved equally fortuitous. In JMU’s final year at the FCS level, the athletic department had 4,600 total donors, according to the school. For the 2025 fiscal year, JMU had nearly 11,000. The Dukes have sold out season tickets for three straight years, and high-profile games, including two bowl appearances, have been a boon for admissions.

So, when Conference USA approached Delaware with a formal invitation to join in November 2023, the choice seemed obvious.

“It was pretty clear that, as a flagship institution in our state, we wanted to be aligned with schools that look like us,” Skolnick said. “We want to align our athletic aspirations with our academic ones. Academically we’re one of the best public institutions in the country. Athletically, we’ve had all these incredible moments of success — but they’re moments. They’re spread out. So we felt like this was an opportunity to bring all of it together in a way that will show people — the best way to give people a lens into how special Delaware is, is for our athletic teams to be really successful and create more visibility.”

Brey remembers reading the news of Delaware’s decision to make the jump, and he couldn’t help but think back to his conversations with Raymond nearly 30 years ago. This had been a long time coming, he thought, and yet it still seemed hard to believe.

“I was shocked,” Brey said. “Little old Delaware is finally going for it.”


THERE ARE AMPLE lessons Delaware and Missouri State administrators have learned in the past few months as they’ve worked to ramp up staffing and budgets and add scholarship players for the transition. But if there’s one piece of advice Skolnick would share with other schools considering a similar process, it’s this: Find a time machine.

Delaware announced its intention to jump to FBS in November 2023. Just weeks earlier, the NCAA, in an effort to stem the tide of FCS departures, made changes to the requirements for moving up that, among other things, increased the cost of doing so from $5,000 to $5 million, and Delaware would be the first team to pay it.

That was not a budget line the Blue Hens had accounted for, meaning the school had to raise funds to cover that cost on a tight timeline.

“We had six months to do it,” Skolnick said. “Fortunately, we had people who were really excited about this transition.”

Ransdell took over as AD at Missouri State in August of 2024, just months after the Bears announced their plans to move to Conference USA, and he inherited a budget that wasn’t remotely ready for FBS competition.

“We had to change some things, do some more investing,” he said. “We weren’t really prepared to be an FBS program with the budget I inherited.”

In other words, the buzzword at both schools is the same as it is everywhere in 2025: revenue.

But if budgets have to be stretched with a move up to FBS, there are benefits, too.

Ransdell said Missouri State has sold more season tickets than any year since 2016, buoyed by a home game against SMU on Sept. 13.

Delaware had faced hurdles selling tickets in recent years, thanks in part to a slate of games against opponents its fans hardly recognized. That has changed already, with ample buzz around future home dates with old rivals UConn, Temple and Coastal Carolina. Crook said membership in the booster club is up 10-15% after years of steady declines. This season, Delaware travels to Colorado, and Crook said a caravan of Blue Hens fans will tag along.

On the recruiting trail, Delaware coach Ryan Carty said the conversations are completely different than they were a year ago, and the Hens have been able to add a host of new talent. The Hens’ roster includes 14 transfers from Power 4 programs this year, including Delaware native Noah Matthews, who arrived from Kentucky.

When Matthews was being recruited out of Woodbridge High School, about an hour’s drive down Route 1 through the middle of the state, he never heard from Delaware. It’s not that his home-state school didn’t want him. It’s that, no one on staff believed the Hens had a shot to land a guy with offers in the SEC.

Four years later though, Matthews is back home, and there’s nowhere he would rather be.

“I wanted to come back and show people, this is what Delaware does,” Matthews said. “We can play big-time football, too. After this year, they’ll know exactly who we are.”

For all the hurdles to get their respective programs in a place to compete at the FBS level, the costs are worth it, Ransdell said.

Need proof? Look no further than Sacramento State, a school that has all but begged for an invitation from the Pac-12 or Mountain West, even dangling a supposedly flush NIL fund with more than $35 million raised. And yet, no doors have been opened for the Hornets.

Still, the old guard around Delaware might not be so easily swayed.

Brey has kept a beach house in Delaware since his time coaching in the state, returning the past couple of years to serve as a guest bartender at the popular beach bar The Starboard to raise money for the Blue Hens’ NIL fund. This summer, he was strolling the boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach, chatting with the locals and getting a feel for how fans felt about this new era of Delaware football.

Most were excited, he said, but one — a longtime season-ticket holder — had a different perspective.

“On the first day of fall camp,” the fan told him, “we always knew we could play for a national championship in [FCS]. That’s not possible anymore.”

In other words, Delaware sold its championship aspirations for an admittedly more financially prudent place near the bottom of FBS. And who’s to say FBS football even remains viable as power players in the SEC and Big Ten move ever closer to creating “super leagues?”

“There very well could be a super league,” Bourne said. “There are signs that could happen. But I think when you look at it from the standpoint of your peer group, it’s to be competitive with them. There’s probably going to be a day where there’s a shake-up and you have some existing [power conference] schools that end up being more aligned with [Group of 6] than they are with the upper tier.”

Brey recalls his old friend Bob Hannah, the former Delaware baseball coach who had long been a progressive among the school’s traditionalists, wondering if the Hens might have been a fit in the ACC, had the school just pursued athletics growth in the 1970s and 1980s. The irony, Brey said, is these days, with even power conferences struggling to keep pace with the rapid change and financial strains of modern college sports, that doesn’t seem like such a long shot.

For Skolnick, that’s a worry for another day. Getting Delaware ready for its chance to shine on some of the sport’s biggest stages in 2025 is the priority. Delaware — the school and the state — hasn’t had many of these moments, and it’s an opportunity the Hens don’t want to miss.

“We’ve got to be ready for what we’re moving into, but everyone in college athletics is dealing with change,” Skolnick said. “That part is comforting. It’s more of an opportunity for us to do it our way. We’re too great of a historical and successful and traditional team to not be part of the conversation.”

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Raleigh hits 48th, 49th HRs to set catcher record

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Raleigh hits 48th, 49th HRs to set catcher record

SEATTLE — Mariners slugger Cal Raleigh hit his major league-leading 48th and 49th home runs in Sunday’s 11-4 win over the Athletics, setting a single-season record for catchers and passing Salvador Perez‘s total with the Kansas City Royals in 2021.

Raleigh’s record-breaking home run also marked his ninth multi-home run game of the season, passing Mickey Mantle (eight for the 1961 New York Yankees) for most multi-home run games by a switch-hitter in a season in major league history. The overall record is 11 multi-home run games in a season.

The switch-hitting Raleigh, batting from the right side, homered off Athletics left-handed starter Jacob Lopez in the first inning to make it 2-0 and tie Perez. Raleigh got a fastball down the middle from Lopez and sent it an estimated 448 feet, according to Statcast. It was measured as the longest home run of Raleigh’s career as a right-handed hitter.

In the second inning, Raleigh drilled a changeup from Lopez 412 feet. The longballs were Nos. 39 and 40 on the season for Raleigh while catching this year. He has nine while serving as a designated hitter.

Raleigh went 3-for-5 with 4 RBIs in the win.

Perez hit 15 home runs as a DH in 2021, and 33 at catcher.

Only four other players in big league history have hit at least 40 homers in a season while primarily playing catcher: Johnny Bench (twice), Roy Campanella, Todd Hundley and Mike Piazza (twice). Bench, Campanella and Piazza are Hall of Famers.

Raleigh launched 27 homers in 2022, then 30 in 2023 and 34 last season.

A first-time All-Star at age 28, Raleigh burst onto the national scene when he won the All-Star Home Run Derby in July. He became the first switch-hitter and first catcher to win the title. He is the second Mariners player to take the crown, after three-time winner Ken Griffey Jr.

Raleigh’s homers gave him 106 RBIs on the season. He is the first catcher with consecutive seasons of 100 RBIs since Piazza (1996-2000), and the first American League backstop to accomplish the feat since Thurman Munson (1975-77).

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Yanks bench Volpe for series finale vs. Red Sox

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Yanks bench Volpe for series finale vs. Red Sox

NEW YORK — Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe was benched Sunday night for the finale of a critical four-game series against the rival Boston Red Sox.

Volpe is mired in a 1-for-28 slump and leads the majors with 17 errors. New York started recently acquired utlityman Jose Caballero at shortstop as the team tries to prevent a four-game sweep.

Volpe is hitting .208 with 18 homers and 65 RBIs in 128 games this season. He has started 125 at shortstop and was not in the starting lineup for only the fifth time all year.

“Just scuffling a little bit offensively here over the last 10 days, (and) having Caballero,” manager Aaron Boone explained. “Cabby gives you that real utility presence that can go play anywhere.”

Volpe did not start for the second time in eight days. After going 0-for-9 in the first two games at St. Louis, he sat out the series finale last Sunday.

He went hitless in 10 at-bats over the first three games against the Red Sox. During a 12-1 loss Saturday, he had a sacrifice bunt and committed a throwing error on a grounder by David Hamilton during Boston’s seventh-run ninth inning.

Volpe, 24, batted .249 through his first 69 games. But since June 14, he is hitting .153 — and some Yankees fans have been clamoring for the team to sit him down.

Volpe won a Gold Glove as a rookie in 2023 and hit .209 with 21 homers and 60 RBIs. He batted .243 with 12 homers last season when New York won its first American League pennant since 2009.

In the postseason, Volpe batted .286, including a grand slam in Game 4 of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“I think he handles it quite well,” Boone said about Volpe’s struggles. “I don’t think he’s overly affected by those things. Just a young player that works his tail off and is super competitive and is trying to find that next level in his game offensively. I think he’s mentally very tough and totally wired to handle all of the things that go with being a big leaguer in this city and being a young big leaguer that’s got a lot of expectations on him.”

Acquired from Tampa Bay at the July 31 trade deadline, the speedy Caballero was hitting .320 in 14 games with the Yankees and .235 overall entering Sunday’s game. Besides shortstop, Caballero has started at second base, third base and right field.

New York began the night six games behind first-place Toronto in the AL East and 1 1/2 back of second-place Boston. The Yankees, Red Sox and Mariners are tightly bunched in a race for the three AL wild cards.

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