NEW YORK — In the eighth inning of Tuesday night’s 5-3 victory over the Colorado Rockies, with the Yankees leading by two runs and the Rockies running out of outs, Jazz Chisholm Jr. pushed for an extra base. He singled to right field and kept going toward second, but as his hand reached the bag, his right thumb caught Ezequiel Tovar’s cleat.
The Yankees won the game. By Wednesday morning, the cost of that slide was clear.
New York placed Chisholm on the 10-day injured list with a sprained right thumb, an injury that will require at least seven to 10 days without baseball activity, the team said. Manager Aaron Boone confirmed the extent of the injury Wednesday after imaging results were reviewed. In a corresponding move, the Yankees recalled Anthony Volpe from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, with the infielder scheduled to rejoin the team Thursday.
The loss of Chisholm could not come at a worse time. He had been the best hitter in the Yankees lineup over the past month, the kind of reliable producer that makes a manager’s decisions straightforward. Without him, the AL East race becomes a more complicated proposition for the Yankees, who have spent much of the year patching together production from a roster that never quite looked healthy all at once.
“The imaging confirmed a sprain,” Boone said Wednesday. “He’s going to need seven to ten days with no baseball activity. We’re going to miss him.”
The timeline creates a specific and painful gap. Chisholm becomes eligible to return no sooner than September 19, which means the Yankees will need to win games in October’s shadow without one of the players who got them there.
He did. Since returning to Triple-A, Volpe posted 11 home runs and a .906 OPS across 37 games. In September alone, before Thursday’s recall, he was hitting .440 with a .533 on-base percentage, numbers that earned him International League Player of the Week honors on the strength of a .524 average, three home runs and six RBIs in his last six games.
YES Network reporter Jack Curry broke the news Wednesday night: when Chisholm is formally placed on the IL, Volpe will be the callup.
Boone confirmed he is comfortable with Volpe at second base. The infielder has logged 19 games at the position for Scranton, repositioning himself from shortstop to fill exactly this kind of gap when it came.
None of this would surprise anyone who watched the Yankees navigate the trade deadline in July with a roster already stretched by injuries. At that point, Aaron Judge had been playing through discomfort for weeks and the infield depth was being tested in ways the front office had not anticipated. The deadline came and went with additions that addressed some of those questions and left others unanswered. The answer to one of them is now named Anthony Volpe.
The broader postseason picture this September is defined by what teams are working without. On the same day the Yankees placed Chisholm on the IL, the Los Angeles Dodgers confirmed that Shohei Ohtani had been placed on the 15-day injured list with knee and biceps concerns. In Houston, Jose Altuve reached 2,500 career hits — a milestone that reminds you September carries weight in both directions. Across both leagues, contenders are discovering which of their absences hurt most.
For the Yankees, Chisholm’s matters a great deal. He was the infielder who gave this lineup unpredictability, whose speed created runs beyond what raw power numbers suggested, whose energy in the clubhouse was visible in the win-loss column. The 2026 baseball season has been defined, for teams like the Yankees, by who is still standing in September. Right now they need Volpe to hold the fort.
Whether he can is the only question that matters through the end of this month. The Triple-A numbers suggest a player who rebuilt something after a difficult summer. The major league environment will test whether what he rebuilt holds up. Boone said Wednesday he believes it will.
Chisholm was available to pinch run in Tuesday’s game even after the injury. The thumb simply did not cooperate with what baseball requires of it. He will wait, and the Yankees will find out what they have in a player who had to go down to Triple-A to remember why he was called up in the first place.
