Yankees trusting George Lombard Jr. to play through historic error streak

Six straight games with an error is the kind of streak that gets a veteran benched for a week and a rookie sent back to Scranton for a "mental reset." The Yankees are doing neither with George Lombard Jr., and honestly, good for them. There's something almost quaint about an organization deciding a 21-year-old shortstop is worth the growing pains instead of shipping him out the moment the box score looks embarrassing.

We say this as people who have watched the Yankees, for years, treat player development like a hostage negotiation, always looking for the exit ramp the second things get uncomfortable. This is different. This is a front office choosing to eat the short-term pain of routine ground balls turning into extra-base hits, because they actually believe the long-term payoff is worth it. That's not sentimentality. That's a bet on talent over optics, and in a sport obsessed with instant results, that's rarer than it should be.

None of this means Lombard gets a permanent pass. Six errors in six games is a real problem, not a rounding error, and if it turns into sixteen games the calculus changes. But there's a difference between accountability and panic, and too many organizations, in sports and everywhere else, have forgotten that. Letting a young player work through failure in real time, in front of paying fans and a brutal press corps, takes more nerve than cutting him loose ever would.

If Lombard comes out the other side of this a steadier player, nobody will remember the six-game skid. They'll remember that the Yankees didn't flinch. That's the part of this story worth paying attention to, not the error total.