Yankees' Jazz Chisholm Jr. bounces back from the foulest of foul balls
New York Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. (13) after he hit a home run during the New York Yankees vs the Cincinnati Reds in Bronx, NY, Friday, June 19, 2026 Credit: Ed Murray
Talk about sensitive subject matter.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. did just that late Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after being forced from Thursday night’s game during a fourth-inning at-bat that didn't go well at all. He fouled a baseball off the ground and into, well . . . the second baseman took it from there.
“If you ever got hit in the testicles, you’d know,” said the always-colorful Chisholm, back in the lineup Friday as the Yankees opened a three-game series against the Reds at the Stadium.
He described the pain level he experienced after the foulest of foul balls at “a million.”
That being said, he felt like a million bucks Friday night, getting his revenge on baseballs in general when he homered in his first at-bat, launching an 0-and-1 changeup 390 feet into the second deck in rightfield. Ben Rice’s 21st homer, a 433-foot three-run shot to centerfield with two outs in the second, gave Cam Schlittler more than enough of a cushion and sent the Yankees to a 5-0 victory.
Schlittler (8-3, 1.71 ERA), well on his way to starting for the American League in next month’s All-Star Game, struck out a career-high 13 in six innings as the Yankees (46-28) won for the ninth time in 11 games.
In his second at-bat, Chisholm drove a 370-foot fly ball that was run down on the warning track by leftfielder JJ Bleday. He proved more than able to walk off the deeply personal unpleasantness from the night before, even stealing a base — complete with a headfirst dive that potentially could have caused some discomfort below the belt — after an eighth-inning walk before scoring on Anthony Volpe's single.
Chisholm, like many players across the sport, including in the Yankees' clubhouse, does not wear an athletic supporter with a protective cup (catchers, for obvious reasons, are the exception 100% of the time).
He said he didn’t wear one in the minor leagues — where doing so is mandatory — and won’t change that in the big leagues, where wearing one is entirely up to the players.
“I’ve never gotten hit [there],” Chisholm said, using the more colloquial term for taking a shot to the groin area. “I’m not gonna change. That was just an unlucky instance right there . . . I’m just not a cup guy.”
Unlucky is one way of putting it.
Immensely painful, too.
It didn’t elicit much sympathy from his teammates in the immediate aftermath for Chisholm (who is super-popular in the clubhouse). That would come later, kind of.
After Chisholm collapsed to the ground and writhed in pain, several of his teammates could be seen cracking a smile in the dugout, Aaron Judge and Trent Grisham among them.
Players almost always react that way when something like what happened to Chisholm happens to someone else. It’s something pretty much all of them have experienced at some level of play.
Did those teammates give Chisholm a hard time after the game?
“Not really,” he said. “They just was asking me how my [groin] felt."
Manager Aaron Boone, who quickly went on the field to check on his second baseman as he was tended to by head trainer Tim Lentych said he was optimistic that Chisholm would be able to play on Friday.
"I felt good about it last night," Boone said. "I got with him last night and he seemed like he was going to be fine. They wanted to do some things this [Friday] morning just to be sure, but I sent the lineup out last night because I felt confident about it, and if we had to adjust, we would. He’s good to go.”
Boone, who played 12 seasons in the big leagues, mostly at third base, smiled when it was relayed to him that Chisholm said he would continue to not wear a cup (he is hardly unique in that respect when it comes to non-catchers).
“In December, going to hit soft toss, I put a cup on,” Boone said. “That’s the difference between this generation and my generation. I did nothing without a cup.”
Boone paused ever so briefly.
“Baseball-related,” he added to laughter.
“I think the first time I heard that Adrian Beltre didn’t wear a cup, it like blew my mind,” Boone continued, referencing the Hall of Fame third baseman. “But now I know a lot of these guys don’t wear cups.”
He smiled again.
“I don’t wear a cup anymore,” he said. “But honestly, literally like if we were going out for team pictures and I was dressing and was behind, I would be like, ‘Hold on, I gotta put my cup on.’ It’s different now. And they’re playing on some pretty nice fields.”
Among the many still photos from the series of unfortunate events — unfortunate especially from Chisholm’s point of view — was one of Boone, a serial bubble gum chewer, blowing an enormous bubble as Lentych spoke to the still-very-much-in-agony Chisholm.
“There wasn’t much I was going to be able to do,” Boone said when asked about the photo. “I was just waiting to see if it [the pain] was going to subside. Obviously, it didn’t, but the trainer was down in there. I didn’t want to get down in there, so it was time to blow a bubble. It wasn’t meant as disrespect to Jazz and the pain he was experiencing.”
A touchy subject, indeed.
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.
