I hope you're right, but there's a part of me that can see a Yankees financial calculus that says Gleyber was an untenable situation because of his well-advertised warts. So if he produced 1.7 fWAR with all those headaches for $14.2M last year, getting a player like Brendan Rodgers, who produced 0.8 fWAR in 2024 for just a couple million bucks is actually seen as an upgrade. Less than 1 fWAR difference, no headaches, and a huge $10M savings in the perpetual battle with the Luxury Tax.
'Horrify' is pretty strong, but anyway the Durbin part of the statement is crucial too. If Cashman didn't plan to bring in someone later to bump Durbin anyway, I don't think he would have traded him.
I didn't. I ripped the potential logic.
Also he is going to miss the start of the season, could be out as much as 3-4 months. I'd say for this reason he might fit the Yankees better than any other team, but we'll see.
Uninspiring to me. Seems like that kind of Yankee signing where there's a glimmer of impressive production somewhere in the past, but the most probable outcome seems pretty clear - after a wonderful 4.0 fWAR season in 2021, he's produced 3.4 fWAR total over the last 3 years. And with a descending trend, no less: 1.7, 1.4, 0.3.
We can guess. Mostly the same reasons Boston fans don't want him: he'll be expensive and is in decline. Add to that his power is to LF. His bat plays better in Houston or maybe Boston than NY for half his games.
He is a righty who pulls everything, he is a much better fit in HOU or Fenway than NY. This is true for Arenado too, but he’d be much cheaper (and from all reports NY is not interested there either anyway).
Ke"Bryan Hayes owning the largest contract in the history of the Pittsburgh Pirates caught me off guard. Smaller market teams always have those contract factoids that big market fans are taken aback by, and I always associated the Pirates version of this with Jason Kendall.
I went down a silly rabbit hole, looking for teams whose top three hitters were OF. So I ran a Stathead for teams with the most PA from OFers, which is a noisy, at best, way of finding this.
I take Donovan over a young LeMahieu all day every day. DJ first got called up for a cup of coffee in 2011, and across the next 5 years in his first roughly 2000 PAs, he posted a grand total of 2.7 fWAR and a 76 wRC+. Donovan posted exactly 2.7 fWAR in the 468 PAs of his rookie year.
I remember seeing these numbers/studies after the initial signing because they were my beacon of hope. And him putting up that massive popup season in year 1 really felt like they had struck gold. For me the LeMahieu experience in retrospect is pretty straight forward now that we've got multiple seasons on him after leaving COL: he's effectively the same dude he was when he was acquired. Here are his last four full seasons of production prior to the Yankees, in fWAR order:
I'd like to try and make a distinction in what you laid out above. For me, the pandemic statistics and DJ's second contract are two different issues, even though they did overlap in real time.
