Yankees 2021 Trade Deadline Report Part I: Reality Check

After taking a much-needed reprieve from the perpetual nonsense that has engulfed the 2021 Yankees, I’m coming back with a clearer picture on what could, and what almost certainly won’t happen this season. It’s clear the Yankees are content to sink or swim with the organizational structure they have in place. While I’m still resigned to the fact that what’s in place is no longer an adequate solution to the Yankees problems, manager Aaron Boone and his coaching staff are going to last the season whether the team makes the postseason or not. Call me cynical, but changing the voice in the room feels like a better play than maintaining blind faith that a lineup full of underperforming, “used-to-be-good,” players will miraculously turn the corner. Truth is, there is no immediate cure-all for the Yankees problems, but any approach would be more creative than the one the organization has taken in the last 12 months. Design flaws in Brian Cashman’s “fully-operational death star,” have mounted only to be ignored and, in some cases, compounded by inaction and, at best, spend-thrift tinkering during the two previous July trade seasons.

The Yankees are now faced with the unenviable choice of whether to invest heavily in propping up what many believe to be a sinking roster, or admit to themselves, and the world, that a team projected to win the American League going away was never anywhere close to such a goal. The events in the days after the All Star break have only muddied the waters further. Since Thursday, the Yankees have lost six players to a COVID-outbreak (including Aaron Judge) only to take two out of three from a first place Red Sox team that looked legitimately vulnerable for the first time all season. In a lineup surrounded by quadruple-A all-stars, the season’s biggest disappointment, Gleyber Torres, began to show flashes of the player we believed him to be. DJ LeMahieu, who went from MVP candidate to decidedly-meh in the span of four months, has quietly reached base safely in 30 consecutive games. Gerrit Cole has come back from a poor run of starts with a vengeance, carrying the Yankees on his back to enormous wins against Houston and Boston, working efficiently with Gary Sanchez in the latter. There are reasons to take the blue pill on the 2021 Yankees if you’re so inclined.

Sure, it’s ironic, perhaps even a bit silly, that this would be the team the Yankees front office chooses to blow through luxury tax thresholds and prospect hauls on in order to fix, but the organization has coasted on a mandate of sending difficult questions down the river for far too long. It’s clear now this team won 100+ games in 2018 and 2019 in spite of their flaws. Your favorite MLB twitter eggs love to rattle them off: the Yankees are a slow, injury-prone, low IQ, right-handed mess of a baseball team. There are more than a few legitimate questions about this team’s viability long-term. Make no mistake, though, they are also a team that will be hell-bent on contending in 2022, when core players like Judge, Sanchez and reliever Chad Green will all be entering contract years. This is a franchise dangerously close to missing the starting gun of a seemingly never-ending title window, you would be a fool to expect them to go quietly into mediocrity.

Many fans, myself included, hope the Yankees are tempted in the next 10 days to start that process now. Most, if not all fans are realistic about this team’s odds at October baseball, but you can’t really blame us for wanting something better (or at least more entertaining) than the current plan of sending the Scranton Rail Riders out to keep our season afloat. Against all odds they did that this weekend, but we can’t expect that to last very long.

Diagnosing the Problem & Finding Trade Chips

The Yankees are, whether we like it or not, all the things critics damn them to be. They are brutally right-handed, to the point where an opposing manager can effortlessly allow a hard-throwing RHP to mow an entire turn of the lineup down in the most crucial innings. They are an “analytics for dummies” wet dream, sitting a more-than-respectable ninth in OBP and HR, but are unable to make the adaptations towards speed and gamesmanship that have catapulted the Astros, Rays and Red Sox to success. As if an inability to manufacture runs isn’t bad enough, the team constantly finds ways to give runs away on defense, establishing the gruesome self-defeating cycle of suck the Yankees are currently in. Make no mistake, the Yankees are everything people think they are, all except hopeless. They are, after all, the New York Yankees, the team with limitless financial resources and a top-10 farm system stocked with players other teams covet. Their current problems will take more creativity than many believe the front office is capable of, but the opportunity to build the team Brian Cashman and Co. intended to build is still within reach.

Any conversation about what the Yankees can possibly add over the next 10 days has to begin with what they have to trade away. It doesn’t seem logical, nor feasible, that the Yankees can reverse their fortunes over the next 12 months without manufacturing some holes along the way. And make no mistake about it, the Yankees main objective should be to put this team in a position to be the World Series favorite 365 days from now. If you can make some moves, get hot and go on a run over the next two months, more power to you, but the second the Yankees start treating 2021 like house money, the better. Oh how the mighty have fallen, but you have to embrace your reality before you can assess how to right the ship. This certainly won’t be a clean process, it won’t be anywhere near like what the Yankees were able to execute in 2016. In some ways that’s good, the Yankees are not an old roster lacking top-flight talent to build around. There are issues though, the Yankees have no valuable players on expiring contracts. There certainly won’t be an arms race between teams with generation(s)-long title droughts which nets you a global top 25 prospect.

What the Yankees can do is make a simple, honest assessment about their strengths and weaknesses in order to insure a more sustainable run. We know their weaknesses pretty extensively at this point, but it isn’t all bad. The Yankees are, despite their categorical inability to develop and cultivate starting pitching, preternaturally good at building bullpens. If the Yankees blindly view themselves as a contender in 2021, trading the likes of Chad Green and Jonathan Loaisiga would be sacrilegious, but if you're operating from anything close to a realistic point of view, you’ll see two of the most valuable trade assets on the major league roster. Given the fact that Green is only signed for two more postseason runs, and Loaisiga has a fairly ugly injury history, the Yankees shouldn’t feel the need to cling to either, especially when the tweener-starter turned dominant reliever profile has been the most repeatable asset of Brian Cashman’s Yankees. The team could also entertain trades for starters like Jordan Montgomery and Jameson Taillon, but a team looking to make a quick turnaround should be looking to add young, controllable starting pitching, not trade it away. It would be smart to see if any value can be derived from Domingo German, who despite flashes has proved to be more of an enigma than a reliable starter since his return from suspension.

The Yankees path to rebuilding their offense is less obvious, and possibly more emotionally gutting for fans. With no players of consequence coming up on free agency after this season, the Yankees will have to move players out in order to bring new players in, they have to do this. There can’t be any more talk of “feeling like what we have is better than what we may have gotten.” This myopic line brandished by Cashman at nearly every press conference for the past three years doesn’t fly when the players you’re clinging to are producing at league-average (or worse) offensive clips. Luke Voit is a player we all love, and from a baseball perspective the Yankees probably missed their mark trading the 2020 AL HR king for any legitimate value. Wrapping yourself in that narrative obstructs what Voit really is, a pretty good right-handed power hitting 1B who can’t play a lick of defense. That’s not a knock on Voit, that describes the vast majority of first baseman in major league baseball! It’s simply to point out what the Yankees are getting out of Voit on the field is a dime-a-dozen in the league, and they should not be adversed to upgrading and recouping whatever they can get for the injury-plagued fan favorite. With the Yankees needing up to three new left-handed or switch-hitters in their lineup, it’s very likely a second infielder will have to go along with Voit. You could always gauge the current value on Gary Sanchez, but good luck finding a catcher who will approximate Gary’s .788 OPS, let alone one who’s left-handed.

Many of the most extremist Yankees fans have floated the idea of trading Aaron Judge or Gleyber Torres. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and a good GM takes calls on every player, but a good GM also considers some calls more seriously than others. Let’s all be realistic about Aaron Judge for a second. Yes, it’s more than fair to wonder who much and how long the Yankees are willing to commit to Judge when his rookie contract expires after next season. Despite playing at a near MVP-caliber level for much of 2021, Judge is still considered (in some cases fairly) as a dangerous long-term investment given his injury history and advanced-ish age upon hitting free agency. Many have pointed to the Yankees decision not to trade Robinson Cano in 2013 as validation for trading their franchise player, but these cries ignore the depressed value of rentals in the current market. Alex Verdugo is a good player, but has he made any Red Sox fan forget Mookie Betts’ MVP season of 2018? Andres Gimenez and Amed Rosario are nice players, but they aren’t bringing back the value of Francisco Lindor. I won’t even try to persuade you on the unfortunate pile of also-ran’s the Orioles got for Manny Machado, but I assure you it wasn’t Cedric Mullins and John Means. Not one Yankees fan would be legitimately happy with the return they’d get for Judge. This team does and should, expect to win in 2022, that isn’t happening without Judge, hard pass.

Torres is a slightly more plausible, and infinitely more complex situation, but I think the end result is the same. His slash line this year has been Ugly (.240/.330/.328, 88 wRC+), as a baffling power-outage has turned a player once projected by ZIPS to average 40 HRs a season into a player with a higher OBP than slugging % (hello, mid-80s Willie Randolph). Clearly this trend is disturbing, but it isn’t all that unprecedented for players of Gleyber’s profile. In Yankees history, Robinson Cano had a similarly-brutal 2008 campaign, posting a well-below league average 86 wRC+ compared to 119 in ‘07 and 124 the following year. More recently, Red Sox all-star SS Xander Bogaerts plummeted to 95 wRC+ in 2017, since then, he’s failed to fall below 130. The Yankees would be wise to take calls on Torres, he’s one of many right-handed, defensive liabilities who have become all-too-redundant on the Yankees roster. Yet, if the Yankees are looking to extend their championship window to the outer reaches of Gerrit Cole’s contract, the 24 year-old Torres is a player the Yankees should invest in getting right, likely with a move back to second base.

The Yankees can certainly field calls on (if they come) on high-priced veterans like Giancarlo Stanton and DJ LeMahieu, but neither will be leaving the team any time soon. Stanton and his albatross contract may not be as unmovable as the Yankees would have you believe, but until the NL decides to step into the late 20th century and adopt the DH, the Yankees will be forced to figure out a better reality with Stanton, preferably in LF. As for LeMahieu, I’m sure you could trade him, but why would other free agents choose to sign with the Yankees if a four-month dip in production sent you out of town? Given the star-power of the upcoming FA class, the Yankees need to make themselves a more desirable destination, not less.

The last, most likely player to get traded is arguably the player least deserving of exile, outside of Aaron Judge. Gio Urshela has been a god-send for the Yankees since busting on the Bronx scene in 2019, providing the team with a consistently respectable batting average, excellent third base defense and the unquantifiable “clutch gene,” the Yankees are desperately looking to acquire in other players. Urshela, acquired for just $25k from Cleveland, is the kind of rags to riches story fans and teams should want to celebrate, but at 48-44, you have to leave your feelings at the door. A close examination of Urshela as an asset yields a slightly above-average offensive player for his position who is (yet again) a right-handed redundancy in the Yankees batting order. He’s moving to the wrong side of 30, but given his contract and past production would be a fairly valuable asset for a team mid-market team looking for a reliable 3B who will (likely) never command top-dollar to keep around. There’s no question trading Urshela would sting, but the Yankees have to open up possibilities for improvement, and given LeMahieu’s flexibility at first or third, they can afford to move Gio in order to open up holes for more perfect solutions.

Well, it felt good to get all that out, but it’s easy to get carried away with the issues and possibilities that face this team. For the sake of making this palatable, I’ll come back later in the week to break down both the rentals (tired) and the controllable players (wired) the Yankees could pursue in order to make this season less of a chore on all of us.