August 13, 2025

26 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Needing a spark, Warren, Yanks find one against — who else?”

  1. I like the idea of re-signing Bellinger, but his underlying metrics give me pause. His batted ball data from StatCast isn’t very representative of a great hitter. He’s mostly middle of the road, but has found a way to get the most out of them. Whereas Tucker is top of the charts. But another $40m guy is tough to squeeze into the payroll.

    1. I love Tucker, and I think Tucker fits PERFECTLY batting either right in front or right behind Judge (probably right in front, I imagine), but man, $40 million a year is a fucking LOT.

      That’s why the Ryan McMahon trade was iffy for me. If they’re going to be ROUGHLY at this payroll next season, adding McMahon’s $15 million AAV makes it so much harder to fit in a $40 million salary.

    2. An interesting move would be to actually add a first baseman next year, so that Rice could become the primary catcher.

      You figure the locks for next season’s lineup are as follows:

      RF Judge
      DH Stanton
      2B Chisholm
      SS Volpe
      3B McMahon
      1B or C Rice

      So you need a CF, a LF, and either a 1B or a C. If Rice is 1B, then Wells is the catcher. If Rice is the catcher, then is there a 1B out there? Heck, could Rumfield possibly have a role on this team? He’s a lefty, though, so THAT doesn’t help.

      Dominguez presumably has a role on the 2025 team, and MAYBE Spencer Jones does, too.

  2. So unimpressed with Dominguez’s season. They only needed a few of the young guys to pan out, and the panning out has pretty much been restricted to Rice.

    3. I get it the disappointment, but he’s 22 and was asked to learn a new position on the fly in the ML. Especially one as tricky as Yankee Stadium LF. Of all players 22 and younger in ML with at least 100 PAs, he is 6th with 102 RC+ and 5th in EV and 3rd in hard hit %. He’s 1st in baserunning runs above average but dead last in defense (-11.5 versus -9.1 and Nick Kurtz’s -8.4.

      The Yankees need to spend some quality time with Dominguez as a LFer if that’s where they want to keep him because he has the bat. But the general take is that the Yankees are significantly lax on development except for catchers.

    4. But on the “new position” front, does he look like he’d be any better if he was playing the position he was familiar with, center field?

    5. Also, it seemed like Dominguez was being projected to play an average to above average centerfield and since he’s been in MLB he looks like he hasn’t played much outfield at all. I don’t know what people saw when he was in the minors.

  3. Also, if Ohtani ends up with MORE home runs than Judge, that would be a big (bad) deal. Honestly didn’t even occur to me to worry about that possibility before the season started, major injury aside.

  4. Stanton will be in right field tonight, the first time he’s been in the field for back-to-back games since August 2023. Good for him. He seriously looks a bit spry out there. There’s honestly not a ton of 35-year-old outfielders out there PERIOD.

    There’s McCutchen, Tommy Pham, Starling Marte (who can BARELY play the outfield anymore himself), Mark Canha (mostly a DH), Jose Altuve (who only plays left because he’s too old to play second anymore), Jason Heyward, and George Springer (mostly a DH).

    1. Wells says hi!

      Probably most disappointing season of all the sucktitude or blah of Volpe, Jasson, etc

Leave a Reply