January 30, 2025

76 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Goldschmidt agrees to join Yankees on 1-year deal (source)”

  2. I’m good with it. Probably the best move out there, all things considered. And it’s not that crazy unlikely he’ll have an outright good year. It’s not the MOST likely outcome, but it’s not outlandishly improbable.
    And the fact that we see players who have had bad seasons after good seasons in their thirties doesn’t mean there aren’t players in their thirties who have had good seasons after bad seasons.

  4. i disagree that the offense will be worse than last year, and they still have a bunch of money to spend under hal cap.

    they were dead last in ops from first 2024. 25th in left. 19th at 3b.

    it’s difficult to replace juan soto but it’s not hard to imagine going to average at these positions could have them scoring about as many runs. plus the pitching is better.

    1. Soto had a monster year last season. He’s going to be very hard to replace, even if they get better at positions that they sucked at. The only real path to improving is if Dominguez is a stud as a rookie, and Wells and Volpe both improve. It’s not going to be because Paul Goldschmidt is a 1.6 win player instead of getting 0.5 WAR out of first base, or because Bellinger’s 2.5 wins are an improvement on Verdugo’s 0.8 WAR.

    3. when i look here it shows they got -1war out of first. If goldschmidt is a 2war player that is a huge swing. and while soto was a monster last year there’s no guarantee he would do it again next year. if he goes from 8 to a more demi godlike 6.5 that’s totally possible anyway even if he was in pinstripes.

      i’m just a fan that’s been reading this site since its inception, not an mlb gm but i think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the well rounded approach.
      https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/team_compare.cgi?request=1&year=2024&lg=MLB&stat=WAR

  5. A replacement level team is about 50 wins. So you want to be able to make up 50 wins on top of that. Last season, the Yankees got 30.8 WAR out of their position players, and 17.8 out of their pitchers. That would come to about 98 wins, of which they underperformed due to Holmes blowing a record number of saves, so they won 94 instead.

    They’ll certainly hope that they’ll up that 17.8 with Fried and Williams, but Belli and Goldschmidt are only getting the position player to about 25 or so. That’s a big step down. They probably project in the low 90s now, which is enough to probably make the playoffs, at least. But I’d obviously prefer more.

    1. following up, the yanks got 1.3 out of verdugo in left while the cubs got 2.7 with bellinger at first and the bigger penalty for the less important defense iirc.

      to sum up, i think they were a high 80s low 90s win team with a full season of cole and fried before the additions of belli and goldi.

      getting a 3b or 2b remains important but the departure of soto is being overstated compared to the moves they’ve made already and im so grateful to not have to watch those terrible routes for the next 15 years or clog the dh spot.

      can you fire up CAIRO to curb my enthusiasm because i feel good!

    2. Brian, I’m not sure what you’re telling people they’re missing.
      Is their logic wrong? I mean this logic:
      1. Last year’s team was at X wins, with a lot concentrated in 2 players.
      2. You lost, let’s say, 8 wins with Soto (although he’s not a lock to get you that every single year, but leave that aside).
      3. If you go from 0.8 war in left field to 2 or 3 (with potential upside), and then from 0.5 in 1B (is that right? They were above replacement at 1st base?) to 2 or 3 (with potential upside), you could easily be half-way or more to replacing that 8.
      4. You have Chisholm for a full season at 3rd, and presumably better there defensively with more experienced, or even better at second, increasing his value. Add a win for that. You could reasonably be within 2 or 3 WAR of Soto 2024.
      _
      So how does your argument from teamwide numbers differ from this? It shouldn’t.
      Looks like they’re not as good on offense as they were a year ago, but they’re not all that far off.
      _
      And then you add:
      (A) they’re probably not done.
      (B) Expecting much more from the Martian, and more likely more than less from Volpe, seems eminently reasonable.
      and as we know
      (C) the biggest WAR improvement this off-season has been with the pitching…
      So if we’re INCLUDING the pitching, this team could already be better than last year’s team, couldn’t it?

    3. Goldschmidt projects at 1.8 WAR, and Bellinger at 2.5 WAR. That’s replacing Verdugo’s 0.8 WAR and the Yankee first baseman WAR of about 0 WAR.

      That’s less than half of the WAR they lost from Soto. Not to mention that they probably have to make up even MORE than that, as what are the chances that even a GREAT Judge season will still be way below 11 WAR? Pretty high, right? He’s projected at 7, meaning they might have to make up ANOTHER 4 WAR.

      They need another another really good bat.

    4. True (re: Judge), and of course another bat would be a big deal.
      But it’s reasonable to look not only at the possible WAR losses (Judge).
      Surely Dominguez’s projection is significantly higher than what they got last year?
      And surely a full season of Jazz must give them some additional value.
      How do Volpe and Wells project? That’s interesting, and I have no idea.

    5. Wells is projecting to be a bit better than last year, while Volpe is projecting the same as last year. Dominguez is oddly projecting pretty low (but still double Verdugo. Fucking Verdugo). Alex Jackson is projecting at not much more than zero.

    6. Thanks. I really do think that Volpe’s 2024 – if it’s not his floor, it’s close to it. The chances of him becoming significantly better are much higher than the chances of him becoming much worse (which would require him to somehow completely unravel defensively).

    7. WAR is a little tricky in this…
      Things like Judge moving off CF to RF, even if he has the same offensive season will mean lower WAR.
      Also, guys like Volpe who put up 3 WAR… kind of sucked offensively.

      It’s probably best to look at raw, aggregate, splits for offense and move the defensive part to run suppression.

  6. He’s not replacing Tino and it’s a one-year deal. He needs to be an improvement on a historically bad 1B tandem last year. Don’t love the guy but his BABIP was down last year and he hit with a bit more authority after the ASB. This team is shaping up to be better than the 2024 version.

  8. Martian’s splits have always bothered me. In 2024 in 217 ABs batting left handed he hit 318/922, in 65 ABs hitting right handed he hit 185/510. That’s extreme. In 2023 it was 849/696. Is switch hitting his future?

    1. I read somewhere that he agrees and has made it his mission this off-season & spring to fix that.

  10. I took the projected roster of the 2024 WS lineup (31.1WAR) and compared those projections to the current starting 2025 NYY (26.9WAR).

    It’s not clear how much money they would have had left after signing Soto but of the 2024 team Verdugo, Rizzo, and Gleyber all have favorable bounce backs from Fangraphs. Assuming they would have all walked and been replaced internally (I understand it is not likely, and they would have acquired at least one bat but not Fried) the two teams are within half a war. Maybe this particular hypothetical is silly but the fact is that the Soto contract put them close to the Halcap.

    Mix in the pitching changes (Williams vs MostBlownSavesMan) and the fact that more help in 2b/3b is probably coming and on paper this team will project to outperform the 2024 model. Even if replacing Soto’s WAR may be a gap they can’t officially close, they will still win more on the field. Less outs on the bases, less terrible defense, more baseball iq, and an end to the awful tweets about how they’re the worst team in baseball if they don’t take a lead in the first. The only positions they’d be worse at being taken over by new players are JD taking over center and Cabrera if he was the full time 3b (which won’t happen).

    How much cope can I cram into a page? Let’s find out! 😉

  11. I’m not sure how this is possible but clay “blown save” Holmes had a positive WAR last year. I’m
    Assuming WAR is context independent because His WPA was -1.5.
    Just getting rid of him adds a win or two (or three).
    That’s my positive vibe for 2025.

    1. I think it’s pretty likely that, if they’d kept him, he’d have performed similarly, but without blowing a historically anomalous proportion of saves. Still, he’s always been strangely iffy for his stuff and command.

    2. The Indians?
      (I know, the spirits who guard the Indian graveyard over which they’re building the mall, I know.)

    4. Hi Plank – if I had to guess, Don and Pete are dismissing the “Guardians” name as a bad choice by ownership, and Pete is attempting historically informed dark humor, adding a land acknowledgment while also noting that historically the team was named Indians for more than a century and till very recently (1915-2021). I understand how it is possible to see their posts as a reluctance to use a chosen name, perhaps reflecting an unspoken desire to perpetuate another racialized misnomer (“Indians”) that is considered a slur by some of the people it commonly refers to. But I’d like to be more charitable here and to assume the best of intentions. Please pardon my pretentiousness as I attempt some unsolicited mediation.

      Within the last decade, amid some societal discourse and the recent decision to change the Washington football team’s name from the slur “Redskins”, the Cleveland baseball team’s ownership decided their franchise would drop the name “Indians”. Many fans in Cleveland, and about as many humans elsewhere, agreed, based on the recognition that it is a slur, and on the principle of “Don’t be a jerk if you don’t have to.” [This principle of anti-jerkiness, while seemingly common sense and surprisingly late in its uptake in America, is currently derided by some as “Woke-ism”.] In polls when that plan was announced, there was an even split between dropping and keeping “Indians”, though roughly a quarter of respondents did not have a preference either way.

      The question that was not yet answered was “what will the replacement name be?”. And when the answer was announced, it was much less popular than simply discarding “Indians”. This was beyond the usual difference that arises between a generic ballot and specific candidate. In fact, the choice of “Guardians” made nobody happy but ownership. “Guardians” was an objectively stupid choice – there were many better alternatives with actual historical / cultural affinity for Cleveland. Among them the Cleveland Spiders (a former name of the same franchise), the Cleveland Naps (another former name of the same franchise, after their then-star Napoleon Lajoie), Cleveland Fellers (after Bob Feller, who has a more fun surname than Lajoie and, bonus, was also a nicer guy and WWII hero), Cleveland Commodores (after Commodore Perry’s 1813 triumph in the Battle of Lake Erie), Cleveland Rockers (after the city’s ties to rock ‘n’ roll, though the name was already used by a short-lived WNBA franchise), Cleveland Blues (with connotations geopolitical and musical, as well as a contrast to the other Ohio baseball team), and Cleveland Steamers (just kidding). The ownership’s rationale for “Guardians” was a transparent lie, to cover their own unwillingness to spend money on rebranding; and pretty much nobody liked it, in Cleveland or out. But it’s the team’s name now, until it gets changed again.

      Anyway – I don’t think Don has forgotten the team’s name, but I think he actively rejects it. I can’t speak to why but choose to give benefit of doubt and assume that he is only speaking to the Cleveland ownership group, and that there are no broader societal dismissals at play. And although he isn’t dead-naming them, I understand how the refusal to use a team’s name makes people uncomfortable. Like, it would be pretty demeaning to falsely tell another human being “that’s not your name”. So while I’m not going to assume anyone here intends to be a jerk, I will gently propose the less-jerky alternative, to just call the team “Cleveland”.

    5. Thanks for the very long response. I get all that. I disagree about Don, though. He has proven himself to be a bigot and it is shameful that he is still allowed to spew his hateful rhetoric on this website. He hates gay people and minorities and he lets the world know it. I had posts marked on the old website that showed his hateful bigotry, but that was all lost, for good and for bad. Don is a terrible person and should be a pariah here and everywhere.

    1. He turned down a 7/158 extension from the Mets in 2023. Now, the Mets may be the only team for him.

    2. The interesting thing to me is that he might find it compelling to take a pillow contract, and he should DEFINITELY NOT DO THAT. Take the longest contract you can get, dude, you are going to age so fucking poorly! Just take the longest deal someone will offer you and lock that shit down now.

      A pillow contract would be doing the team a huge favor, since he’s really only worth signing for a single year for any team.

  14. Maneaa back to the Mets, and Buehler to the Red Sox. It is interesting. I don’t think Buehler is that good, but I still hate that they got him. More because I hate that the Yankees have to worry about them this season. If only the Yankees were allowed to make a significant improvement to their team instead of this gradual shit.

  15. Off season so far:

    + Bellinger
    + Fried
    + Goldschmidt
    + Devin Williams

    – Soto
    – Gleyber
    – Nestor
    – Rizzo
    – Trevino

    Am I missing anyone who would move the needle in 2025? They really made lemonade out of lemons after losing out on Soto. Not offering Gleyber the QO is still mystifying to me.

    1. I think Gleyber’s QO didn’t happen because he was the most glaring example of the Yankees’ poor “fundamentals”. Even if Gleyber’s talent / projected production would overcome the value lost in defense and baserunning, and the QO were reasonable based on run expectancies, there would be a tremendous implicit cost to making the QO. The Yankees would basically be telling the league that, even as it was a major problem that cost them games and a championship, they would still re-sign the guy who gives outs away in the field and on the bases. They couldn’t do this and be taken seriously by anyone they might want to sign/keep – especially a Max Fried who might appreciate good infield defense, but more generally anyone who cares about not giving outs away in the field or on the basepaths.

      Also, Gleyber would totally have taken the QO; but I think the QO would have been a problem for the Yankees’ image and recruitment efforts even if Gleyber rejected it.

  16. There’s also the factor of Goldschmidt’s potential for opposite-field pop. Throughout his career, he’s done damage pulling the ball and going to center, but he has also almost always gone the other way more than the rest of the league, too. Even in 2024, per FanGraphs, MLB as a whole had a 24.2-percent Oppo%, while Goldschmidt beat that at 25.9 percent. A year prior, he was at 31.7 percent and MLB was at 25.6 percent. As seen in the reel below, Goldschmidt has the kind of pop to send shots to deep right field.
    https://www.pinstripealley.com/2024/12/23/24327788/yankees-analysis-paul-goldschmidt-2025-signing-first-base-cardinals-free-agent-2024

    1. Pederson is a platoon bat, but on the strong side of the platoon and he’s an elite hitter there. It’s kinda crazy, but I get it.

    1. Bregman makes a lot of sense for the Yankees. I’m not really sure why the Yankees aren’t in on him.

    2. They’re seeing the downward trend, and seeing how Arenado went from an MVP candidate at 32 to washed up at 34, and wondering just how bad things will be for Bregman when he’s 34 if he’s already dropping at 31.

      The trick is that no one can truly know when the total drop-off WILL be. Bregman could easily maintain 4 WAR for four more seasons, or he might be under 2 WAR next year. I don’t think anyone really knows, and it’s tough to want to give someone like that $180 million.

  22. Some random Steamer projections and I’m probably reading this wrong. Gleyber 3.0 WAR, Bellinger 2.5, Goldschmidt 1.8, Volpe 3.5, Wells 3.4, Martian 2.0

    1. I don’t remember the other, but nice callback. I believe it was Steven Goldman who coined that phrase.

    2. Darrel Rasner wasn’t a terrible pitcher, I’m surprised he didn’t stick longer in baseball

    5. You made me look up Rasner. His Wikipedia page says he ended up getting a $1 million contract to play in Japan. Played there for 5 years before getting TJ surgery. He’s now an international scout for that same Japanese team.

    7. I have a real fondness for these old names that at one time (probably 1983-20015) meant so much to me. Its fun to read about these players still kicking around the game.

    1. Once interesting…but after the last 3 minor league seasons batting 180, 187 and 220 I’m not even sure he’s worth a spot on the 40-man roster. I guess he never recovered from being hit in the face with a pitch.

    1. And to all who celebrate Boxing Day remember kill the body and the hands will fall.

      Yes a big thanks to Bryan for keeping this going.

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