Yankees Resilience – Currency Thoughts
Yankees Resilience
May 21, 2025
A series of setbacks for the New York Yankees that began with losing the 2024 World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games last October was followed by off-season losses of their second best hitter, a starting pitcher and two top relief pitchers, and continued into the 2025 spring training in Florida with severe injuries to several other key players. All told, the team has had to replace last season’s first baseman (Rizzo), second baseman (Torres), left fielder (Verdugo), right fielder (Soto), designated hitter (Stanton), catcher (Trevino), three starting pitchers (Cole, Gil, and Cortes) and several relievers. Two other starting pitchers have missed extensive time to injury (Stroman and Schmidt). Before opening day of this year, it no longer seemed assured that the team would make the 2025 post-season playoffs, let alone return to the world series against the National League pennant winner.
Forty-seven of 162 scheduled regular games have now been played, which is seven short of completing the first third of the season. The 2025 team is nonetheless in first place in the American League Eastern Division and has its biggest wins minus losses differential of the season so far, that being nine games. The two most glaring player absences that had to be filled were those of Juan Soto, who drove in 109 runs last year and had a super high on-base-plus-slugging average (OPS) of 0.989 and their best starting pitcher, Gerrit Cole, who had allowed only 3.41 earned runs per nine innings thrown in 2024. Stanton, Torres and Verdugo collectively drove in 196 runs last year, while Rizzo and Trevino accounted for another 63. Those contributions represented an enormous amount of run production to replace and yet…..
With just a week left in the first third of the season, the Yankees are averaging 5.77 runs per game, roughly three quarters of a run more offensive runs scored than the 5.03 average in the whole 2024 season. The loss of Juan Soto to off-season free agency created plenty of salary space to recruit well-established additions to the team. At first base, Paul Goldschmidt has driven in 25 runs and is on pace to drive in 85-90 runs for the whole season. His OPS is solid at 0.878. Ben Rice and Jason Dominguez with very little prior major league experience have each driven in a bit over 20 runs and are on pace to end the year with 70 or more RBIs, and their OPS averages of 0.904 and 0.763 are far better than had been expected. Cody Bellinger in center field has 28 RBIs already, that is close to 100 if sustained all season, and an OPS of 0.783. Arguably the most unexpectedly big surprise has been from Trent Grisham, who with fewer at-bats than the aforementioned replacements has driven in 22 runs already with an OPS of 0.960.
On the pitching side, the main free agency acquisition Max Fried is 6-0 with a 1.29 earned run average (ERA), and the Yankees have not yet lost a single game that he started. Knock on wood, but he has been even closer to perfection than Gerrit Cole, who has been the team’s undisputed ace for several years but missing the whole 2025 season because of Tommy John surgery in March. One can only dream of the one-two punch that a healthy Cole and Fried might have been on the same starting pitching rotation. Two other newcomers to the starting rotation, Will Warren and Ryan Yarbrough, have won four games between them, striking out 60 and 20 batters with respective ERAs of 4.05 and 3.70 in a combined 71 innings. Among relief pitchers, the loss of Kahnle and Holmes have been replaced by an equally nasty combination of Williams and Weaver.
Just as the 2025 rebuilt Yankees are so far on a pace to score more runs than last year’s team, the 2025 pitching staff, which eagerly awaits the return of a healthy Luis Gil, who with 15 wins won the 2024 American League rookie of the year award, has been allowing fewer runs so far this year (3.80 compared to 4.12 in full 2024) per every nine innings played. Can the reinvented Yankees keep it up? Only the next four months will tell. Out of the starting gate, the team’s evolution in 2025 has been a heart-warming show of resilience.
All of which leaves one strand of the tale to ponder. The vast change in the team’s make-up between 2024 and this year happened greatly because Juan Soto as an off-season free agent elected to join the crosstown N.Y. Mets with a record-breaking multiyear contract offer totaling $765 million. The Yankees had offered Soto almost the same pay and years, but the player felt that looking a decade or more into the future that the Mets offered him the better chance of winning multiple baseball championships than would the Yankees. So far, Soto is not putting up the sensational numbers that he did in his single year with the Yankees. At this point also with a brand new club in 2024, he had 13 home runs, 40 runs batted in and an on-base-plus slugging average of 0.979. With the Mets in the same city and also in his first year, he has slugged just 8 home runs, driven in 20 runs, and has an OPS average of 8.15 — 0.164 lower than a year ago. New York City sports parlors are rife with conflicting explanations for the totally unexpected drop-off in production. It’s not age, since he’s only in his mid-twenties, nor the pressure of playing in a big city, which he handled with ease in 2024, nor the fact that 2024 was a fluke because he’s been a very good hitter ever since coming up to the major leagues as a late teenager.
I’m wondering if the problem lies in the pressure that comes from living up to a contract that shattered all precedents. In 2024, Soto was incentivized by the opportunity of scoring a mega-contract, and fans loved seeing a guy excelling day after day in a gamble with such high stakes. In 2025, the challenge is completely different, namely to justify a contract so brazenly big. It’s hard for fans or any anybody to empathize with underperformance on such a grand scale. One has to wonder, too, if money on such a large scale distorts a person’s perspective especially if they must live a highly visible life that doesn’t allow them to hide from under-achievement. I’m thinking of other professional athletes, top entertainers and political leaders. Money corrupts, so why should it be so surprising when mega-money or mega-power corrupt super-spectacularly.
Copyright 2025, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
Tags: baseball, Juan Soto, Yankees
ShareThisYou can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
