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Major League Baseball’s annual Winter Meetings, which wrapped up on Wednesday, were mostly quiet this year — but they were especially quiet for the New York Yankees who — after falling short in the American League Division Series — left the meetings without making a single player acquisition or transaction of any kind.
According to a New York Post report, their total lack of action marked the first time since 2018 that baseball’s most storied franchise and the one that has historically been the splashiest and most aggressive on the free agent market, stood pat at the Winter Meetings.
(The meetings were canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
But two full months remain before the opening of spring training — and even that date is not a deadline for getting deals made and free agents signed. There are still talented players on the market and one in particular appears, at least according to multiple media reports, to be in Cashman’s sights — outfielder and 2019 National League MVP Cody Bellinger.
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The 30-year-old 2013 Los Angeles Dodgers fourth-round draft pick spent the 2025 season in the Bronx where he played the second season of the three-year, $80 million deal he signed with the Chicago Cubs before the 2024 season.
The deal contained player options, also known as “opt outs,” after the first and second seasons. After the second year of the deal, his sole season in New York, Bellinger — after belting 29 home runs with an .813 OPS, third-highest of his nine-year career — took the opt out and became a free agent.
But if the Yankees plan to re-sign Bellinger, when will they get around to it?
Yankees’ longtime general manager Brian Cashman’s lackadaisical approach to the offseason so far has put many Yankee fans in “panic mode,” as the Locked on Yankees podcast phrased it on Friday.
“The New York Yankees need to get their offseason act together, because right now this front office looks like it’s running a yard sale instead of a franchise worth billions,” wrote Robert Casey, founder of the popular Yankee fan blog Bleeding Yankee Blue on Friday.
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Bellinger Signing on the Way, Maybe
According to reporter Inna Zeyger of the Yankees news site Pinstripes Nation, the answer to the question of when the Yankees will get Bellinger back to Yankee Stadium is — “eventually.”
The reason, Zeyger wrote, is that another free agent outfielder — former Cub Kyle Tucker — is expected to set the price tag for “elite position players, and teams have shown hesitation about fully committing to other alternatives until his situation resolves.”
When it comes to re-signing Bellinger, “remaining patient prevents New York from competing against itself while market conditions stay uncertain,” the Pinstripes Nation scribe wrote.
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Size of Bellinger’s Contract Remains Uncertain
Tucker may be setting the market, but there are still some benchmarks for assessing what Bellinger will cost the Yankees. After the Phillies’ 56-home-run-hitting designated hitter Kyle Schwarber, also a free agent, agreed to return to Philadelphia on a five-year, $150 million contract, Yankees correspondent Pete Caldera of NorthJersey.com predicted that Bellinger “might also find a Schwarber-type contract in this market.”
According to an estimate by the sports business site Spotrac, Bellinger should do somewhat better than Schwarber, with a six-year contract worth $183 million, or $30.4 million per year compared to the $30 million that Schwarber will receive.
