Stove hot! Specifically, Yankees stove hot, which is good for the current state of Yankees fan cope. While it remains impossible to rebuild Juan Soto in the aggregate, “Now we can afford to sign multiple guys” is at least starting to pan out as true, if not necessarily in the hitting department. Of course, this blog is not about Juan Soto.
Last week, the Yankees signed free agent Max Fried to an eight-year, $218 million contract. This at least covered the record-breaking portion of rebuilding Soto’s contract in the aggregate, though instead of the more straightforward “biggest contract in MLB history,” it came with the qualifiers of being the largest guarantee for a left-handed pitcher. Also like Soto’s contract, the contract has a large risk of being player-friendly toward the end—Soto will be 41 when his runs out; Fried is currently 30 with a spotty injury history—but the Yankees front office, like the Mets’, will only cry about the final years if the team doesn’t make some deep runs in the first few.
On Friday, the Yankees subsequently employed the “sign a lefty, trade a lefty” tactic by trading Nestor Cortes Jr. and second baseman Caleb Durbin to the Milwaukee Brewers for closer Devin Williams. Williams is one of the best relief pitchers in baseball, with an ERA under 2.00 for each of the past three seasons, and allows for the Yankees to somehow upgrade their closer position after losing Clay Holmes.
However, on the most important scale of the Yankees offseason, which is trying to rebuild Juan Soto in the aggregate, the Williams trade is a bit of a headscratcher. For one, the contract isn’t even that big, and is even smaller than it can be, after the Brewers had already gone for the accounting tactic of declining Williams’s $10.5 million team option in order to squeeze an extra one or two million out of him in arbitration. Also, Williams is a relief pitcher, not a batter.
But that’s thinking too small. Maybe Williams helps fix the spiritual wound of losing out to the Mets, as that’s also where Holmes signed in the offseason, and the Yankees have now replaced Holmes. I’m sure psychoanalysis would have something to say about that. Perhaps the trading of Durbin indicates the Yankees are confident that they’ll be able to sign another Scott Boras–represented client in Alex Bregman, or trade for another Boras client in Cody Bellinger, who is also an outfielder. And while the Yankees make up for Juan Soto across four different players, the one or two million the Brewers are no longer saving might give them the margin to win another 90 games in the NL Central before immediately losing in the playoffs.
