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D.J. LeMahieu could be on his way to Atlanta.
The New York Yankees have fallen on hard times. Losers of nine of their last 12 games, the Bronx Bombers are now barely clinging to their lead in the American League East. The Tampa Bay Rays, by contrast, have won 10 of their last 13, racing to just one-half game off the top of the division.
The Bombers’ offense is also bombing. The Yankees now rank fifth in MLB with 407 runs scored, and since a 6-3 victory in Kansas City on June 11, the Yankees have played 14 games and scored two runs or fewer in half of them. In one particularly horrific stretch, from June 15 to June 17, they were shut out in three consecutive games.
‘Free Fall’ in the Bronx as AL East Lead Slips Away
“The Yankees offense is in a free fall, lacking the dominance they started the season with,” wrote Zachary Howell of Clutch Points on Thursday. “With the trade deadline looming, Aaron Boone’s roster needs an upgrade.”
Not surprisingly, Howell has just the thing — at least in his opinion. He proposes a trade that he says would upgrade the Yankees’ middle infield both offensively and defensively, at a spot that has been a sore point for New York since losing second baseman Gleyber Torres to the Detroit Tigers in free agency over the offseason, and simply neglecting to land an adequate replacement, or any replacement at all.
Instead, manager Boone has used 36-year-old D.J. LeMahieu — who missed the first six weeks of the season with the latest his many injuries — at second base in 35 of the Yankees’ 82 games so far.
The move back to the middle infield hasn’t exactly done wonders for LeMahieu’s offense either. In his last 36 at-bats, LeMahieu has scraped out just six hits, only one (a double) for extra bases.
Howell’s trade idea would rid the Yankees of LeMahieu entirely and bring in a full-time, 28-year-old second baseman in the Atlanta Braves’ Ozzie Albies, a three-time All-Star whose seven-year, $35 million contract pays him $7 million this season — a bargain compared to the $15 million LeMahieu is set to collect. The Yankees are on the hook for another $15 million to LeMahieu next year, when he will be 37 years old.
To pry Albies from the Braves, Howell proposes, the Yankees will also need to throw in their No. 5 overall prospect, 20-year-old Roderick Arias, signed in 2022 for a $4 million bonus out of the Dominican Republic, and ranked the top prospect in that year’s international class by MLB Pipeline.
Would Braves Actually Trade Away Albies?
But Albies has also been slumping this season, with a career-low .624 OPS. Howell seems to think a shift in scenery might help Albies improve.
“While a lot of his issues at the plate cannot be excused, many of them could be attributed to the additional pressure he was under at the beginning of the season,” Howell wrote. “Since moving down in the order, he has played better.”
But longtime Yankees blogger Robert Casey of Bleeding Yankee Blue is skeptical.
“The Braves aren’t trading Albies unless the wheels absolutely fly off in Atlanta and they find themselves buried in the NL East,” he wrote Thursday in response to the Howell trade pitch. “They’re not in the business of handing out discounts on star players just because you included a top-five prospect and offered DJ like a coupon.”
Whether the LeMahieu-for-Albies deal is the answer or not, one thing is clear: without some sort of an aggressive move to right the offensive ship, the Yankees risk letting a season in which they appeared destined to head back at least to the AL Championship Series and possibly the World Series once again just slip into oblivion.
Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering Japan Pro Baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin
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