Most things have gone well for the New York Yankees this season. The performance of Joey Gallo has not been one of those things.
Acquired last trade deadline, Gallo has offered little to the Yankees this season, especially at the dish. The 28-year-old is hitting a miserable .164 with 98 strikeouts, just 11 homers and a .630 OPS, which is by far his lowest mark since becoming a full-time big leaguer.
The Yankees need to figure something out with him, because they can’t really go into the postseason with him as an everyday player if he performs like this. Trading him could be the best way out, and his agent, Scott Boras, claimed on “The Show: A NY Post Baseball Podcast” that there would be interest.
“We all know Joey’s gifted, we know he’s a multiple Gold Glove outfielder, we know he has extraordinary power, we know that he’s hit 40 home runs in multiple seasons. The skill, the talent and everything is there. The question is, what do we do to get the execution potential to a higher level, to a normal standard?” Boras said. “... I tell players, ‘I’m not here to talk about what life would be beyond what uniform you’re wearing.’ He had a nice home run the other day. Defensively, he’s been playing at very, very high levels. And he gets on base a lot because he’s walking at rates now that he was before. We certainly have things to work on.
“But as far as what the Yankees are gonna do," Boras continued, "I do know there are a lot of teams that feel that Joey in their market and their uniform would be more of the normal than what he is in New York. But right now he’s on a winning team, he’s on a team that’s doing very well, he can be a major contributor to it, … and really the job of us is to get him most comfortable and get him back to being at his norm.”
Of course, Boras has an interest in Gallo being somewhere he plays well, whether that’s New York or elsewhere. So while there’s an obvious bias here, past performance suggests that there would be teams willing to take a flier on him in hopes that he bounces back.
Gallo is very obviously a depressed asset right now, and he’s set to become a free agent after this season, so it would not take much to get him. Apparently, that's enough to get some teams talking about the idea of bringing him in.
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