After being among the league leaders in nearly every meaningful offensive category during the Aaron Boone era, the Yankees took a swift and unexpected step back in 2021, ranking 13th in the league with a .729 OPS and 17th in runs scored.
To address the suddenly glaring issue, the Yankees added a glove-first shortstop in Isiah Kiner-Falefa, swapped out Gio Urshela with a 36-year-old Josh Donaldson, and promoted defensive-minded Kyle Higashioka to the starting catching role after including Gary Sanchez in the deal for Kiner-Falefa and Donaldson.
And that was it.
With four star shortstop options available via free agency this past winter, the Yanks instead opted to go with Kiner-Falefa, citing prospects Anthony Volpe and Oswald Peraza as on-the-cusp stars who will be infield fixtures for years to come. But as for this year, considered to be within a championship window that the Yanks have failed to capitalize on for the last five years, the Yanks rode with Kiner-Falefa, who holds a career .667 OPS and is hitting just 4-for-23 to start his pinstriped tenure.
Donaldson, who certainly still has pop left in his bat, has a league-high 13 strikeouts to start the season, and is just 6-for-32 out of the gate. Higashioka, one of the top home run hitters in spring training, has plummeted back down to earth in the form of just two hits in 21 at-bats so far this season, much more in line with his career .600 OPS.
The result? More collective offensive struggles, especially with runners in scoring position. The Yanks managed just two hits in 11 at-bats in those situations in Friday’s loss to the Orioles, and now have the third-worst batting average with runners in scoring position in 2022, and the fifth-worst OPS.
Aaron Boone insists that this won’t be a sequel to last season, when the Yanks had the third-worst OPS with runners in scoring position, saying this year’s group is simply “better.” But even with a microscopic sample size, where is the reason for faith that this year will be any different?
The best way to address the Yankees’ 2021 issues was to dramatically improve the roster, but they failed in that regard this winter. The Yankee lineup differs very little from the one that lost the Wild Card Game last year. Gleyber Torres is still at second, Anthony Rizzo at first after returning on a new contract, and Higashioka is still behind the plate. The only changes? The struggling and often injured Aaron Hicks replaced the aging Brett Gardner in center field, Donaldson replaced Urshela at the hot corner, and Kiner-Falefa took over for Bronx native Andrew Velazquez at short.
Is that enough to inspire hope that this year’s offense will be any different from its underperforming predecessor?
It raises more concern when considering that Aaron Judge (38 home runs and a .916 OPS in 148 games) and Giancarlo Stanton (35 home runs and an .870 OPS in 139 games), both critical to the lineup but with their own injury concerns, played full seasons last year and produced like many hoped they would, yet the offense still struggled badly. So, in a best-case scenario with the team’s two most important bats, the lineup was still nowhere near championship caliber, yet the Yanks only tightened up the margins this offseason rather than swinging on any of the home-run opportunities that were there for the taking.
So, the Yankees can act surprised that last year’s run-scoring issues are already at the forefront in 2022,as there shouldn’t have been reason to expect much else.
Sure, Aaron Hicks could stay healthy and venture closer to his 2018 production, or either Torres, DJ LeMahieu, or Joey Gallo could bounce back after rough showings in 2021. And it’s unlikely Donaldson will continue to strike out at his current pace. But those are all hypotheticals, echoes of the seemingly patented Yankee rallying cry of “the return of this injured player is like making an addition at the trade deadline.” Last year, the Yanks had 162 games of evidence that showed the lineup as constructed wasn’t enough to legitimately compete. So there should be no stunned looks on the faces of Aaron Boone, Brian Cashman, or anyone else in the organization if this year’s slightly-tweaked model continues to produce similar results.
Follow Ryan Chichester on Twitter: @ryanchichester1
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