“I see this as an absolute win!”- Bruce Banner, “Avengers: Endgame” (2019)
It’s Opening Day, and while that’s invariably exciting, the vibes in Yankeeland remain bleak. Maybe that’s because our generational $40 million ace will spend the entire season (and a chunk of the next one) recovering from Tommy John surgery. Maybe it’s because the Mets stole our best player in humiliating fashion and left our lineup with a massive, unfilled chasm at the top. Or maybe it’s the twin traumas of Games 1 and 5 of the 2024 World Series, which are too much for any team to recover from in only five short months, and which will require years of round-the-clock, intensive inpatient therapy for everyone involved before they can regain a semblance of their former pennant-winning selves. Realistically they probably also need an exorcist for that last one.
In any case, while the team establishment would like you to believe “we’re way better on defense” or “the lineup isn’t as top-heavy,” or “these guys are really going to hustle this year,” the fact remains that in Juan Soto and yes, Gleyber Torres, the lineup lost two of the three guys who were even semi-productive in the postseason. The third, Giancarlo Stanton, will start the season on the IL with grisly injuries to both elbows somehow, joining 2024 Rookie of the Year Luis Gil. Both will be back by late July, if we’re lucky. Aaron Judge (who, let’s recall, was relentlessly, irredeemably awful in the postseason, after, in fairness, one of the very best regular seasons in modern history) will start the season healthy (thanks to the many barnyard animals I’ve slaughtered as offerings to the injury gods), but if the last eight Yankee seasons are proof of anything, it’s that not even he can do it alone. The lineup looks weak, the rotation has already been ravaged by injuries, the team doesn’t really have a third baseman or a left fielder or a leadoff man, and with the rest of the division ascendant, it’s not hard to see how things could become very bleak very quickly.
However, the Yankees do have one trick up their sleeve that, if executed correctly, would make them not only the league’s best team this year, but one of the greatest of all time. It’s not easy, and in fact I’m fairly sure it’s impossible, but in their current predicament, and with such high upside if it works, it would be irresponsible for them not to give it a shot. What this team needs is a Time Machine.
The past is often a horror show, fully of haunting memories and unresolved traumas. But for some, the past is also the time when things were best, when all emotions were felt most vividly, when aching muscles had not yet started to wear down under the stress of professional baseball, when anything was possible, when life had not yet gotten in the way. For the most important players on the 2025 squad, the key to greatness will be choosing the right past year, punching it into the Time Machine, and regaining the excellence they once had. Here’s how good they’ll be when they pull this off:
Max Fried
Our new $218-million lefty ace will be taking a trip back to 2022, his age-28 season, when he emerged as one of the league’s very best starters and the clear ace of the Braves’s rotation. He will boast a career-low 4.4% walk rate, and a whopping 36.8% strikeout rate, thanks to advances in his changeup and two-seamer. He will have five pitches at his disposal, which will allow him to rely less on his signature curveball, making it more devastating when he does throw it, and giving him the versatility necessary to remain elite the second and third time through the order. He will be completely healthy for the entire season, as he will not yet have strained his hamstring and then his forearm in quick succession in 2023, injuries which have led to nagging complications ever since. He will be an All-Star, of course, with 185 innings pitched on 30 starts, with a 1.01 WHIP, and a 2.48 ERA. He will be worth 6.0 wins above replacement, and, as he was in 2022, he will be the first runner-up for the Cy Young Award.
Carlos Rodon
Rodon will join Fried on the trip back to 2022, his age-29 season, where he will regain the dominance he achieved in his one season with the Giants. While his average stats will not be quite as insane as they were the previous year, this was, and will be again, the year he was able to be elite for a full season, going deep into all of his games and missing no significant time due to injury. He’ll do this mostly by becoming a strikeout god (no one has figured out how to hit his slider yet), leading the majors in strikeouts per nine innings (with 11.98) and reaching double-digit strikeouts in a single game seven different times. He’ll be an All Star, with 178 innings pitched on 31 starts, with a 1.02 WHIP and a 2.88 ERA. He’ll be worth 5.2 wins above replacement, and, as he did in 2022, he will come in sixth in Cy Young Award voting.
Marcus Stroman
Marcus Stroman will be going all the way back to 2017, his age-26 season, his fourth year on the Toronto Blue Jays, and his first as their best pitcher. It will be a simpler time for Stroman, before he caused a “commotion” in the Blue Jays locker room upon learning that he had been traded to the Mets instead of the Yankees (remember when players chose us over them?), then went on a long Twitter tirade about how bad the Yankees front office was, insulting many of his future teammates in the process, and somewhere in there also felt the need to defend Kyrie Irving’s antisemitism and urge fans to be “conscious of who’s controlling the narrative. Unburdened from all of this future baggage, the 2017 Marcus Stroman will be a workhorse, pitching over 200 innings on 33 starts, but he’ll keep his pitch count low by inducing tons of soft contact from his sinker and breaking pitches. He’ll lead the league in induced ground-ball double plays, with thirty-four, more than one a game on average. While it inexplicably won’t be enough to earn him a spot on the AL All-Star team (I guess he'll have a slow start), it will add up to a 1.31 WHIP, a 3.09 ERA, and 5.1 wins above replacement, and, as he did in 2017, he’ll end up eighth in Cy Young Award voting.
Gerrit Cole
Sadly, while my Time Machine can undo long term wear-and-tear, it cannot magically fix current injuries, so Gerrit Cole will spend this year and a lot of the next one recovering from Tommy John surgery. That’s a shame, because he would have only had to go back as far as 2023, when he pitched 209 innings on 33 starts, with a 0.98 WHIP and a 2.63 ERA, worth 7.4 wins above replacement, and of course, the 2023 Cy Young Award. He’ll have to wait until mid 2026, at which point this will be a more distant memory and the Time Machine will be all the more necessary.
Luis Gil
Luis Gil, however, is recovering from a lat strain, not Tommy John surgery, so we can reasonably hope for him to be ready to hop into our Time Machine by sometime in July. He’s coming off where he beautifully executed the Time Machine strategy, imitating in 2024 the elite form that no one had seen him in since August of 2021. He’s proven his ability to ably navigate the space-time continuum, which is good because he’s going to have a more precise destination: the first two months of 2024. These were the months where Gil was borderline unhittable (before he became atrocious, and landed at “okay”), throwing nasty breaking stuff off of his 100 plus mph fastball, all with a 99th percentile spin rate (more than 2400 rotations per minute). He pitched 69 innings in these eleven starts, with a 1.82 ERA and 0.91 WHIP, and he was worth about two wins above replacement in this short time. With the help of our Time Machine, he will deliver exactly those eleven starts again when he returns from injury this summer.
Carlos Carrasco
This is a fun one! In the present, the Time Machine-less Yankees are speaking about 38-year old Carlos Carrasco as a backup, who can spot start once in a while when we need him, or else come in in a blowout and eat multiple innings at a time in the parts of games that don’t matter. And in his current form this is totally reasonable; he hasn’t been very good in many years. But he used to be, and a quick trip to 2017 will yield a version of Carrasco worthy of a much more prominent role. That year, his age-30 season, and already his eighth in Cleveland, he threw 200 innings in 32 games, with a 1.10 WHIP and a 3.29 ERA, was worth 5.2 wins above replacement, and came in fourth in Cy Young Award winning.
Devin Williams
Devin Williams has been one of the league’s best closers for the past three seasons. He has had a sub-2 ERA for all three of those years. If he could pick any of those years, I suspect it would be 2023, when he had a 1.53 ERA over 58 innings, saved 36 games, and was worth 2.6 wins above replacement, which is about as much as you can have as a reliever. But any of the last three years would be fine; the main thing is that he travels back to a time when he isn’t yet burdened by the memory of blowing a two-run lead over the Mets by surrendering a three-run home run to Pete Alonso in the decisive Game 3 of the 2024 NL Wild Card Round. For metaphysical ghost reasons, he’s going to need to be lights out against the Mets this year, so he should avail himself of the Time Machine to ensure that he is.
Paul Goldschmidt
Moving onto the lineup now. Seven-time All-Star, four-time Gold Glove winner, and five-time Silver Slugger Paul Goldschmidt has many excellent options for his Time Machine destination year. Pretty much any of them would be great except for the most recent one, where he seemed unable to hit righties for the entire first half of the season. Reasonable people could disagree, but if it were up to me, I’d send Goldy back to 2022 with Rodon and Fried, when he was, quite simply, the league’s best first baseman. He will hit 35 home runs, slash 317/.404/.578, and lead the league in OPS (.982) and therefore OPS+ (177), all while playing excellent defense at first. He will be worth 7.7 wins above replacement, and will be, as he was in 2022, the league’s Most Valuable Player.
Cody Bellinger
Oh boy. Since dislocating his shoulder while celebrating a home run in the 2020 playoffs (a very spooky injury), Cody Bellinger has one of the most haunted career arcs in modern baseball history. Throughout the following season, the 25-year old Bellinger, theoretically at the very start of the prime of his career, was plagued both by a series of nagging injuries (complications from shoulder surgery, fractured left fibula, hamstring strain, cracked ribs), and by the yips, as all of his considerable hitting prowess seemed to vanish overnight. He struck out in a quarter of his at-bats, hit for a .165 average, was considerably below replacement level, and eventually dropped out of the Dodgers lineup completely. It’s been a long road back since then. After a similarly disappointing 2022, the Cubs signed Bellinger as a reclamation project, and were able to extract an All-Star caliber season in 2023 (his age 27-season! He’s still so young!!), worth 4.8 WAR, followed by a less impressive 2024. Screw that. With my Time Machine, Belli will travel back before the cursed shoulder dislocation to the 2019 season, when, at age 24, Cody Bellinger won the NL MVP Award and seemed a virtual lock to be one of the very best players of his generation. That year (and therefore this year), the prodigious center fielder hit 47 home runs (yes, yes, juiced balls, whatever), slashed .305/.406/.629, walked almost a hundred times, won a Gold Glove with his elite centerfield defense, and was worth 8.7 wins above replacement. So he’ll do all that again this year, which of course means he will be the league’s Most Valuable Player.
Aaron Judge
Aaron Judge will go back to last year, where he’ll be the league’s Most Valuable Player, or 2022, where he’ll be the league’s Most Valuable Player, or 2017, when despite getting beat out in the voting to a cheating leprechaun, he absolutely was the league’s most valuable player, as well as the Rookie of the Year. He will hit 50-60 home runs, be very tall, get some brutal called strikes on pitches at his ankles, and (injury gods, if I have to slaughter Emile, my favorite baby goat, the one with the most “pluck,” in your honor I swear I’ll do it) will not get injured.
Giancarlo Stanton
A Luis Gil redux, as we will only get Stanton sometime in late summer if we’re lucky (and never, if we’re not, which looks increasingly likely). Assuming he comes back, he’ll enter the Time Machine and emerge in 2017, his age-27 year, and a really really good time to be Giancarlo Stanton. If we prorate out just two months of this season, then he should hit 20 home runs (he hit 59 that year), and they should all be absolute nukes. They will travel an average of 418 feet, with an exit velocity of 120mph. They will make cracking noises the human ear is not designed to comprehend. And they will be hit with a terrifyingly low launch angle, but hit so blazingly hard that they seem to have no discernable arc, just a flat laser beam shooting across the stadium. He’ll hit .281/.376/.631, and be worth a prorated 2.7 wins above replacement, and while only two months of this won’t be enough to win him the Most Valuable Player award (which of course he did in 2017), it will indisputably be an MVP-caliber performance.
DJ LeMahieu
DJ came in 4th in MVP voting in 2019, so that would obviously be nice, but it seems unlikely he will be healthy enough to enter the Time Machine any time soon. But okay, sure, DJ LeMahieu will slash .327/.375/.518, play three infield positions at an elite level, hit 26 home runs for good measure (juiced balls again), and will be worth 5.6 wins above replacement. Good to be consistent.
So there you go. In the lineup, three different Yankees will win the MVP award, and the five hitters mentioned above will collectively hit about 140 home runs, average about .300, and will be worth a combined 34.1 WAR. Because of Gerrit Cole’s injury, no Yankee will win the Cy Young Award, but we will have the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth place finishers (in 2024 terms, this would be a rotation of Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Logan Gilbert, and Kirby Yates), and on the backs of those pitchers named above only, will be worth 23.5 Pitching WAR. Baseball Reference estimates that a team entirely made of replacement players will win about 48 games. So if every other Yankee on the 2025 roster is replacement-level on average (and it shouldn’t be too hard, because by definition, if they are not, we can replace them with players who are), the Yankees will be 57 games above replacement level, which means they will win 105 games! This would be their best season since 1998, and one of the league’s best in many years. They’d surely win the division and be a heavy favorite in the playoffs.
Of course the Yankees have big plans for the rest of their roster to be much better than replacement level. They believe that Anthony Volpe will be an All-Star shortstop, that Austin Wells will be a credible leadoff hitter, that Jasson Dominguez will learn how to catch routine fly balls, that Jazz Chisolm Jr will lead the league in stolen bases while also hitting tons of home runs, that Ben Rice will be good instead of bad, and that having someone on the roster who can play third base is optional. That’s all fine. But there’s a limit on how much magical thinking we fans can tolerate. The radically honest thing to do is to pencil in all these guys being bad, and rely on the Time Machine instead.