The Great Volpening (Part III)
A Dialectical Analysis of the Gleyber Movement
Preface: I wrote this in the two weeks surrounding Opening Day last month, and have not updated it since. It might help to read Part I and Part II first. The Yankees are currently 21-18. Incidentally, Gleyber has been quite good thus far.
VI.
So far, I’ve described the Specter as a merry ghost, cheerfully arranging inconvenient coincidences and oddities for laughs, a thorn in the team’s side, but one they grudgingly smile at. The Gleyber Torres chapter takes a darker turn. What Spooky Six has done to MLB Pipeline’s No. 2 overall prospect of 2018 has jump scares, grisly murders of beloved secondary characters, psychological terror beyond anything that one should have to even imagine. It is not suitable for children under 17. It is illegal in 49 states. It’s the kind of ghost story that gets a camp counselor fired.
To understand why the Specter took exception to Gleyber, one must remember that in Yankeeland there are two kinds of superstar origin stories, and that Gleyber had the wrong one. A great Yankee is supposed to be made, not bought. He’s supposed to emerge from the Yankees hallowed farm system, learn the “Yankee Way,” sleep in pinstriped pajamas, own and regularly use military-grade facial hair prevention technology. Watch last year’s Jeter documentary and you’ll hear all about how important it was that even before his rookie year, Jeter had come down to spring training in Tampa and fielded ground balls next to Don Mattingly, and how Donnie tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the owner’s box. “That’s where the Boss sits,” Donnie allegedly but almost certainly did not say. “George is always watching.”
New Yankees fans soon learn that you are supposed to talk about the home-grown guys differently. Jeter (and Cano and Judge after him, and certainly now Volpe) was “already so good, just imagine how good he’ll be next year.” Fans were to look at him with wonder, awe, even gratitude. “We are so lucky to be fans of such a special team led by such a special player,” a fan is instructed to think.
Gratitude, of course, is entirely unnatural for a sports fan, who, first and foremost, is at a stadium or sports bar to be miserable, loudly, angrily, unreservedly miserable, in the company of similarly miserable people. The Yankees fans do not suppress this instinct (no fans can), but they are taught to reserve their rage for the other kind of star: the mercenary.
To be a Yankees mercenary, an elite superstar acquired in a trade, or worse, free agency, is to be trapped in an abusive relationship with a self-hating narcissist who can only love you if they also hate you, constantly, aggressively, passionately, even more than they hate themself. Nothing you do is ever enough. You can win MVPs, shatter franchise records, come through in clutch situations at heroically implausible rates, and to the fans, you’ll still always be one strikeout away from confirming their suspicions that you are a TOTAL FRAUD, a complete waste of all the money (not their money) that they (someone else) paid you. If a mercenary’s performance is truly unassailable (as A-Rod’s often was), Yankees fans assume a kind of grudging satisfaction, closely resembling entitlement, the polar opposite of gratitude. I remember texting my grandfather, a perpetual Giancarlo Stanton skeptic, in September 2021, right after Stanton sent a ball into orbit above the Green Monster in Fenway Park for the second time that night. “He’s just so so good!” I said. “He better be,” my grandfather replied.
In some ways, Gleyber has had it worse than Stanton. Stanton was acquired in the A-Rod manner, which, while destabilizing in 2004, had by 2018 become comfortingly routine to Yankees fans: a poor team signs a generational mega-talent to a massive contract, loses its nerve, and in a panic agrees to trade him to the Yankees for a Snickers bar and some scratch-offs. To the fans, Stanton will never be a god like Jeter or Judge, but to most of us, as long as he remains excellent,1 he’ll continue to serve as a pleasant reminder that the Yankees are one of the half-dozen teams that actually puts effort into winning games every year. In the current era, spending and being good is embarrassing, but “tanking,” or choosing to be relentlessly, soul-crushingly terrible now to save money, in service of a distant, murky future where you might be slightly above-average, is worse.
The trouble is, tanking sometimes works. It worked for the 2016 Cubs, who used the strategy to vanquish some of the most vicious ghosts ever to haunt a baseball diamond. It’s worked sickeningly well for the Rays, who have made their bones continuously trading their best players for scrap, and then cackling as that scrap magically becomes MVP-caliber talent, at which point they rinse and repeat. It’s worked for the Astros, who were aggressively terrible for three years until their trove of prospects finally blossomed, and then, um… encouraged them all to cheat shamelessly, something none of those players have ever received any punishment for whatsoever.
And though it goes against every tenet of Yankees exceptionalism, of the Yankee Way of continuous excellence, the dirty secret that Gleyber’s presence forces us to face is that tanking worked for us too. In 2016, after a dismal start, Cashman did the unthinkable and intentionally made the team worse, so they might be better in the future, but also so that they could be dramatically cheaper in the present. He sent aging slugger Carlos Beltran to the Houston Astros for a trio of teenagers, jettisoned elite reliever Andrew Miller to Cleveland for stud pitching prospect Justus Sheffield and flashy upstart outfielder Clint Frazier, and finally, moved flamethrowing closer Aroldis Chapman to the curse-breaking, World Series-winning Chicago Cubs. Chapman would become the Cubs’ only reliable reliever that postseason, single-handedly keeping them in close playoff games with nothing but one 105 mph unhittable fastball after another. The price the Cubs paid for their savior: top shortstop prospect Gleyber Torres.
From a baseball perspective, these moves were exactly what the Yankees needed. The newly stocked farm system yielded dividends almost immediately, producing a bevy of young, cost-controlled major leaguers, as well as a bunch of flawed, intriguing prospects that Cashman could package into trades for flashy, expensive veterans (the way that the Yankees are supposed to trade). Since 2017, the Yankees have enjoyed six straight winning seasons, the seeds of which were sown during that 2016 trade deadline. But psychically, the Chapman trade that landed Gleyber was an admission of defeat, a humiliating display of intentional mediocrity that was as commonplace and unexceptional as it was un-Yankeelike. The fans, whether they know it or not, have never gotten over this shameful incident, and in the six years since, the Specter has mercilessly hounded poor Gleyber for it.
VII.
About those 38 home runs in 2019. Gleyber Torres was never supposed to be a power hitter, exactly. He hit around ten a year as he progressed through the minors, completely respectable but nothing eye-popping. He wasn’t supposed to be a high average/on-base guy either, though, nor was he a glove-first defensive phenom. He was just supposed to be an all-around good player, without a specific superpower, but without any gaping weaknesses either. Being incredible at a specific thing often makes a player valuable to a team, but being quite good at everything and bad at nothing makes him a unicorn.
By 2019, Gleyber’s defensive potential had dropped from “above-average” to “average” at the shortstop position, as it became clear that he was slightly better suited for second base, where the proximity to first buys the fielder more time to gather the ball, transfer it from the glove to the other hand, and make an accurate throw. He was still an “above-average” defensive second baseman, to be sure, with the potential to improve even further. And anyway, he was hitting out of his mind, with a .278 batting average, a 128 OPS+ (compared to a league average 100), and, let me say it again, thirty-eight dongs. Thirteen of them came against Baltimore, and with each one, longtime Orioles television announcer Gary Thorne grew progressively more incredulous (“You simply cannot imagine this happening,” he grumbled after homer number nine.) By the time Gleyber reached double digits, Thorne had given up on announcing altogether, resorting instead to stunned silence followed by a guttural groan. Gleyber may not have been a blemish-less unicorn anymore, but he was a ferocious monster at the plate instead, a transformation that no reasonable fan could complain about.
The problem was that Gleyber’s power surge was unsustainable. And not in the typical way that bursts of excellence from young baseball players aren’t sustainable, because pitchers eventually adjust and find a hitter’s weak spot, or because of the toll that continuous athletic excellence can take on a human body, even that of a seemingly indestructible professional athlete in his prime, or simply because bursts of excellence in baseball, like in life, are fickle, and prone to vanishing as quickly as they came for no reason at all. No, Gleyber’s power was doomed for a reason, obviously entirely outside his control, and cruel and spooky enough to flummox even the most ardent Specter-skeptic. Gleyber hit more home runs in 2019 than ever before because the balls were juiced that year.
Major League Baseball has never officially admitted to instructing Rawlings, the official ball manufacturer which the league coincidentally purchased the previous year, to secretly make the ball more aerodynamic, to drive up scoring and make games more exciting. But players shattered the league-wide home-run record in 2019 by a wide margin, and if you watch a highlight reel you’ll see why. A long fly ball, like all of baseball, compels an instant of foolish, ecstatic hope, quickly extinguished by harsh reality. That year, the opposite began to occur. Gleyber (or Gary or Voit) would take a hack, swing noticeably under the ball, make glancing contact, and the crowd would sigh and prepare for the inevitable routine flyout. And then the outfielder’s eyes would widen, and he’d be at the warning track, then the wall, and the ball would inexplicably keep gliding forward. If Major League Baseball had installed massive, invisible fans directly above every park, furiously blowing balls outward if they reached a certain height, it would have had about the same effect. By the end of the year, the pitchers were livid, and the league was frantically signaling that they would fix this issue, even as they continued to deny culpability. Batters were supposed to realize that they would no longer be so lavishly rewarded for swinging for the fences and adjust accordingly.
But try telling a 23 year-old that he’s not as strong as he thinks he is, that the laws of physics apply to him, that he is a mortal who needs to carefully manage risk and plan for the future. Now imagine telling that to a 23 year-old who just hit 38 home runs. He’s obviously not going to listen. He’s going to think that he’s a power-hitting monster just like all his monster teammates (Judge, Gary, and Giancarlo can’t have been good influences in this regard). The juiced balls were the first cruel spell the Specter placed on Gleyber, cursing him with hubris that he was set up to believe was entirely earned.
He spent the next two seasons completely ignoring the right side of the infield (hitting singles the other way had been yet another of Gleyber’s “above-average” talents). He started swinging out of his shoes on nearly every pitch, hoping that the ensuing precipitous increase in strikeouts would be offset by the glory of his towering dingers. In the following, pandemic-shortened 2020 season, those dingers never came. His average dropped to .249 (bad), his on-base plus slugging landed at .724 (fine, a smidge above league-average that year), and he managed to clear the fences… only three times. But the sample size was so small; Gleyber missed two weeks with a quad strain, started almost every game when he was healthy, and ended up with 160 plate appearances over 42 games. Everyone goes through slumps, and it seemed silly to extrapolate much from such a freakish season, with its empty stadiums, elaborate yet wildly inadequate COVID protocols, and unnatural seven-inning doubleheaders. Besides, a slightly-above-average hitter could still provide immense value to a team if he came with “above-average” or even “average” shortstop defense.
Enter the Specter. By 2021, Gleyber’s defense had declined from “average” to “noticeably bad,” such that his Outs Above Average and Defensive Runs Saved (two advanced defensive metrics) went negative, becoming Outs Below Average and Defensive Runs Not Saved that Really Should Have Been. Worse yet, Gleyber couldn’t hit. His power outage had continued from the previous year, as had his pitifully low batting average, but now he also couldn’t hit extra-base hits with any regularity, which dragged his slugging percentage below league-average. Gleyber also struggled through weirder (ie spookier) ailments, such as a months-long battle with a recurring thumb injury that was supposed to heal after a few days, and one of the newly vaccinated nation’s very first “breakthrough” coronavirus cases in May, months before the emergence of the Delta variant.
The Yankees openly searched for shortstop alternatives at the trade deadline, telling the media that they were interested in moving Gleyber back to second base where he might “be more comfortable.” I remember finding this completely absurd. Yes, proximity to first base makes the throw easier, but Gleyber’s problems were mostly with fielding, not throwing. Was it really easier to field a ground ball ten yards to the right of second base rather than to the left? And anyway, how would changing positions in the field make any difference to Gleyber’s struggles in the batter’s box? Was the playing shortstop at Yankee Stadium so debilitatingly stressful, and second so comparatively “comfortable,” that a move from one to the other could have a psychological impact that would translate into measurable improvement in an unrelated part of the game?
The answer turned out to be yes. In late August, having found no suitable additions in the trade market, manager Aaron Boone moved third-basemen Gio Urshela to shortstop, where he had never played before, so that Gleyber could return to second. The results came immediately. For the remainder of the season, Gleyber’s average skyrocketed to .300, and his slugging to .443, buoyed by two homers and four doubles in just three weeks. His fielding prowess returned as well; whereas at short, he had averaged an error every 50 innings, at second he recorded only one in 140. By 2022, the idea that 25-year old professional baseball player, and elite second-baseman Gleyber Torres was spooked by short, once the crazy conspiracy theory of the superstitious fans who spent too much time on Reddit, had become the team’s establishment narrative. At the end of spring training that year, there were three infield spots (second, third, short) for three starting-caliber infielders (Torres, Lemahieu, Donaldson). But somebody had to play shortstop, the latter two had no experience there, and though it would have drastically improved the lineup and simplified everything, the Yankees refused to play Gleyber at short either. Instead, the trio was compressed into a rotating musical-chairs routine, and Gleyber had an excellent year in his time-share at second base. After finally acknowledging his limitations and making a post-juiced ball swing adjustment, he accumulated 4.1 WAR (third-best on the team) by mashing 24 home runs, keeping a respectable average, playing excellent defense, and vindicating everyone’s superstitious instincts. Meanwhile, the Specter, unable to haunt Gleyber on the “comfortable” side of the diamond, received a new soul to torment.
Next Week in the Great Volpening: The Isaiah Kiner-Falefa saga, and the Delicate Alchemy of Creating a Star from Thin Air.
And can finish one freaking month of a season with a single ligament in either leg intact.
Can't wait for the next one!