Luis Gil starts the final game of the two-game Subway Series on Wednesday night, but if he overturns the worst start of his career last week with another poor performance and continues to do so for the remainder of this season, he will have done his job for 2024.
The Yankees had to get through roughly the first three months of this season without Gerrit Cole, and they had to remember what it felt like to have their ace injured in mid-March. They needed to trade Dylan Cease or sign Jordan Montgomery or Blake Snell. They didn’t. Gill showed up. He’d just missed basically two seasons after Tommy John surgery. As a player who’d never been on a top-100 prospect list. As the guy they’d acquired in exchange for Jake Cave.
Expectations were low, and if Gill could hold the Yankees in check for the majority of the game, that would be great.
Instead, he pitched like Cole while Cole was out, whose second major league start of 2024 came on Tuesday night against the Mets.
So it’s not that the Yankees don’t want more from Gil. But if this is the end, well, mission accomplished. Because part of value is timeliness. There’s a difference between hitting a home run when it’s 3-3 and hitting a home run when it’s 9-0. And there’s a difference between performing at the peak of your game and performing when you’re down. Gil filled in for a player who seemed irreplaceable in March and became as valuable as Aaron Judge or Juan Soto in the Yankees’ first half.
So this season, the team will be extremely wary of the additions of DJ LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres.
The Yankees are fifth in runs per game, but watching them shows their offense and the impact their season will have in 2022. The Yankees were 58-22 after 80 games, even better than this season’s 52-28 record, and that team ended up winning the AL East with ease. But watching the second half of the season, it turns out this team was buoyed by Aaron Judge’s historic season. They were second in the majors in runs per game, but still weak, and their offense was exposed by the Astros in the AL Championship Series.
Juan Soto was the Judge co-star the Yankees envisioned when they acquired him in December, but despite his fifth-best runs per game at 4.99 (almost identical to his 4.98 in 2022), his weaknesses are all on display: The Yankees had the seventh-worst OPS at first base (.644), the fifth-worst OPS at second base (.618) and the fourth-worst OPS at third base (.605).
First baseman Anthony Rizzo is out for a while with a broken arm. Giancarlo Stanton will miss at least a month with a tight hamstring, making the Yankees even more vulnerable against lefties. Consider that against David Peterson, the Yankees plucked J.D. Davis off the streets to hit sixth and had Jamai Jones, who was in the witness protection program basically all year, as the designated hitter at eighth. And Torres, who hit .218 with a .338 slugging percentage, was the fourth hitter.
Ben Rice’s bat looks mature, and the Yankees should see more of that. I think Austin Wells needs to play more to get the best offensive potential out of him, and Aaron Boone shouldn’t hesitate to use him at DH when he’s not the catcher. But they’re still young. Torres and LeMahieu are proven, overpaid veterans. And they, along with Rizzo, were a drag on the Yankees’ lineup. The Yankees were winning in spite of them. But this is their Luis Gil moment. The Yankees need them to hit.
Torres maintained, as he has all year, that looming free agency isn’t affecting him, but he likely loves being a Yankee and, as one team source said, “he’s human too,” it’s hard not to think his time in pinstripes is running out.
“The most important thing right now is that we’re still winning and we’re in first place,” Torres said, “so I have a few more months to think about how to help the team.”
As for LeMahieu, when Boone and hitting coach James Lawson talk about the two-time batting champion, they sound like they’re encouraging a Little League player, about the hard-hit balls that didn’t result in hits, but he hadn’t hit an extra-base hit in 76 at-bats before Tuesday night. He looked totally lost and underpowered, like another batting champion, Jeff McNeil. But the Mets’ lineup suddenly seemed better able to absorb a slumping player for longer than the Yankees’ lineup.
To prevent the Yankees from being too worried about their lineup, which is full of heavy hitters such as Anthony Volpe, Soto, and Judge, they need LeMahieu, who suddenly woke up in the second half of last season, and Torres, who is still in his prime, to take on tough at-bats again. They need someone like Gil who can hit timely when it’s needed.
