Think you know your 2021 Yankees? Try this one:
Name the two position players who, entering Tuesday night’s game against the Rangers at Globe Life Field, had experienced the largest OPS drop from 2020. Please consider only those gentlemen qualified for the batting title.
No. 1, which probably won’t surprise you, is Clint Frazier, who followed up last year’s .905 with a .582, a 323-point drop which landed him on the bench Tuesday.
No. 2, would you believe … given this team’s loud struggles with the bat … the correct answer was DJ LeMahieu?
Unlike many of his Yankees teammates who, like Frazier, have slipped from good to bad, the versatile infielder LeMahieu slipped from great to good. He took a .277/.367/.368 slash line into the second game of this Lone Star State set, his .735 OPS a .276-point drop from last year’s 1.011. Nevertheless, slippage is slippage, so when you’re trying to determine what in the heck has become of this once impressive offense, you can’t ignore LeMahieu looking only a little like the guy who served as the centerpiece to the Yankees’ offseason plans.
“He set the bar really high, and [he’s] working hard to get to that level where we know he’s The Machine,” Aaron Boone said of LeMahieu. “Hopefully, these last couple of games, I feel like he’s really starting to lock it in a little bit.”
In Sunday’s 10-6 loss in Baltimore, LeMahieu singled and walked twice. In Monday’s 5-2 loss to the Rangers in Arlington, the 32-year-old knocked a pair of singles and sent a long line drive to the right-field warning track, 101.7 mph, where Joey Gallo snared it — a “very DJ-ish” piece of hitting, Boone said, and his second triple-digit stroke of the night. Maybe he is starting to find something.
Then again, as LeMahieu played out his two-year, $24 million contract in 2019 and 2020, he never lost his hitting touch — hence his nickname. His consistently elite offense gave him a pair of top-five finishes in the American League Most Valuable Player voting. More to the point, it convinced the Yankees to double down on DJ, signing him to a six-year, $90 million deal in January.
Peak LeMahieu, combined with the extended injury absences of Giancarlo Stanton, significantly altered the Yankees’ offensive identity. Suddenly they weren’t strikeout machines, improving from third in the AL in 2018 to seventh in ’19 to 14th last year. They improved at hitting with runners in scoring position, from fifth (in OPS) in ’18 to first each of the two prior seasons (thanks, Baseball-Reference.com).
Through Monday’s action, the Yankees had climbed back up to seventh in strikeouts and dropped to 10th in those clutch situations. Not coincidentally, LeMahieu’s strikeout percentage had jumped from 9.7 percent in 2020 to 16.4 percent this year, while his .269/.387/.269 slash line with runners in scoring position — again, not terrible — marked quite the drop from his .364/.405/.455 in ’20.
Add it all up, and in its own way, LeMahieu’s fall must claim some responsibility, statistically if not morally, for the Yankees’ awful offensive beginning. And wait, there’s more: The Yankees need LeMahieu, who has publicly agreed with the notion that his ’19 and ’20 campaigns ranked as his top two in the big leagues, to be better not just to aid this club’s championship ambitions, but to validate the Yankees’ faith in him.
He agreed to a contract structure that would take him through his age-37 season in order to help his employer’s luxury-tax management with the understanding that he likely wouldn’t be an MVP candidate in his final year or two. The unspoken understanding of such a structure was that he’d continue his All-Star ways for at least the first half of the pact.
LeMahieu covered up for many organizational inadequacies the prior two years, as special players do. The Yankees sure could use some cover-up at the moment. Whether LeMahieu can turn back into The Machine might prove as serious an issue as any other this team faces.
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