The Yankees can’t lose DJ LeMahieu in free agency and they shouldn’t proceed with Gleyber Torres at shortstop. This seems like an irresolvable problem.
Unless, that is, we look around the infield and make a difficult choice to identify the weakest of four strong links. Then we realize that the Yanks could tighten their defense by re-signing LeMahieu to play second base, moving Torres to third base, trading Gio Urshela and bringing in a shortstop like Andrelton Simmons or Brandon Crawford.
This would all be much easier if the Torres experiment at shortstop had simply worked. But scouts and metrics agree that it hasn’t. Torres seems to be lacking in some basic skills and instincts like knowing when to cover the bag -- odd for a player who came up in the minor leagues as a shortstop -- and doesn’t have the range that is ideal for the position.
The Yankees make up for some of the range issues with data-driven positioning. Still, the end result this year was not good; Statcast had Torres in the bottom two percentile in outs above average.
Most evaluators believe that Torres is best suited to play second base. But that’s LeMahieu’s position, and the Yankees need his bat and quiet leadership. A year ago, the Yankees considered trading Luke Voit to create more lefty-right balance in the lineup. Doing so now would achieve a different objective in freeing up first base for LeMahieu. But Voit has emerged as a star, and should probably stay.
That leaves Urshela as the odd man out if the team wants to keep both LeMahieu and Torres. Although we’ve grown accustomed to watching Urshela make exceptional plays at third base, the advanced stats tell a different story, ranking him behind 80 percent of MLB third basemen in outs above average.
Urshela has also become a productive offensive player, a great find by the Yankees’ front office. But how valuable is he going forward? Perhaps the best answer to that comes in the answers we got about his trade value while reporting this column, which can be summarized as “not great.”
The idea of moving Urshela would not be to get a haul back, unless he’s part of a larger package that Brian Cashman cooks up to, say, improve the starting rotation. The point is to free up third base for Torres -- a position that scouts believe he could play capably.
Imagine how much smoother the Yankees would look with more athletic defense up the middle. This year, every regular in those positions -- Gary Sanchez, LeMahieu, Torres and Aaron Hicks -- graded out below average. Something has to change.
How about signing Simmons (many moons ago, by the way, the Yanks tried to pry both he and Jason Heyward from Atlanta). Or trading for Crawford, who happens to be Gerrit Cole’s brother-in-law?
One idea the Yankees should not and likely will not consider is bringing back Didi Gregorius to play short. Last winter, the team viewed Gregorius as a winning player who had simply lost too much of his first-step quickness. This year in Philadelphia, his defensive metrics and underlying hitting numbers were fairly ghastly.
The Yankees begin their pro scouting meetings soon, perhaps next week. That’s when Cashman listens to his scouts and analysts kick around ideas like this one. Until then, we won’t know what the team plans to do. But we do know -- and we trust that they know -- that they need to get creative to improve their defense up the middle.