DJ LeMahieu's slump earns him spot on bench. Is this end of line for him with Yankees?
DJ LeMahieu #26 of the New York Yankees strikes out during the second inning against the Cincinnati Reds at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, July 2, 2024 in the Bronx borough of New York City. Credit: Jim McIsaac
This isn’t the fun part of the game — the part in which a player is forced to contemplate his baseball mortality.
And though he didn’t exactly come out and say it, you have to think it's at the forefront of DJ LeMahieu’s mind.
Here he is at age 36, a two-time former batting champion, with a .177/,270/.202 slash line. He’s got one of the slowest swings in the game, according to Baseball Savant, and his weighted on base average on pitches in the heart of the plate is an MLB-worst .143. In 124 at-bats, he has no home runs and 11 RBIs.
He has tweaked, he has tinkered, and he is frustrated. And on Sunday, on the heels of an 0-for-17 skid, those numbers earned him a spot on the Yankees' bench, with no public assurance from Aaron Boone that this was just a one-time thing.
That’s the right move, though hardly an easy one. But it’s also yet another indication that the Yankees aren’t as complete a team as they could be, and recently, the results are bearing that out.
“It hasn’t given me much hope, the last month or so,” LeMahieu said when he was asked if he thinks he can find a way out of this one. “As long as I’ve played this game, whatever challenge presented itself, I’ve always come out of it, one way or another. I keep showing up, keep working, and that’s gotten me a lot of success.”
It’s too bad, of course. LeMahieu is a steady clubhouse presence and well-respected in the sport, and he still has two more years and $30 million left on his contract. It’s possible he will turn it around — remember, he had an awful first half of the season last year and rebounded to hit .273 with an .809 OPS in the second half. But the Yankees no longer have the luxury of excessive hope, not when it comes to their third baseman or any of the other underperforming parts of their lineup. And not when they lost for the 20th time in 29 games on Sunday — this time 6-4 to the Rays — and are in a pivotal stretch.
But the problem isn’t just LeMahieu. It’s logistically easy enough to sit him down and give him time to navigate the mental and physical issues that could be causing his drop-off, or to figure out if the slew of lower-body injuries that have plagued him the last few years will prematurely shorten his career.
It’s also that the Yankees don’t have much in the way of alternatives. On Sunday, Boone slotted in Oswaldo Cabrera at third base. Despite the two singles he collected, that is an incomplete solution. Jon Berti suffered a setback while rehabbing his calf injury this past week, and a return isn’t imminent.
Add to that: It’s not as if the rest of the lineup can consistently pick up the slack. When Luis Severino said the Yankees have “two good hitters” at the moment, he wasn’t exactly wrong. Besides Juan Soto and Aaron Judge, every hitter in Sunday's lineup was hitting below .250. Alex Verdugo has been a near-automatic out of late, he and his teammates can’t seem to stop hitting into double plays, and as fearsome as it might be to face Soto and Judge, when no one else is producing, pitchers can work around them.
It’s the result of injuries, underproduction and shallow roster construction. But for all the slings and arrows (and boos) LeMahieu has taken from fans, he’s just a symptom of a larger problem: The Yankees, right now, desperately need to lengthen their lineup, among other issues. And with the trade deadline looming, their shopping list is on the long side for a team with one of the best records in baseball.
Recent events have proved that a corner infielder should be a top priority. In a best-case scenario, they’d nab the Rays’ Isaac Paredes, who plays first, second and third and hits with power, but not only would the hypothetical price be exorbitant for a player who’s under team control through 2027, it’s an intra-division trade that could bite the Rays in the future.
None of this is to say that the Yankees should go the Aaron Hicks/Josh Donaldson route and DFA LeMahieu — certainly not yet. He missed the first two months of the season with a broken foot, and though he says he’s not hurt, he still could be trying to coax more stability and power from the lower half of his body. But they also have to mentally prepare for the possibility that they can’t fully rely on the bodies they have on the 26-man roster — not for a deep October run, at least.
“It’s tough, it’s definitely tough,” Judge said. “You never want to be in this situation. We’ve got a lot of guys in here with some good track records of what they’ve done over the past couple of seasons, so it’s definitely surprising, but we’ve got work to do.”
That’s the thing with track records, though. They tell you only what happened in the past. And the Yankees might need a little more than that to shape a brighter future.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.