How did Gleyber Torres and the Yankees get to this point?

One of the biggest dominoes in the Yankees’ relative fall from grace — which has sparked an urgency in Brian Cashman to find a new shortstop — is Gleyber Torres’ sharp decline.

Two years ago, as a 22-year-old wunderkind, Torres boomed 38 home runs with an .871 OPS and 125 wRC+, all placing him in the top five among shortstops. In making his second All-Star team and guiding the Yankees within two wins of a World Series appearance, Torres was anointed as one of the faces of the new shortstop generation. Since then, he’s been lapped by players like Trea Turner, Fernando Tatis Jr., Tim Anderson and, within his own division, Xander Bogaerts.

The consensus is that Torres is done as the Yankees’ shortstop, and his status with the team at all might be in peril. It’s not difficult to imagine a world in which the Yankees sign a shortstop in the coming months as well as a first baseman, two areas Cashman has singled out as needing help. If that happens, the only spot for Torres is second base, and DJ LeMahieu will have something to say about that. Other teams would certainly be interested in Torres, who turns 25 in just over two weeks and comes with three more years of club control, should the Yankees plop him on the trading block.

Torres’ jarring transition from burgeoning MVP candidate to depreciating trade chip is enough to give a person whiplash. The Yankees got to this point due to back-to-back seasons of immense disappointment that engulfed Torres on both sides of the ball. The 2020 campaign was wonky for plenty of people, but Torres followed that up with another disaster in 2021.

THE OFFENSE

Those 38 home runs in 2019 came in 604 plate appearances. Since then, Torres has taken the batter’s box 676 times and cleared the wall in just 12 of them. His nine home runs in 2021 was an unthinkable outcome for anyone who watched him lay waste to opponents in the playoffs two years ago. In the 2019 ALDS against the Twins, Torres hit a cool .417, with his five hits in the series consisting of three doubles, a home run and a single. In the next round against Houston, the hot streak continued. Though the Yankees lost in six games, Torres had two long balls and six RBI.

That was the last time anyone saw Torres punish the ball at a consistent rate. It’s worth noting that he was splitting time between second base and shortstop in his first two years, when the lofty expectations began. After Didi Gregorius packed his bags for Philadelphia, Torres became the everyday shortstop, and coincidentally or not, his skills deteriorated. His on-base percentage boosted as Torres took more walks in 2020, but a shocking 167-point drop in slugging percentage started the alarm bells. That was the same year where Torres started hitting the ball on the ground more and pulling the ball less, zapping much of his home run power.

Those trends continued in 2021 as his fly ball rate reached an all-time low of 36.2%. Fewer fly balls obviously means fewer home runs, but the nature of those fly balls was fundamentally different as well. In 2021, his home run to fly ball ratio dive bombed all the way down to 6.9% after sitting comfortably above 15% for both of his star-making years.

The best indication of just how much Torres’ bat has deflated comes from wRC+. The FanGraphs statistic uses 100 as its baseline average. From 2018-19, Torres had a 123 wRC+, meaning he was 23% better than league average. That number put him ahead of Turner, Anderson, Javier Baez and Marcus Semien.

In the 2020-21 seasons, Torres has a 97 wRC+. Zoning in specifically on last season, Torres’ wRC+ was below Arizona’s Josh Rojas and Kansas City’s Nicky Lopez, fellow shortstops who aren’t exactly household names.

THE DEFENSE

It’s bad.

Starting with the most recent season, when the wheels fell off, were stripped of their hubcaps and sold on the black market, Torres made the third-most errors of any qualified major league shortstop. Among that group, he was tied for third in both throwing and fielding errors, leaving no saving grace in any aspect of his glovework.

The advanced defensive stats put Torres in a body bag as well. Defensive Runs Saved, which attempts to quantify how many runs a fielder saves above an average fielder, had Torres as the second-worst shortstop in the game. According to that metric, Torres cost the Yankees 10 runs last season. At shortstop, Torres has been a negative in each year of his career, totaling negative-24 Defensive Runs Saved at the position since 2018.

According to Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), which looks at each batted ball and determines how often it is fielded by an average player at the same position, Torres was graded at negative-2.6. That’s right in line with Torres’ UZR numbers from 2018 and 2019, but in 2020 he was a truly atrocious negative-5.0 in 40 games at the infield’s most important position.

By Statcast’s Outs Above Average, Torres was third from the bottom at negative-9, meaning an average shortstop would have produced nine more outs given the same plays Torres had within his range. In that category, he was closer to the very last player on the list (former teammate Gregorius at negative-17) than he was to zero. Outs Above Average viewed Torres as equally inept on balls to his left as he was on balls to the right.

All of these ingredients went into FanGraphs’ analytics oven and gave Torres a 1.7 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in 2021, two years after cooking up a 3.7. In the last 25 seasons of Yankee baseball, the only shortstop to make 400 plate appearances in a season and come out with fewer than 1.7 WAR was Derek Jeter in 2014, his age-40 season.

It’s fair to say that Gleyber Torres will not receive the same opportunity to play shortstop in the Bronx until he’s 40.