Examining the Yankees’ recent history with position player development

Since 2015, the first post-Derek Jeter year, only four of the Yankees’ best 20 position players by Wins Above Replacement were originally signed or drafted by the team.

You could probably guess that Aaron Judge and Brett Gardner are the top two. They are, in fact, the top two players on the list overall, regardless of being homegrown or not. Gary Sanchez checks in at fourth, and then after sifting through the likes of Aaron Hicks, Chase Headley and even Jacoby Ellsbury, we find Kyle Higashioka as the only remaining member of the top 20 who has spent his entire career in the Yankee organization.

The list demonstrates many things. For one, the Yankees are getting most of their offensive juice from free agency or trades. DJ LeMahieu will go down as one of the club’s better free agent pickups of the 21st century, while trades for Giancarlo Stanton, Gleyber Torres and Didi Gregorius led to a bevy of beautiful baseball moments.

But the top of the list also shows us how much recent turnover the Yankees have had, due in large part to fielding several rosters that skewed to the older side. Judge, LeMahieu, Stanton, Torres and Hicks are the people in the top 15 who are still on the team. Five of the remaining ten (Gardner, Headley, Ellsbury, Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran) have retired. Starlin Castro, who holds the distinction of being the Yankees’ tenth-best position player since Jeter left, has one foot out the MLB door as well.

The other glaring part of the list is not about who’s present, it’s about who’s absent. A huge chunk of those youngsters that helped create the Baby Bombers nickname flatly did not pan out. There’s no Miguel Andujar, Greg Bird, Jackson Frazier, Estevan Florial, Tyler Wade, Rob Refsnyder or Tyler Austin (all of whom were former top ten prospects in the system) among the top 20 WAR accumulators. Jorge Mateo and Thairo Estrada, who were also both considered top ten Yankee prospects at one point of their minor league careers, have become extremely useful players, but for the Orioles and Giants.

Turning unproven glitz into major league glamor has been an institutional failure for the Yankees in recent years, at least on the position player side. While they hit it out of the park with Judge (no pun intended), they don’t have many other feathers to put in their development cap. Cracking that top 20 isn’t even necessarily a tall order either. A mere 47 games from Matt Carpenter — albeit 47 games full of the leather-skinned Texan making Yankee history — were enough to earn him 2.3 WAR and the last spot on the top 20 bus.

The fact that Frazier — who, like Torres, started his professional career with a different organization before getting traded to the Yankees as a minor leaguer, so wasn’t technically a fully homegrown player, or Bird, who hit three homers during the 2017 playoffs and just 12 more in his career thereafter — never worked out casts some doubt about the Yankees’ ability to handle their current prospect situation. Every player is different, obviously, but there’s more than enough evidence here to wonder whether Jasson Dominguez and Anthony Volpe are destined for the same fate.

Frazier was once slotted as highly as 24th on MLB.com’s league-wide prospect rankings, and while Dominguez is still somehow only 19, he’s yet to ascend that high. The main message is that no matter how many superlatives scouts are putting on a dude’s scouting report, they need the help of their organization’s development system to make sure they sprout correctly. The annals of baseball history are littered with can’t-miss teenagers who ended up missing severely. Even as they reach their twenties and show more polish, that leap to the big time can dirty a player up very quickly.

This is of high importance to the Yankees of today, but even more so for the Yankees of the future. There’s no way around it: the difference between simply being perennial AL East champions and potentially American League champions hinges on how well the prospects take over at shortstop and left field. Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Volpe’s ceilings are separated by many, many stories. Going from Hicks to Dominguez could, if the latter enjoys the fruitful development that evaded many of his forefathers in the Yankee prospect darling camp, be the equivalent of going from tinned sardines to fresh caviar.

Given how long they’ve been playing chicken with the Pirates in trade talks for outfielder Bryan Reynolds, plus the clear reluctance to shop for long-term shortstop help, all signs point to the youngins getting their training wheels off this year. A season full of Oswaldo Cabrera, Oswald Peraza and perhaps, eventually, Volpe, should be a welcome sight for Yankee fans. The only way to know what you’ve got is to let them actually play, something that doomed Andujar and Florial as they decayed on the bench. Every other position on the diamond is mostly in good shape, especially if LeMahieu is healthy enough to regularly start at third base over Josh Donaldson. Shortstop and left field are the question marks, and the plan clearly involves a few under-25 studs.

Whether those players follow the Judge and Gardner roadmap or end up in the Frazier neighborhood (the one-of-a-kind redhead played in 228 games for the Yankees and was worth -0.3 WAR) will determine much of the Yankees’ next five years. No pressure, kids.

If anything, the pressure really lies in the prospect farmers across the front office, which now includes former Yankee developmental whiz Brian Sabean again, who can’t afford another period of their minor-league hitter harvests returning unusable crops.