About the Off-Season: Bargain Basement

About the Off-Season: Bargain Basement

By Tim Kabel

February 4, 2026

***

I think it's fair to say that most of the fans and commentators around the Yankees view the fact that the Yankees offered Trent Grisham a $22.025 million contract which he subsequently accepted, as a blunder by the Yankees. The prevailing thought seems to be that the Yankees didn't think Grisham would accept the offer and were hoping that he wouldn't. Their main focus was not losing a draft pick for him if he signed with another team without the QO. The fact that it was not going to be a premium draft pick didn't really seem to matter. 

That Grisham accepted the offer seemingly had and will have a ripple effect on the Yankees off-season and the 2026 season. The Yankees did re-sign Cody Bellinger, Amed Rosario, Ryan Yarbrough, and Paul Blackburn. They did not sign anyone who was not on the team last year. Is that because they have to pay Grisham over $22 million for 2026? Quite likely, that is the case. After all, Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman are sitting up at night counting coins like Silas Marner. Hal does not want to spend excessively. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, he would prefer not to. That's fine, but when they committed $22 million to Grisham, that meant the belt would have to be tightened in other places.

Therefore, all the free agents that many of us thought and hoped the Yankees would sign, Bo Bichette, Tatsuya Imai, Kazuma Okamoto, and others went elsewhere. The Yankees are not even making trades for players with higher salaries. The Yankees have seemingly exhausted their 2026 budget with the moves they made and one of the largest moves was bringing Grisham back.

Here's where it gets interesting. On Monday, Brian Cashman made comments regarding the Grisham signing. He stated, “At this point, that $22 million looks like a bargain the way the free agent market got away from everyone on a one-year basis.”

Cashman further stated that he and his staff believe that Grisham's 2025 season was “real and sustainable and that Grisham is an offensive and defensive player for the Yankees moving forward.”  I think it would be fair to say that Grisham’s 2025 season was a bargain. He earned $5 million. Grisham batted .235 with 34 home runs and 74 RBI in 143 games. That was a very solid year. Was it a breakout year that is likely to be sustained? I'm not so sure.

In Grisham’s first three seasons, with the Brewers in 2019 and then the Padres in 2020 and 2021, he batted .231,.251, and .242. 2020 was the year of COVID so those numbers must be looked at differently. 2021 was the closest he came to playing a full regular season, as he played in 132 games. That season, as noted, he batted .242 with 15 home runs and 62 RBI. Other than the home run totals, 2021 was a comparable season to 2025 for Grisham.

I think it would have been reasonable and fair to characterize 2021 as a breakout season for Grisham. After all, he was a part-time player in 2019 and 2020 was a truncated season. Well, what happened after that?

In 2022, Grisham played 152 games and batted .184 with 17 home runs and 53 RBI. In 2023, in 153 games, Grisham batted .198 with 13 home runs and 50 RBI. In his first year as a Yankee, Grisham reverted to being a part-time player, playing only 76 games. He batted .190 with 9 home runs and 31 RBI.

So, after a year in 2021 that was comparable to the season that Grisham had in 2025, he had three awful seasons for the Padres and Yankees. Cashman and his analytics staff are banking on the fact that 2025 is an actual breakout season, as opposed to 2021. That seems to be quite a leap of faith and may be a very strenuous effort of justifying the qualifying offer.

Grisham’s defensive numbers regressed in 2025. He was a Gold Glove winner in 2020 and 2022. In 2025 his -2 outs above average was second worst among qualified center fielders. His defensive runs saved statistic was even worse. He scored a - 11 performance. When he was with the Padres, Grisham was a light-hitting defensive whiz. Last year with the Yankees, he was a defensively limited center fielder with a decent batting average. The fact that I am characterizing .235 as a decent batting average shows where things stand in the Major Leagues today. Fred “Chicken” Stanley batted .238 in 1976, after all. Grisham provided a considerable amount of power last year.

Let's look at it another way. Grisham earned a $17 million raise off his season in 2025. That is a tremendous raise. I am struggling to find any way to view Grisham’s contract as a bargain. I don't think it is. The only good thing about it is that it's for one year. At least, the Yankees didn't do with Grisham what they did with Aaron Hicks. They did not reward him with a seven-year contract. I have to check and see if the Yankees are still paying Hicks. I know they are paying DJ LeMahieu.

The point is that Brian Cashman is trying to justify the fact that the Yankees are on the hook to Grisham for $22 million this season. Obviously, if the Yankees didn't want Grisham to accept the qualifying offer and were only doing it to preserve a draft pick, Cashman would never admit it. He would be foolish to do so. However, he seems to be working overtime to tell us all how fortunate the Yankees are to have Grisham in the fold. Well, he had better be right because with Grisham in the fold, no one else came into the fold other than Cody Bellinger, who was in the fold last year. There were no upgrades from last year's team.

Many years ago, we had a relative who stayed with us. She brought home a bunch of Bar-S hot dogs which were on sale at the grocery store. They were purportedly made from some type of meat. She told us what a bargain they were. She must have purchased 10 pounds of them. Well, after she took a bite of the first Bar-S hot dog, she began to realize that it might not be such a bargain after all. Unfortunately, there were still 87 more hot dogs to go.

I hope Trent Grisham’s 2026 contract does not turn out to be a package of Bar-S hot dogs.