About the Off-Season: Meanderings of My Mind

About the Off-Season: Meanderings of My Mind

By Tim Kabel

December 29, 2025

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The Yankees were eliminated from the postseason in the ALDS, so there will be no more games to recap until March of 2026. The off-season has not been very active for the Yankees thus far. Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner have only occasionally emerged from their hibernation to acquire fringe players or players who would have to work really hard to become fringe players. We are about to enter 2026 and there has been very little done to improve the Yankees from the team that was slapped around by the Blue Jays in the ALDS. If things do not change for the Yankees soon, 2026 will not look to be a very promising year for them. Since we will have a lot of free time on our hands waiting for Spring Training, I will be able to ponder and speculate about a variety of issues. I will now move from topic to topic as if I was my friend Roger on his way to a Bert Lahr look-alike contest. 

·      Rest easy, my friends. The Yankees have found the missing piece to their team. Success is guaranteed. As a belated Christmas present to their fans, the Yankees signed Nick Torres on Saturday. And they did it just in the nick of time. If you are asking yourselves, “Who is Nick Torres?”, you are not alone. It is quite likely that only Mr. Torres and his immediate family are familiar with him. He is the reigning Mexican league MVP. That entitles him to a lifetime supply of churros and apparently a contract with the Yankees. If it were me, I would settle for the churros. Torres is a 32-year-old right-handed hitting first baseman and outfielder. His last Major League affiliation was with AAA in 2018 for the Rangers. That was 8 years ago. Since then, he has played in the Mexican league where he flourished. Clearly, this was the move to make. Who needs Bo Bichette? Who needs Cody Bellinger? Who needs Corey Seager? The Yankees don't. They have Nick Torres. Could the signing of Roy Hobbs be far away? Just because he would be a morally ambiguous fictional character who would now be over 100 years old, that would not matter to the Yankees’ brain trust.

·      Today, my older son, Jack, is leaving for Basic Training in South Carolina. He joined the Army Reserves. The job market has been tough, so he decided to pursue this avenue. He will have a commitment of one weekend a month after he finishes all his training and will receive financial help to pay off his student loans. He took the process of making this decision very seriously, as he always does. He will be gone for nine weeks and then come home for a couple of days. Then he will go to Missouri for specific training for the job he will have in the Army Reserves. That will also be a nine-week program. He will not be able to have his phone during Basic Training so, I will have to write him letters. I think I can handle that job. Although it goes without saying that I will miss him, I will say it.

·      I woke up very early on Sunday morning and saw a notification on my phone that the Pittsburgh Pirates had signed Kazuma Okamoto.  I went back to sleep very disappointed. When I woke up, the report had been removed as it was inaccurate. Despite the signing of the great Nick Torres, I would still like the Yankees to sign Okamato.  However, it is beginning to look more and more likely that the Yankees will not sign anyone of consequence. Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner can talk all they want about being committed to improving the team but when they make no actual improvements, that is hard to swallow. Each passing day of inactivity by the Yankees front office makes it harder to believe that the 2026 team will be better than the 2025 team.

·      I received many very lovely Christmas gifts this year, as I always do. None of them were baseball themed, which is fine. My children gave me many wonderful gifts. My daughter and her boyfriend gave my wife and me a gift card to Murray's Cheese, I practically leaped around the kitchen like Charlie Bucket from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory singing “I've got a Golden Ticket.” My wife gave me an extremely beautiful sweater from the Pendleton Woolen Mills. It has one of their traditional Native American prints on it. She also gave me a very nice newsboy style cap from Boston Scally. In case you don't know, I collect two things, cats, and caps.

·      Now that Christmas has come and gone, we have a few days before the end of the year for the Yankees and other teams to make some moves. I suspect that there will be transactions beginning today through the end of the week, with a possible hiatus on New Year's Day. After all, Tatsuya Imai needs to be signed by January 2nd. I hope that the Yankees are among the teams making moves. I'm not overconfident in that hope but sometimes hope works better without confidence. Hope always worked very well with Crosby, but that's a different story.

·      Since most of the free agent relief pitchers of note have been taken off the market, it seems likely that if the Yankees do improve their bullpen, it will be through either trades or promotion from the minor leagues. It is possible that the Yankees could convert at least one of their outstanding young pitching prospects to a bullpen role. A third option would be to move someone from the starting rotation to the bullpen when Carlos Rodon and Gerrit Cole return from the IL. A lot depends on what, if anything, the Yankees do in the next few weeks. Signing Tatsuya Imai would provide a lot of stability to the starting rotation and facilitate a move of someone like Luis Gil to the bullpen. With the Yankees right now, there are a lot of things up in the air.

·      To say that this off-season for the Yankees has been a disappointment would be a major understatement. Things can change. The off-season is not over. There are still several star players who are not signed. The Yankees could step up and do something. The problem is that the Yankees have presented as if they are bumbling around in the dark, unable to find the light switch. They are looking for crumbs of bread while all the other teams are buying full loaves. That's what makes this so hard to believe. These are the Yankees. When I read this morning that Kazuma Okamoto had signed with the Pirates, I was crestfallen. It turned out not to be true but the mere thought that the Yankees could be outmaneuvered or beaten out for a player by the Pirates is preposterous. Now it may be true that the Yankees have no interest in Okamato. The question would be why not. The Yankees need to stop twiddling their thumbs on the sidelines and get involved in this off-season. Because as fans, it's hard to care about an organization that doesn't care about itself or its fans.