At 24, Gleyber Torres is the second-youngest player to take an at-bat for the 2021 Yankees, older than only Estevan Florial. Just two younger players, the Blue Jays’ 23-year-old Bo Bichette (140) and the Padres’ 22-year-old Fernando Tatis Jr. (110) have logged more major league games at shortstop than his 108.
Young players need time to figure themselves out, even on the Yankees, who in turn need time to learn who can do what for them.
Torres, however, never figured out shortstop at the major-league level, and the Yankees pulled the plug on their commitment Monday when they outlasted the Twins at Yankee Stadium, 6-5 in 10 innings, with a starting lineup that featured Torres at second base, DJ LeMahieu at third base and Tyler Wade at shortstop. From the way Aaron Boone spoke about this shuffle before the game, it sounds highly unlikely that Torres — who had made four errors in nine games at short since returning from the injured list — will return to the prime position this season, which in turn means he’s probably done being an everyday player there altogether.
This therefore becomes a failed two-year venture. Over the next three weeks, we’ll see how costly a venture it was. If this wasn’t too late, will it prove too little?
“I feel like this is something that hopefully will take a little bit of weight off him as we move forward now,” Boone said of Torres.
Like Gary Sanchez and (it might feel hard to remember now) Giancarlo Stanton, Torres’ low points — be they defensive, offensive or on the bases — seem to possess considerable legs in media/fan conversation circles. Boone noted that, too, saying on Monday, “One play becomes such a storyline that lasts a long time, which I think at times has been really unfair.”
Could be, yet any fair assessment of Torres’ defense at shortstop, which he took over full-time following Didi Gregorius’ departure to the Phillies for 2020, showed his work to be below average, or below even replacement level. Torres never compensated for his obvious lack of range (a liability that afflicted newly inducted Hall of Famer Derek Jeter for the majority of his career) with reliable hands (a Jeter strength, to put it mildly). And when you have a shortstop who neither gets to many balls nor consistently handles the ones he does reach, well, that’s not much of a shortstop. Throw in Torres’ alarmingly declining offense — he owns a .349 slugging percentage for 2021, whereas he slugged .535 in ’19 — and you don’t have much of anything.
If Torres can’t pick it up offensively at second base — he went 0-for-4 Monday, although he scored the winning run from second, as the ghost runner, on Gary Sanchez’s single — then he should just be sidelined altogether. Deploy LeMahieu at second, Urshela (who replaced Wade at shortstop late Monday after Anthony Rizzo pinch hit for Wade) at third base and Wade and Andrew Velazquez (once he can be recalled) at shortstop. With the Yankees fighting for their playoff lives, the time for growing pains has ceased.
As for the Yankees’ future at shortstop, well, we’ll have time to tackle that many more times before a resolution arrives. That the Yankees weren’t willing to wait until their offseason to do the same shows just how dire a situation this had become.
Should the Yankees fall short of the postseason, it’ll be eminently fair to wonder how much they cost themselves sticking as long as they did with Torres, who needed to develop defensively and hit in order to justify the Yankees’ faith and ultimately did neither. All parties in pinstripes will hope to mitigate such judgments by smoothly executing this quick change, which is undefeated after one game.