Yankees Temperature Check: Who’s for Real and Who Is Not

Last night the Yankees got a great game from Carlos Rodon, Anthony Volpe flashed some leather, and Trent Grisham came through with (another) clutch hit, leading to a 1-0 win. That puts the Pinstripes at 13-7 on the season, and atop the AL East Division. That means we’re essentially one eighth of the way through the 2025 season, which is still far too early* to take anything meaningful from numbers, but let’s take a look anyway for fun.

(*Tom Tango, in his great book “The Book”, details with data that even after 100 PA, there’s still a lot of variances in how players are performing vs what their actual results are. As of this writing, Aaron Judge leads the team with only 90 PA.)

If you’ve read my stuff previously, you know that I value expected statistics. Actual results, although obviously massively important to wins and losses, don’t necessarily tell you as much about player performance as many believe. If we look at what the player is actually doing, and compare it to his results, we can learn a little bit more about their performance, both past and future to a certain extent.

We’ll skip past the numbers and analytics nomenclature and just do the short version today. When results are put aside, and we only look at quality of PA and take randomness out of the equation to the extent we can…

• Aaron Judge and Ben Rice have been monsters.
• Trent Grisham and Paul Goldschmidt have been very good, but Goldschmidt’s success is not sustainable.
• Jazz Chisolm and Oswaldo Cabrera have been “OK”, but Jazz has not been the beneficiary of good fortune – Waldo has.
• Volpe has not been “good”, but as I previously noted here, so far in ’25 he’s been better than he was in his first two seasons.
• Austin Wells also has not been good, but he’ll be fine.
• Jasson Dominguez has been awful – there is still reason for concern there.
• Cody Bellinger has not been good either, but not nearly as bad as his results suggest.

Again, with the caveat that we’re talking about fewer than 100 PA, here’s what I suggest your take home messages should be:

1. Ben Rice is the real deal. Not the Ohtani/Soto level deal that he’s been so far, but his ability to control the zone and his power aren’t going away.
2. Don’t buy in on Goldschmidt’s and Cabrera’s successes yet.
3. Grisham was always better than people realized, Bellinger was never as good as people thought he was.
4. Wells and Jazz are going to be fine – worry about Dominguez.

They’ll all be taking on the Rays again today, with Carlos Carrasco on the bump for the road grays. The Bombers will take their cuts off the Rays’ Shane Baz, who I assure you, is no joke.

First pitch, 4:10.

Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments, or yell at me on the “My Baseball Page” on Blue Sky.

Recommended reading: “The Numbers Game“. Phenomenal book about the history of baseball statistics. Spoiler alert: Arguments about baseball stats are not new, in fact most have been going on for over a century.

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