Along with increased bullpen usage, three true outcomes taking over the batter’s box and the stolen base going the way of the dodo bird, there’s been another trend that’s taken over Major League Baseball recently.
Each of the last six teams to win a ring have had a top-flight shortstop manning the prized position. The six most recent starting shortstops to win it all (Carlos Correa, Xander Bogaerts, Trea Turner, Corey Seager, Dansby Swanson and Jeremy Pena) all inhabited the upper class of their position at the time of their life-changing victory. All six are still among the best of the best, too, with the first five members of that group now under contract for a combined $989 million. Pena, just 25 years old with a World Series MVP, Championship Series MVP and Gold Glove already in his clutches, is certainly blazing a trail toward a different tax bracket as well.
The path to a trophy goes through a brawny shortstop. That much has been clear since Correa slugged .562 with 14 RBI in the Astros’ 18 games on the way to their first title. As a nascent 22-year-old, Correa completely warped the idea of what a foundational shortstop could be. The position was definitely already shifting bigger and badder when Correa laid waste to the Yankees in the 2017 ALCS, and once the championship was secured, there was no turning back. The future of baseball was all about having a shortstop who’s built like a strong safety, taking the torch from Cal Ripken Jr. and Alex Rodriguez and running with it all the way to the bank.
The Yankees’ incumbent shortstop is not one of those guys. Since his debut season in 2018, nobody who’s made at least 2,000 plate appearances has a lower slugging percentage than Isiah Kiner-Falefa. While slugging is not part of his game — and he, the Yankees and every coach game-planning against them knows this — the unfortunate reality for IKF and players of his ilk is that they are rarely part of a championship equation anymore. To be a shortstop on a contender is to be someone that’s expected to put at least 20 balls over the fence, lock down the left side of the infield and send fans flooding to the team store to buy their jersey.
If you see any No. 12 pinstripe jerseys at Yankee Stadium, they’re probably holdovers from the Alfonso Soriano era, not an appreciation of Kiner-Falefa.
Those six most recent World Series winners at shortstop also overlap entirely with the Yankees’ championship window. When Aaron Judge announced his presence with 52 home runs as a rookie in 2017, and Luis Severino emerged as a baby-faced assassin atop the pitching rotation, it was clear that the Yankees had some pieces in place that could help them bathe in confetti again. But as that period started to take shape and Gleyber Torres was anointed the shortstop of their dreams, it didn’t take long to realize that Torres was better suited as a Dan Uggla-type, a second baseman who’d pack a punch but rarely stand out on defense.
That’s how the Yankees ended up with Kiner-Falefa in 2022, a man hailed for his glovework but prone to a few nauseating at-bats per week. He is the type of player a team succeeds despite, not because of. The 2022 Yankees also won 99 games and a playoff series, nothing to sneeze at, but not quite the kind of year that meets the city’s skyscraping expectations.
If the Yankees do put their pennant drought to bed while keeping Kiner-Falefa at shortstop, it will be because of their stacked pitching staff canceling out the bottom-of-the-order hitting woes. If they stay healthy, Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodon, Nestor Cortes and Severino are a strong enough concealer to hide the blemishes on other parts of the Yankees’ face. The Giants of the 2010s are the most pertinent recent example of a team that rode consistently able pitching and just enough offense to the mountaintop. These Yankees have more top-to-bottom talent than those teams did, but the game has changed dramatically since the 2014 Giants won by hitting just two home runs in seven World Series games. No longer can a team like the 2015 Royals shock the world by being full of offensive shortcomings and cruising on sacrifice flies and small ball.
The Yankees occupy an interesting place between those pitching-heavy Giants and scrappy Royals, though. This is a team that scored the most runs in the American League last season, even with the shortstop’s turn at bat doing very little to help accomplish that. They’ve done most of the things that a contemporary contender is supposed to do: prioritize home runs, create an indomitable bullpen, sign their superstars to long-term deals. They just don’t have a shortstop, the one thing that every team that’s outlasted them in the last six years has.
That’s where the burgeoning prospects come into play. It’s very possible that Oswald Peraza or Anthony Volpe could be Jeremy Pena, the question is how likely that is to happen, and when. If either shows they’re as close to a finished product as Pena was in 2022, the Yankees are cooking. If they show that they need more reps in the minors — a very predictable outcome for two guys that are 22 and 21 years old, respectively — the Yankees are back to trying to buck the recent trend of World Series winners being partially carried by their shortstops.
As parts of last summer clearly demonstrated, Judge can’t do this all by himself. Support from the sixth through ninth spots in the batting order is the missing ingredient here, even more so if the starting pitchers and bullpen perform as well as they’re expected to in 2023. A team with an IKF-level offensive shortstop hasn’t won the whole thing since the mid-2010s, when Alcides Escobar and Addison Russell’s lackluster bats were masked by other parts of their roster.
In the years since, Correa and Seager-types have been en vogue, with perhaps nobody understanding that better than the people standing on the sidelines watching their competition host parades. To get off the sidelines, the Yankees either need to find one of those Correa or Seager types as soon as possible (if only they had been available!), become so pitching dominant that they can spare part of the offense, or pray for a miracle.
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