Yes, another pivotal New York Yankees season. What else would we be signing up for? It feels like every year since 2017, the team has been faced with future turnover questions as early as spring training.
Brian Cashman further constructed this 2024 roster to live like there’s no tomorrow, and that’s very much the case for many players on the 40-man roster. Yes, guys like Juan Soto, Alex Verdugo, Gleyber Torres and Clay Holmes are free agents after the season, but they don’t fall into the category of “fighting for their futures.” Their futures might not be in New York, but they’ll have plenty of life beyond 2024.
Some other players won’t be so lucky. They might get outright tossed off the roster. They might have to take a demotion. They might be subjected to minor-league deals the rest of their careers. They might be straight up unwanted when all is said and done.
The early going of spring training is crucial for a few of these players to establish their footing for 2024. Others will get a chance to make their case for the entire season. But the struggle is real for many well-known Yankees players.
7 Yankees who are fighting for their futures heading into the 2024 season
Everson Pereira
Pereira’s situation with the Yankees is very much unfair, but such is life in New York. The Yankees have no time to waste, and if the top outfield prospect can’t figure out his bat at the big-league level, he will be discarded rather quickly.
That said, Pereira should not be judged by his one-month sample size in the big leagues last season. That’s not a proper assessment, not for anybody. But it also doesn’t help he made a glaring defensive miscue early on this spring and is batting .222 with a .639 OPS in his seven games so far.
The outfield is already set with Soto, Verdugo, Aaron Judge and Trent Grisham (and Jasson Dominguez returning midsummer). The clock is ticking for Pereira to at least make himself a palatable option for 2025.
Oswaldo Cabrera
Yankees fans want nothing more than Oswaldo Cabrera to succeed in pinstripes. When he helped spark the team down the stretch in 2022, many were excited about his future. In 44 games, the versatile slugger hit .247 with a .740 OPS. That’ll play.
But then came 2023. The cursed season. Everyone was terrible, but Cabrera was especially bad. Despite most of his experience coming as a middle infielder, the Yankees, who refused to address their outfield heading into 2023, thought Cabrera would be a viable solution, and they thought wrong.
Cabrera’s returned to infield duty this spring, but he’s 1-for-21 across eight games. Spring stats don’t necessarily matter most of the time, but if a player needs to make an impression they do. And this certainly doesn’t help.
Oswald Peraza
How about another Yankees top prospect with no discernible future? Ask any Yankees fan and they’ll probably tell you Peraza should have been traded the moment Anthony Volpe won the starting shortstop job last year. Why? Because his value was only set to decrease as a part-time player at the big league level or if he was wasting away at Triple-A.
And here we are. A few Peraza errors this spring, zero hits in seven at-bats, and a shoulder injury have thrown his Yankees (and baseball) future fully into flux. The Yankees promoted him to MLB first, then put him in a “competition” with Volpe, who was always the top choice for shortstop, and have left him role-less without a paddle.
The classic Yankee way of handling prospects. Now Peraza’s future couldn’t be more up in the air. And his 2024 showing feels like it’ll be more of a nail-in-the-coffin-type deal rather than a building block.
Ron Marinaccio
Onto the pitching staff! Let’s talk about another former prospect whose value inexplicably plummeted overnight. Ron Marinaccio … what is happening?!
The right-hander put up a sterling 40-game showing in 2022 — 2.05 ERA, 3.20 FIP, 1.05 WHIP and 56 strikeouts in 44 innings. He looked like the real deal and an immediate integral piece for the bullpen. That year, the Yankees demoted him in July for … no reason? We still don’t know why. Thankfully, he kept his composure and performed admirably when he returned.
But a shin injury ended his 2022 season right before the playoffs. It also was still affecting him in 2023. And he regressed hard. He finished with a 3.99 ERA, 4.69 FIP and 1.31 WHIP in 47.1 innings, but that wasn’t even the worst part. A cold stretch saw him sent down to the minor leagues for the remainder of the year, and at Triple-A he logged an 8.80 ERA and 1.96 WHIP in 15.1 innings. He walked 18 batters and struck out only 13.
This spring? The 28-year-old has allowed five runs on five walks and five hits across 3.2 innings. It’s very much unclear how he fits into the 2024 picture.
Jonathan Loaisiga
And then there’s Johnny Lasagna, who has a terrific arsenal but can never stay healthy. He’s of the few Yankees in a contract year that actually needs to prove something. The Yankees sound fairly fed up with his inability to stay on the field, too. We thought he was going to be non-tendered because of it.
Outside of the shortened 2020 and the disastrous 2021 season, Loaisiga has either been ineffective or unhealthy. Once called the “Yankees’ future closer,” that couldn’t feel further from the truth at this very moment.
He’s healthy heading into 2024, but elbow concerns shut him down in 2023 and there’s just no possible way his future performance can be projected. If Loaisiga doesn’t put up serviceable numbers or can’t stay healthy this year, his future in the sport might be in doubt. His Yankees career is probably done, for what it’s worth.
Giancarlo Stanton
Feels like this is it for Big G, right? If the Yankees want to maximize their current window with Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole still in their primes, they simply cannot lock Stanton into the DH spot for another THREE years (from 2025-2027).
Conveniently enough, here comes the Marlins subsidizing as part of the trade agreement back in 2017. Miami will kick in $30 million across Stanton’s final three years, which brings his AAV down to just $22 million from 2025-2027 (and that includes his $10 million buyout in 2028). Yeah, terrible trade, terrible contract, terrible everything.
Not Stanton’s fault, though. The Yankees knew what they were getting into when they acquired a 28-year-old with a lengthy injury history who had just signed the largest contract in North American sports history at the time of the trade. New York has gotten 2.5 serviceable seasons out of the slugger, and the other 3.5 have been dreadful thanks to injuries and overall poor offensive play.
Again, Yankees fans would love nothing more than to see Stanton succeed and be Judge’s bash brother, but it just hasn’t worked out. The two have spent more time not in the lineup together, in fact.
Over his last 211 games (2022 and 2023), Stanton is batting .201 with a sub-.300 on-base percentage. That’s just downright unacceptable, and if he’s not logging reps on defense, he can’t be occupying a spot in the lineup that would otherwise help the Yankees exercise more flexibility.
If Stanton can’t improve or stay on the field in 2024, we’d bet he’ll either be released or traded come the offseason.
Aaron Boone
Boonie. In a contract year. Again. We thought (most hoped) the Yankees would let the relationship naturally end after the horrific 2021 campaign, but Boone instead received a contract extension.
Now, is Boone the problem with the Yankees? No. Does he help elevate the Yankees? Also no. Fans have yearned for a more disciplinarian-type of manager, but that’s just not who Boone is. He’s a players guy, and that’s not going to change.
That said … there’s no logical reason he should get another chance after 2024 if this team figures out a way to fail spectacularly with this roster. And we’d probably say anything short of a World Series appearance should seal his fate, unless there are injuries galore and this roster is a shell of itself late in the campaign.
Boone’s in-game management isn’t perfect, but he’s also not actively holding this team back with his decision making. It’s not his fault the front office has failed to acquire the right personnel over the last few seasons. It’s not his fault they forget to hit when the calendar flips to October.
But this is it. These are the stakes. Sweeping changes will be required if the Yankees flame out once again. A new voice will be needed, or else it’ll be the same old disappointing Yankees this fanbase has watched since 2010. It might not be fair, but he’s heading into his seventh season as the team’s skipper, and most don’t even get a chance to last half as long.
