Good afternoon everyone, it’s time to dive back into the mailbag and answer some of your questions. The season is unfortunately over, which means we’ll be rolling the mailbag back to bi-weekly shortly,
but for now we’ll remain at our current pace to go over the postmortem. Remember to send in your questions for our weekly call by e-mail to pinstripealleyblog [at] gmail [dot] com.
The Hall Monitor asks:
Anthony Volpe is due to get his first arbitration raise before the season starts. Some models estimate he’ll get a raise from the ~$900k he made this year to about $3.9 million. Question 1) Does that number seem right to you, or does his bad 2025 bring it down? Question 2) Because Volpe is still relatively “cheap” at that number and you could probably spin a narrative around him that “the tools are still there, and he suffered from the injury but now he’s all better and he just needs a change of scenery,” would you try to trade him?It’s in line with what a position player that has started in all of his pre-arbitration years would earn, but I’m sure the actual number will be haggled over as the Yankees try to trim off a few hundred thousand dollars or so. They’ll have ample evidence stat-wise to try and trim the hedges, though Volpe’s camp will also have ammunition as the front office has been at the forefront of declaring their confidence in him over the years. As for a trade, it doesn’t sound like that’s likely — both because the team doesn’t have great options to replace him this offseason, and because they wouldn’t get much selling on him while he’s at the lowest point in his career.
A change of scenery argument is nice for a team that wants to pick him up on the cheap, but it isn’t going to compel them to send the Yankees any prospects of value, and the injury only adds to the worries going forward that Volpe might not be as durable as he seems, because the numbers in his first two years don’t imply that a healthy Volpe will be much of a game-changer. Sure, the start of his 2025 was promising, but that’s not going to be enough for the Yankees to get enough back to warrant giving up on a player they’ve invested this much into already. No, 2026 will be the make-or-break year for Volpe in pinstripes, and he may not even have the full year this time around to make his case.
Don H. asks: Hal says you should be able to win the World Series with under a $300 million payroll. Except that for the last 16 years, he hasn’t. The Dodgers now have more than a $400 million payroll, signing Glasnow, Snell, and Yamamoto — pitchers the Yankees passed on or were outbid for, deeming them too expensive. So, would you advise Hal he needs to spend another $100 million to do what the Dodgers have done and compete cash for cash with them, and try to reach or be close to the World Series each year like they are, or do you think the Yankees should stay under $300 million, save Hal some millions by being under the luxury cap, and take their chances this drought doesn’t go on for another 16 years?
Far be it from me to say Hal Steinbrenner shouldn’t spend more money on the team, as our collective body of work on this site has suggested that the solution to the Yankees’ struggles in October lies in going for those top-flight free agents that the team passed on in so many years. It’s not my money, and the Yankees will charge an outrageous amount for tickets and chicken buckets no matter what the payroll is, so by all means dump $100 million into some good choices over spreading that money out in the long run on mediocre players that flame out.
But we’ve had that talk ad nauseum at this point, so let’s actually talk about Hal’s side of the argument. Because I do agree, you should be able to win a World Series with a payroll under $300 million — so long as the rest of the league is interested in signing their players for what they’re worth, and not letting the Dodgers swipe them all up. Much was made about the Dodgers’ free agent bonanza last year, and how they built a roster that has survived a boatload of injuries to simply get healthy and start rolling over the best teams by record in the postseason, but the league is complicit in allowing the Dodgers to buy buy buy. There are so many teams that should have the room to expand their payroll, whether it be as they’re moving into contention or just in general after years of penny-pinching, but few actually rise to the occasion and do more than give their franchise player a big extension. Many even falter at that.
We saw teams like the Orioles make confounding payroll decisions last offseason after charging into the playoffs for the first time in years, only to flounder in 2025 with their patchwork moves failing to support the core they’d built. We’re seeing it already this offseason, with the Tigers and Tarik Skubal reportedly historically far apart on contract extension talks despite the reigning Cy Young Award winner putting on a potential encore performance this year. Teams already treat the luxury tax like a cap, with the exception of a handful of teams that treat it like a crime that they’re committing by being in the tax, while many others proudly run out payrolls well below what they could afford. The upcoming CBA negotiations after 2026 will be a bloodbath, and the threat of a lockout costing games in 2027 is real, but using the Dodgers’ success as a cudgel to bash the union into agreeing to a cap is laughable when this issue is a problem of the owners’ creation. If Hal Steinbrenner wants a world where the Yankees compete for titles without investing Dodger money, then he can start by pushing his peers to compete as well. He won’t.
DeanJS asks: Rank order innings prediction for 2026: Schlittler, Gil, Cole, Warren, Schmidt?
I think the order as you laid it out is close, but Cole will end up with more innings than Gil. Cole is only supposed to miss about the first month of the season, and while there’s no guarantee that he’s going to return and immediately be the Gerrit Cole of old, I imagine the Yankees will let their ace work his way back into shape once he has his sea legs under him. On top of that, while the Yankees certainly need Luis Gil in this rotation at the start of the year he could be one of their biggest trade candidates at the deadline if they want to dip into an area of strength to shore up a different part of the roster. It’s not the most likely solution, as they do have some prospects coming up the pipeline that either need to force their way into playing time or get traded, but it’s on the table considering the team looked at a Gil-for-Kyle Tucker trade last offseason that got canned when Houston requested even more.
