Baseball is a game of repetition. You play 162 games over about six months, leaving very few days to catch your breath. Schedules are littered with long road trips, homestands, and stretches where you see a team several times in a short window due to travel schedules. We saw that recently, as the final six games of the season series with Toronto was condensed into a 10-day span in mid-to-late August, where one particular player caught my eye for the wrong reasons.
We’ve all heard the term “Yankee
killer”, originally coined by Frank Lary’s dominance over the team during his time in Detroit from 1954-64. In the decades since, many players have embodied the role of being a villain in the Bronx, from George Brett to Ken Griffey Jr. to Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz to Jose Altuve, and on and on we go. No organization has been more synonymous with the term than the Yankees in all of professional sports.
But it’s not always the superstars that, for some reason, love to get their game off with the pinstripes on the other side. Before his extremely brief stint with the Yankees earlier this year, Randal Grichuk embodied that, hitting 13 home runs in 35 games from 2018-19 while with the Blue Jays. Even since then, he always seemed to get a big hit in the few times he found himself against the Yankees.
That brings me to Brett Bateman, a little-known Cubs prospect who was sent to Toronto in the Kevin Gausman trade a few weeks ago and who has quickly grown into the leadoff hitter for a disappointing Blue Jays team that’s trying to be the least mediocre of the seven teams in the race for the final AL Wild Card spot.
Bateman has been good all month, but he’s been especially annoying as part of a Jays team that embodies what he does: slap hitting. He went 9-for-24 across six games, numbers that somehow felt lower than I thought. He currently has a .769 OPS, but if you remove the games against the Yankees, it drops to .676. Is this small-sample conjecture? Sure, but it got me thinking about other guys with inconspicuous careers who’ve, for some reason, tortured the Yankees. For the sake of recency, let’s look at some examples since 2010:
Jonny Gomes (2003-15)
Gomes spent the bulk of his career playing prior to 2010, but his longstanding dominance against the Yankees continued through the end of his big-league days. He was never a bad hitter, having a career slashline of .242/.333/.436 with a 106 OPS+ across 1,300 career games with seven teams as a solid starting outfielder for a decade, being a particular terror against lefties.
As someone who started his career in Tampa Bay and had multi-year stints in both Boston and Oakland, he got to see the Yankees a lot. In 290 career plate appearances against the Bombers, he slashed .292/.384/.531 with 15 home runs and 48 RBIs in 81 games. Comparing it to his performances elsewhere, no team with a similar sample size against him saw him replicate those numbers, nor did he ever hit more homers against anyone else.
It wasn’t consistent dominance, but more condensed in individual seasons. Take 2005, his rookie season with the Devil Rays, where he slashed .349/.509/.648 across 13 games. When he got to Boston, he relished his ability, hitting .323 with nine extra-base hits in 20 games in The Rivalry.
Evan Gattis (2013-18)
You had to put some form of Astro here, and while many of them are too talented overall to be here (Correa, Altuve, Springer, etc.), one of the more underappreciated parts of their 2017 championship narrowly fits my billing is Evan Gattis, who only played six years in the league with Atlanta and Houston, but made the most of his unlikely ascent.
A guy who mostly played catcher and DH, Gattis didn’t play too many games against the Yankees, but more than excelled in them. Across just 18 games and 70 plate appearances, he slashed a ridiculous .312/.386/.672 with six home runs and 17 RBIs, particularly torturing them in the two seasons the two teams squared off in October in 2015 and 2017.
In 2015, his first season in Houston, he went 11-for-26 with three home runs in seven games, including a two-game stretch where he blasted a grand slam one night and two homers the next. His 2017 was much calmer, but he had the distinction of scoring the pennant-winning run when he homered off CC Sabathia in the fourth inning of Game 7 of the ALCS in an eventual 4-0 win.
Adam Eaton (2012-21)
My brain had never compartmentalized most of these guys as Yankee killers, but I vividly remember just how random Adam Eaton’s dominance against the Yankees was. Eaton was better known for his spectacular defense, but he was a good hitter in his own right, posting a half-decade of good offense for the Chicago White Sox throughout the mid-to-late 2010s before sputtering out in Washington (though he did win a title in 2019).
But for a guy who had a 108 OPS+ for his career, the numbers he put up in 27 games and 109 plate appearances were just silly. Eaton slashed .394/.444/.525 in his career against the Yanks, posting the highest batting average of any player ever against baseball’s most storied franchise, min. 100 plate appearances. He did it with tremendous consistency, never hitting worse than .364 against them in any year of his career until his last in 2021.
Yet, his inclusion here was partially predicated on a Mandela Effect moment I had that I didn’t realize until afterwards. I vividly remember him robbing a home run at Rate Field in or around 2018 against the Yankees, but I might just be connecting how much he dominated us with the bat to his stupendous defense.
Ezequiel Duran (2022-)
If you’re going to do a list of under-the-radar Yankee killers, you have to include a former prospect who has since burned the team every time he’s gotten a chance to get revenge. That’s certainly the case for Ezequiel Duran, a fine utility player down in Texas who was one of four prospects traded there in the July 2021 Joey Gallo trade. Since then, he’s done a solid job in his role for the Rangers and an even better job of hitting his former team.
It’s only 67 plate appearances across a few seasons, but Duran is hitting a blistering .450, also the highest of any player with that kind of sample in MLB history, against his former team. While it’s hard to find the big hits by some of these guys against the Yankees, Duran has a good bunch of them.
He’s had a great 2026, but this is a guy with a career OPS under .700 who’s arguably been the best pound-for-pound hitter against this particular team since he entered the league. His 232 wRC+ against the team is only beaten by Richard Hidalgo since 2000 (min. 50 PA).
Richie Palacios (2022-)
I’ll end with a fun active player who plays for a division rival that has been extremely annoying for the Yankees, basically the Bateman prototype. You might not think Palacios, who’s been on the Rays since 2024 after brief stints in Cleveland and St. Louis, has been that good against the Yankees, but you’d be surprised.
A player who has a career OPS of .682, Palacios is slashing .347/.429/.531 across 18 games and 56 plate appearances, almost entirely concentrated in the last few seasons. The Brooklyn native hit two home runs against New York in 2024, but has settled for the peskier approach the last two seasons, flicking singles all around the field to continue the Rays style of hitting.
