Our long national night-meh is over, folks.
Cody Bellinger is back in pinstripes, inking a five-year, $162.5 million contract to shore up the lineup behind Aaron Judge, and hedge some of the very real downside risk the club holds while rostering Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, and Jasson Domínguez. It’s the resolution to a very long standoff, with the Yankees holding firm on their offer for a couple months and the Mets seeming to drop out of the bidding on Tuesday night with their acquisition of Luis
Robert Jr. from the White Sox.
It’s funny, then, that the Yankees seem to have re-upped with the player type that the popular media covering the team has said they’ve always needed. Bellinger’s 13.7-percent strikeout rate was the lowest of any Yankee last year — no qualifiers attached. If you stepped into the box in a Yankee uniform, you struck out more than Cody did last year. He also can capably play all three outfield positions, including arguably being a better center fielder than the incumbent Trent Grisham.
Without a single home run to left field, Bellinger is also the perfect fit for Yankee Stadium III. His underlying Statcast metrics indicate his ability to pull fly balls should have netted in a couple more long balls than he hit in 2025. One thing that I’m starting to look closer at in evaluating players is how they manage fastballs — pitchers today can do so many evil things with breaking pitchers, almost everyone seems to have multiple offerings on the cutter-slider-sweeper spectrum. Once you lose the ability to catch up with heat, you become exploitable across multiple fronts.
To his credit, Bellinger is still in the 75th percentile of run values against both four-seam fastballs and sinkers. This gives him a pretty reliable floor over the next half-decade. Being competent against hard stuff allows a hitter to be more aggressive early in counts, when you are still more likely to see fastballs and pitches in the zone, while Bellinger’s strike zone awareness and ability to make contact out of the zone, key to his low strikeout rate, hedge some of the weaknesses hitters display against the nonsense breaking stuff modern pitchers offer.
So he’s the ideal player, at least when we consider the charges levied at Yankee teams in the Aaron Judge era. They strike out too much, they can’t reliably hit once the opponent gets past the captain, they give away runs on defense that leave them behind the 8-ball over and over. Bellinger is a solution for all three critiques, and yet this signing isn’t really considered some landmark deal.
How much of this is Bellinger’s fault compared to the club overall? I’m tempted to say it has more to do with the way the roster is currently constructed:
There’s nothing wrong with this lineup per se, it’s just returning the same group we would have seen in like, mid-September last year, with everyone a year older to boot. It’s hard to imagine the Yankees being a better team in 2026 than they were in 2025 just because Cody Bellinger is back — but with less than three weeks before pitchers and catchers report, the time to continue improving seems to be running out.
