‘I Didn’t Live Up to Expectations,’ Says Joey Gallo of His Time With the Yankees

Sunday July 31, 2022

Joey Gallo’s tenure with the Yankees appears to be coming to an end. The MLB trade deadline is coming up next week, and the team has already added a new outfielder Andrew Benintendi.

While Gallo will most likely be wearing a different uniform in the near future, he knows that he will remember his New York time for the rest of his life.

Gallo is hitting 12 home runs this season and has progressed from starting outfielder to bench player with a ticket out of the Bronx, though the timing and next destination are unknown. Gallo hit .159/.291/.368 for a .660 OPS in 139 games for the Yankees last year, a significant drop from the .833 OPS he had in 7 years with the Rangers.

The Yankees had a large enough sample size of outcomes when they acquired Gallo to understand that the player was offensively streaky, defensively solid, and came with a difficult-to-watch strikeout rate. Gallo is as follows: He has an uppercut swing, and he’s a left-handed pull hitter.

Gallo is a player with a number of statistical anomalies. This season, his contact and strikeout rates are similar to previous years, and he continues to hit the ball hard when he makes contact. However, his barrel rates and overall exit velocity numbers are significantly lower, and the results do not correspond to the power he appears to generate.

Gallo said Thursday that he doesn’t know what “rock bottom” in baseball looks like. With the possibility of a move out within the next week, Gallo appeared to be in a much better frame of mind, when he responded to a question about the poor results, deflated response: “I’m just not good enough.”

Gallo came to New York from Texas, where he was the star of the team, playing in front of a crowd that gave him grace because he was a homegrown talent, and he eventually had a handful of productive seasons.

Gallo is a self-aware player. He recognizes that his contact skills are far below league average and believes it is critical to add value in areas such as baserunning and defense. He understands that his season hitting stats are usually boosted by a couple of scorched-earth hot streaks, the likes of which he hasn’t had since moving to New York.

Most Yankees fans probably didn’t pay attention to Joey Gallo while he was with the Rangers. When he was traded to the Yankees, he was the hottest-hitting name on the trade market, and he had just returned from the All-Star Game. There is a distinction to be made between understanding Gallo to be a swing-and-miss type of player — which Yankees fans might mistake for Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton — and recognizing the extreme strikeout tendencies Gallo brings, as well as enduring many hopeless at-bats to reach the homering hot streak.

Gallo is now attempting to use his struggles in New York to help him develop as a player, stating that “there’s no other place that’s going to be as difficult to play in as this place, especially when I struggle.”

However, while he hopes to use his New York experiences to become less swayed by criticism in the future, the reality is that the feedback matched his poor results.

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