Joey Gallo’s time with the Yankees appears to be coming to an end. The MLB trade deadline is approaching next week, and the team has already acquired a new outfielder, Andrew Benintendi.
Although Gallo will most likely be wearing a different uniform in the near future, he knows he’ll remember his time in New York for the rest of his life.
Gallo has hit 12 home runs this season and has gone from starting outfielder to bench player, with his days in the Bronx numbered—though the timing and his next destination remain unknown. Gallo batted .159/.291/.368 for an OPS of .660 in 139 games for the Yankees last year, a significant drop from the .833 OPS he posted over seven years with the Rangers.
When the Yankees acquired Gallo, they had a large enough sample of his performance to realize that he was an offensively inconsistent player, defensively solid, and with a strikeout rate that was hard to pin down. Here’s the thing about Gallo: 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 those of previous years, and he continues to hit the ball hard when he makes contact. However, his slugging percentage and overall exit velocity figures are significantly lower, and his results do not match the power he appears to generate.
Gallo said Thursday that he doesn’t know what it means to “hit rock bottom” in baseball. With the possibility of being traded next week, Gallo seemed to be in a much better mood when he responded to a question about his poor performance with a deflated, “I’m just not good enough.”
Gallo arrived in New York from Texas, where he had been the team’s star player, playing in front of a crowd that cheered him on because he was a local talent, and he went on to have a handful of productive seasons.
Gallo is a self-aware player. He acknowledges that his contact skills are well below the league average and believes it’s essential to add value in areas such as baserunning and defense. He knows that his batting statistics are often boosted by a couple of scorching hot streaks—the kind he hasn’t had since moving to New York.
Most Yankees fans probably didn’t pay much attention to Joey Gallo while he was with the Rangers. When he was traded to the Yankees, he was the most promising player on the market and had just returned from the All-Star Game. It’s important to distinguish between viewing Gallo as the kind of player who hits and misses—which Yankees fans might confuse with Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton—and recognizing Gallo’s extreme tendency to strike out, as well as his tendency to take many desperate swings in an attempt to extend his home run streak.
Gallo is now trying to use his games in New York to help him develop as a player, stating that “there’s no other place where it’s going to be as hard to play as here, especially when I’m struggling.”
However, although he hopes to draw on his experiences in New York to be less influenced by criticism in the future, the reality is that the comments coincided with his poor performance.
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