DJ leaving New York? Say it ain't so

DJ LeMahieu is one of the best free-agent signings the Yankees have ever made. Now they might lose him to free agency. It is as good a place as any to start talking about what LeMahieu has been to the Yankees, and what they might lose if they decide they can’t afford to keep him, even though he has been their best player since they got him for $24 million and two years after he left the Rockies.

Once it would have been unthinkable that the Yankees would allow somebody who is now a finalist for the American League Most Valuable Player Award to walk away. It might happen.

“I want to stay here and I’ve said that a few times,” LeMahieu said at the end of the season.

LeMahieu hit .364 in the short season, despite being on the IL at one point with an injured thumb. By the way? The Yankees were 2-7 in those games. He hit 10 home runs in 50 games with an on-base percentage of .421 and a slugging percentage of .590 and an OPS of 1.011 -- this after hitting .327 with 26 homers and 102 RBIs the year before.

LeMahieu is every bit the MVP candidate that fellow AL finalists José Abreu and José Ramirez are. Whether he wins the award or not – and I honestly believe he should -- you have to know that a Yankees team that many felt was good enough to win the World Series wouldn’t have even made the postseason without him.

LeMahieu can play three positions, though his real position, if you watch him day after day, is simply "baseball player." For two seasons, he has been the Yankees’ star. Not Aaron Judge, not Gleyber Torres, not Giancarlo Stanton. Luke Voit led the world in home runs in the shortened season. All LeMahieu did was hit for a higher batting average than any second baseman in Yankees history -- the highest since Tony Lazzeri’s .354 in 1929 -- and become the first man to win a batting championship in both leagues.

LeMahieu is also just 32 years old, he has a shift-proof swing and he is a great teammate and total pro. And he may end up leaving, maybe to another team in the American League East, maybe even to the Mets, who have a new owner with money to burn, and who is burning to spend it.

Judge hasn’t been able to stay on the field and neither has Stanton, who just exercised the option on the rest of the $325 million contract the Yankees absorbed when they traded for him. Torres, who was supposed to be the infield star of the present and future, one of the Baby Bombers, also couldn’t stay on the field this year and ended up hitting .243 with just three homers in 42 games. LeMahieu? He just won his second straight Silver Slugger Award. Their MVP. Maybe the league MVP.

LeMahieu’s last manager in Colorado, for two years, was Bud Black. I asked Bud about DJ on Wednesday and this is what he said:

“DJ is a player who truly understands how to play the game of baseball. He has great in-game instincts and a feel for what the game is telling him. He checks all the boxes of a winning player.”

Paul O’Neill, great Yankee, was not a free agent when Gene Michael got him from the Reds before the 1993 season in the trade that sent Roberto Kelly to Cincinnati. But O’Neill, now a broadcaster on the YES network, was made for the Yankees from the moment he showed up at the old Stadium and began to play the game with the same quiet professionalism that LeMahieu does. O’Neill carried himself with an old-Yankee grace, did everything possible not to draw attention to himself and had a feel for what the game was telling him. His career flourished in New York. So, too, has LeMahieu’s.

A year ago, when it was all on the line for the Yankees against the Astros in Game 6 of the AL Championship Series, it was LeMahieu who kept his team’s season alive with a two-run homer, one of the most dramatic home runs any New York Yankee has hit lately in October.

LeMahieu has now played in four postseason series as a Yankee. He hit .286 in a 2019 Division Series against the Twins. Then he hit .346 in the ALCS against the Astros. He hit .300 against the Indians this year in the Wild Card series. Finally, he hit .273 against the Rays in the 5-game ALDS that the Yankees ended up losing.

We know the Yankees are trying to stay under the competitive balance tax. We know they want to spend on starting pitching, because they always do. We know that Francisco Lindor is a sexy trade possibility for the Yankees and just about everybody else. It would be a trade that would make a lot of noise, the kind of the Yankees have always liked.

LeMahieu doesn’t make a lot of noise. He just came to New York and quietly became the best Yankee. The Yankees never lose a player like this. Now they might. It is, in the words of “The Princess Bride,” inconceivable.