Yankees Slugger Aware Poor Defense Needs Fixing

The one person who knows this glaring, yet rare, weakness in his game is Grisham himself. He says he was actually keeping track of where his metrics were over the course of the year.

"It's not something I've ever really had to worry about," Grisham said, according to MLB.com's Bryan Hoch. "When there's enough data in the middle of the year, I like to know where I am in the pack as far as center fielders go. I knew I was down toward the bottom of the list that year. I took that personally this offseason and wanted to get better. It was more mentally putting a chip back on my shoulder to get that edge again."

A Reason for the Poor Numbers?

A hamstring injury may have been one explanation why Grisham had such lackluster metrics. Still, it isn't something that he is going to blame for what happened. To him, he was healthy enough to play, so he didn't want to make that excuse.

"I felt good enough to go at the end of the day and play," Grisham continued. "Maybe I was not quite 100 percent, but it wasn't really about that. It was about wanting to be out there and playing, and I felt like I could do a pretty good job out there."

Grisham's Outlook for 2026

Now the question with Grisham will be whether he can recreate that 129 wRC+ season. The Yankees will say they have the utmost confidence in him, and that's why they put that qualifying offer on him, even if many will say they were surprised he accepted.

There's reason to believe his season wasn't flukey, though. His .370 xw0BA and .498 xSLG were both in the 91st percentile. He had an average exit velocity of 91.1 MPH, which was in the 75th percentile. His 14.2% barrel rate was in the 89th percentile.

While good offensive metrics under the hood aren't always predictive of what the next season could look like — especially when a player has never hit that way — they're at least one thing to look at when wondering whether a player ran into a few and had a flukey season. In Grisham's case, that didn't happen. The rate at which he walloped baseballs on the back of his baseball card aligns with the underlying data.

If Grisham can be close to what he was at the plate, and then also be a good centerfielder, there's no reason he can't be a four or five-win player by WAR. At that point, he becomes a bargain in what would likely be his final year with the Yankees.

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