Manage your account
…
The New York Yankees have acquired third baseman Ryan McMahon from the Colorado Rockies on Friday in exchange for pitching prospects Griffin Herring and Josh Grosz, the team announced on Friday.
[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Football league for the 2025 NFL season]
The 30-year-old McMahon, who has played his entire nine-year MLB career with the Rockies, is hitting .217 with 16 home runs and 35 RBI in 100 games this season. A 2024 NL All-Star, he's in the fourth year of six-year, $70 million deal signed in 2022. He has a $12 million base salary this season and is due $16 million in both 2026 and 2027.
While McMahon has shown pop at Coors Field, his hitting away from Colorado has been a different story. The new Yankees third baseman has a career batting average of .216 and career OPS of .665 on the road, compared to .263 and .821 at home. He has hit .146 in 41 at-bats with one home run and six RBI in his career at Yankee Stadium.
The Yankees had been seeking help on the left side of their infield, with D.J. LeMahieu designated for assignment earlier this month and Oswald Peraza and Jorbit Vivas struggling to chip in. Arizona Diamondbacks slugger Eugenio Suarez had been rumored as an option, but the two teams were reportedly unable to get close to a deal, according to Jon Heyman.
The Yankees are 56-46 and sit 4.5 games behind the Toronto Blue Jays for first place in the AL East. They've come out of the All-Star break struggling, with a 3-3 record, having just lost two of three to the Blue Jays. They begin a seven-game homestand Friday against the Philadelphia Phillies.
For the Yankees, this is an absolute no-brainer, as predictable as a deadline deal can be. The hot corner has been an abyss of woe in the Bronx for a while now; McMahon fills that need. He’s no superstar, but that’s fine; the Yanks just needed a capable humanoid at third. It’s a glove-over-bat profile because while McMahon makes a ton of hard contact, he’s immensely whiff- and strikeout-prone. Perhaps that changes now that he’s free of Coors Field and all its wonkiness.
For the Rockies, this qualifies as a shocker. Despite the franchise’s sustained run of non-competitiveness, they’ve been incredibly averse to trading away players they view as cornerstones. For other teams, completing trades of any kind with the purple mystery in the mountains is considered quite a chore. Perhaps this trade is a sign that Colorado, jolted awake by its historically bad 2025, is pivoting from those isolationist ways. Perhaps they just really liked Herring and Grosz. — Mintz
