It wasn’t so long ago that Spencer Jones was the shiny new toy in the Yankees’ family.
What was there not to love? Jones had a swing made for Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch, base-stealing speed, quick-twitch instincts in center field and a can-do attitude.
Optimists were calling the 6-foot-7 Jones a future Aaron Judge, but from the left side. The hype was building in spring training. The future looked bright.
Fast-forward to mid-July. The narrative has changed. After two stints with the Yankees, Jones is back at Triple-A where he’s awaiting a third call-up to the Bronx — or a trade before the Aug. 3 deadline.
Yankees moneyline is sitting at -104 on DraftKings for Friday’s series opener against the Dodgers. Our complete DraftKings Sportsbook review shows you how to sign up and use their platform.
Scouts say the Yankees would be wise to choose the latter.
“Trade Jones while he still has some value,” one talent evaluator wrote in a text message this week. “He’s Joey Gallo 2.0.”
Yankees fans don’t need an explanation. The memory of Gallo’s failure in pinstripes is still fresh. He was the slugging outfielder who, like Jones, had a powerful left-handed swing designed to launch home runs over the right field wall.
Instead, all Gallo did in parts of two seasons (2021-22) was swing and miss. While batting a combined .159, Gallo struck out 194 times in 501 plate appearances — a whopping 39%.
Jones’ whiff rate as a Yankee this year is eerily similar: 42%. He’s batting .233 in his two call-ups this season, with 34 strikeouts in 82 plate appearances.
General manager Brian Cashman has to decide in the coming weeks whether Jones has the potential to improve. Can he put the ball in play more often? If the answer is no — if Jones’ future is limited to home runs and strikeouts — it’s highly likely the Yankees will trade him.
While he has the power and athleticism to reach the seats at will, Jones has a huge upper-cut that leaves him vulnerable to high-velocity fastballs in the inner half of the strike zone, scouts say.
“It’s a pretty glaring hole,” another scout said of Jones’ cold zone. “(Opposing teams) have figured that out and Jones hasn’t made an adjustment.”
Jones’ advocates say it’s too soon to give up. They point to Judge’s struggle in his early Yankees years, believing Jones deserves the same organizational patience.
Judge’s K-rates in his first two seasons in New York (2017-18) were 30.7% and 30.5%, respectively. But his minor league numbers weren’t quite as acute. From 2014-2016, Judge struck out at a 25% clip.
Jones? He’s always been a swing-and-miss machine — at a combined 33% clip from 2022 to mid-2026. There’s enough data to believe that while Jones is no Joey Gallo — he’s a .272 hitter in the minors — Jasson Dominguez will be the better bet in the long run.
That’s the crossroads Cashman is facing. With Trent Grisham likely to leave as a free agent this winter, the GM has to decide whether he wants Jones or Dominguez in center field in 2027.
There are plenty of insiders who think Dominguez will prevail. If so, Jones may still have a fine major league career, but it won’t be on 161st Street and River Avenue.
Final thoughts on a disappointing All-Star Game
The Yankees should be proud of Cody Bellinger and Ben Rice for providing the cushion for the American League’s victory in the All-Star Game on Tuesday. Bellinger’s MVP award will look great on the back of his baseball card.
But the game itself was brutally boring for anyone other than Yankees fans. The fact that the National League’s best ballplayers could only manage three hits underscores the sport’s fundamental imbalance: pitchers are wiping out hitters.
I spoke to Yankees ace Gerrit Cole about this subject last week. He believes pitchers’ superiority will eventually become a marketing problem for MLB and will have to be addressed. The MLB-wide batting average is .244.
The great equalizer will be the robot umpires, who will inevitably replace human umps altogether. Once that happens, the robots can be programmed to call balls and strikes any way the game’s overlords desire.
“They’re going to make the strike zone smaller so offense gets back to where it was in 1980,” Cole said, referring to the season Kansas City’s George Brett batted .390.
The highest overall average was .271 in 1999, but it has mostly been trending downward since 2009.
Baseball needs to address a second, more insidious trend: making the marquee events inaccessible to many fans. The Home Run Derby drew only 5.3 million viewers, the fewest since 2003 (5.2 million).
The culprit was Netflix, which owned the rights to the event. Many baseball fans, especially older ones, don’t want to pay $26.99 a month for the streaming service.
Of course, the real villain is commissioner Rob Manfred, who doesn’t know (or care) that baseball is already the hardest sport to follow.
His term doesn’t expire until 2029, so there’s plenty of time to complete his mission — making the game as unrecognizable as possible to those who grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Manfred is instead obsessing over younger fans, splitting up as many games as possible across Amazon, Apple, and now, Netflix.
A word of advice to the commissioner: There’s a reason why the All-Star Game itself drew 8.79 million viewers – a 22% increase from last year.
It’s because the game was on Fox.
It was priced at the old-fashioned rate: free.
Read the original article on NJ.com. Add NJ.com as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
About the Author
