The Yankees' acquisition of Andrew Benintendi from the Royals ahead of the trade deadline just about guarantees what has been assumed for a long time: Joey Gallo's days in New York are numbered.
New York acquired Gallo from Texas in July of 2021 hoping he would become a source of consistent, left-handed power to balance out a lineup featuring right-handers Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, D.J. LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres. But from the moment he arrived, things went south. In his 58-game stint in 2021, his OPS dropped from .869 with the Rangers to .707 with the Yankees. Through 81 games in 2022, it's a paltry .621.
As he prepares for an eventual exit from the Bronx, Gallo told The Athletic's Lindsey Adler he knows the criticism he has received from Yankee fans has been earned.
“I feel bad,” Gallo told Adler. “It’s something I’m gonna have to really live with for the rest of my life. It’s going to be tough. I didn’t play well, I didn’t live up to expectations. And that’s a tough pill to swallow.”
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New York is a challenging place to play, as Gallo acknowledged, as the expectations are high and poor play sours the fanbase quickly.
But what went wrong with Gallo in pinstripes? The Sporting News takes a look at the numbers.
The expectations
The Yankees knew when they traded for Gallo they weren't getting a future batting champion.
At the time of the deal, Gallo was hitting .223, which would have been the second-best batting average of his then-seven-year career behind only the .253 he posted in 2019. That one season, however, certainly was an outlier, as no other season had Gallo posted a batting average north of .210.
But Gallo was the mold of the three-true-outcome hitter. He had back-to-back 40-home run seasons in 2017 and 2018, and outside of a down year in 2020, his slugging percentage had never dipped below .490. While the strikeout rates were always north of 35 percent, he consistently walked at rates at least 12 percent to keep his on-base percentage above .300.
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He was also at his best when facing right-handed pitching. From 2017 to 2020, Gallo launched 78 home runs against right-handers with a .835 OPS and .501 slugging percentage.
During that same time, the Yankees as a team had only 216 home runs by left-handed batters against right-handed pitching, per Stathead, which ranked 18th in baseball, with a .438 slugging percentage (16th) and .776 OPS (14th). Those numbers aren't bad, but these are the Bronx Bombers, and it was a clear weakness in an otherwise powerful lineup. So making a trade for a few prospects wasn't a bad exchange to address that weakness.
The reality
The problem quickly became that while New York knew it was getting an inconsistent batter, it wound up getting one whose cold streaks were becoming more frequent.
Since coming over from the Rangers, Gallo has twice had streaks of at least 16 consecutive games with at least one strikeout, tied for the most in MLB with Franmil Reyes. His swinging-strike rates and plate discipline numbers got worse, as did his batted ball numbers.
It is a bad sign for a power hitter when their soft contact rate goes up, their hard-hit rate goes down and their infield fly ball rate takes a drastic upward shift. It's also not a good sign when a batter is swinging outside the strike zone more and making contact out there less.
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Gallo chasing outside the strike zone is nothing new. Since his first full season in 2017, he has ranked in the first percentile of whiff rate per Baseball Savant in each full season except for one, when he was in the fifth percentile.
But up until 2022, his average exit velocity was also always among the best. In 2017 and 2018, he was in the 100th percentile. In 2020, he was in the 85th percentile. In 2021, he was in the 87th percentile.
In 2022? He's in the 35th percentile. His barrel rate is in the 98th percentile, but when he isn't putting barrel on ball, he has been unable to drive the ball as hard.
All this has meant that his carrying trait, his ability to hit home runs, has become more inconsistent than in years past. Gallo has always been streaky, but since arriving in New York, he has had seven streaks where he went at least seven consecutive games without hitting a home run, including a career-long 23 games from Sept. 22, 2021, to April 24, 2022, according to Stathead. Between 2017 and when he was traded in July 2021, he had 10 such streaks in 515 games. He has been with the Yankees for 139 games.
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There is still plenty of reason to believe Gallo can turn things around. He's only 28 years old, he still walks a ton and his max exit velocity and barrel rates show that he is still capable of driving the ball when he makes contact.
But things haven't worked in New York, and Gallo is the first to admit that. Maybe he just needs a change of scenery, and to have the pressure of the New York spotlight taken off him.
“When I see my numbers, I feel like I’ve played better than that,” Gallo told Adler. “There are a couple of things mechanically that I think I could have been better about monitoring. Baseball is a weird game. You can be doing something slightly wrong, and in baseball you just start doing it every day, and it starts to become a habit you don’t notice. I just feel like something here got out of rhythm, out of whack.”
