Yankees stock watch: Gleyber Torres starting to regain power; first-round pick breaking out in minors
Plus lefty Nestor Cortes has emerged as New York's secret weapon
By
Mike Axisa
•
8 min read
Nearly four months into the 2021 season, the New York Yankees are 48-44 with a plus-7 run differential. They've won seven of their last 10 games to climb to within 3 1/2 games of the second wild card spot. The Yankees are three games into a season-defining stretch in which they'll play 14 games against the Red Sox and Rays before the trade deadline.
Two weeks ago we looked at Gerrit Cole's and Aroldis Chapman's struggles since the foreign substance crackdown and the club's lack of lefty production. Here are three new notable Yankees trends.
Torres regaining power?
Over the weekend Gleyber Torres did something he had not done since the 2019 postseason: he hit a home run in back-to-back games. He last did it in Game 3 of the ALDS and Game 1 of the ALCS in 2019. The last time Torres went deep in back-to-back regular season games was Aug. 23-24, 2019. Here are his two weekend home runs:
In 2019, Torres smashed 38 home runs in 604 plate appearances in his age-22 season, his first full season as an MLB player. In 2020-21 combined, Torres has only eight home runs in 488 plate appearances, and he's slugging .340. His power has completely vanished the last two seasons and, at least publicly, the Yankees attribute the power outage to swing mechanics.
"Well, I'll go back to some mechanical things within his hips that I think are a factor," Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters, including NJ.com's Randy Miller, after Torres hit a home run Saturday. "He probably hasn't completely unlocked or mastered or gotten back to where he's in that good, strong powerful position consistently."
Torres remains a disciplined hitter. His strikeout rate (19.8 percent), walk rate (11.9 percent), and chase rate (22.5 percent) are all better than the MLB average (23.7 percent; 8.9 percent; 26.8 percent). Swing decisions are not the problem. Torres simply has not hit the ball with authority much this year, at least not up until recently.
Here are Gleyber's month-by-month average exit velocities. He was well below the 88.2-mph league average the first three months of this season. As far as driving the ball is concerned, July is the first month this year that is on par with 2018-19.
Torres has hit only 33 balls over 95 mph this season but 11 of the 33 have come within the last four weeks. Exit velocity is not everything but it's not nothing either. It's not a skill you can fake -- you can fake being a .300 hitter for a month, but you can't fake hitting a ball 100 mph -- and the harder you hit the ball, the more likely it goes for a hit. That's been true since the dawn of baseball.
Two home runs in one weekend are not nearly enough to say Torres has regained his 2019 power stroke. Hardly. At this point though, the Yankees are looking for any positive signs from their young cornerstone, who looked to be in the Ronald Acuña Jr./Fernando Tatis Jr. echelon two years ago, and is now almost a reclamation project. The two homers were a good sign. Now we'll see whether Torres can build on them as the Yankees enter a crucial stretch of their season.
"I think we've seen some glimpses of (the power returning)," Boone told Miller. "He just missed the ball that he hit to the fence [on Friday night]. I thought he had some really good, aggressive powerful passes [last weekend] in Houston. Hopefully the power follows, but more importantly right now I just want him to have really good at bats and be in a position to help us win ballgames."
The Yankees' secret weapon
Last week the Yankees lost several key players to a COVID-19 outbreak, including their best player (Aaron Judge), their starting third baseman (Gio Urshela), and their ace setup man (Jonathan Loaisiga). They also lost swingman Nestor Cortes Jr., and on the surface, Cortes would not seem to be a significant loss. After all, he came into the season with a 6.72 ERA in 79 MLB innings.
The man they call Nasty Nestor is a significant loss, however. The Yankees called him up to help their bullpen in late May and he's since allowed four runs (three earned) in 25 2/3 innings, including one run in eight innings (while on a pitch limit) spread across two spot starts. Last weekend Cortes shut the high-powered Astros out across 4 2/3 innings.
"He was huge for us tonight, just like he's seemed to be every time he pitches for us," Boone told reporters, including MLB.com's Bryan Hoch, after the game.
Cortes has a 1.05 ERA and the various performance estimators (FIP, xERA, etc.) say he "deserves" an ERA in the mid-2.00s given his strikeout and walk rates, and the quality of contact he's allowed. At some point he'll allow a home run (Cortes faced 100 batters without allowing a home run in the first half, 13th most in baseball) and the ERA won't be quite as shiny.
That said, Cortes has shown legitimate improvement this year. His strikeout rate was 21.7 percent from 2018-20. This year it's 31.0 percent. His average exit velocity allowed dipped from 87.4 mph the last three years to 85.8 mph this year. And, most notably, Cortes is throwing harder. Check out his average fastball velocity by month:
"I think my stuff has gotten a little better. My command has gotten a lot better too," Cortes told Hoch. "I think that's what's working for me most. A lot of people think I'm a crafty lefty, which I am to a certain point, but I think my pitches have gotten a little crisper."
Cortes is indeed a crafty lefty. He doesn't throw hard (even with the added velocity this year, his fastball is averaging 90.6 mph) and instead relies on a deep arsenal and funkiness. Cortes varies his delivery (sometimes to the extreme) and arm angles, and gives hitters a different look pretty much every pitch. Even when he's pitching poorly, he's entertaining watch.
For a crafty lefty, going from 87-88 mph to 90-91 mph is huge, and it helps explain the significant uptick in Cortes' strikeout rate. He is damn near impossible to predict given all the arm angles and shimmies and whatnot, and now hitters have to respect a little more velocity. I don't think Cortes is truly this good, though this is not the same guy who had a 6.72 ERA from 2018-20 either.
GM Brian Cashman confirmed Cortes is vaccinated and there are protocols in place that allow vaccinated players to return before completing the league's mandatory 10-day quarantine after testing positive. Cortes has emerged as the team's secret weapon this year, soaking up innings as a long reliever and spot starter with great effectiveness, and they should welcome him back from the COVID list soon. He's quickly become an important member of their pitching staff.
Volpe's breakout season
The Yankees drafted Jack Leiter, the No. 2 pick in the 2021 draft, with their 20th-round selection in 2019. They knew Leiter was dead-set on attending Vanderbilt and wouldn't sign, but they rolled the dice anyway, figuring a 20th-round pick was a small price to pay for whatever small chance existed that Leiter would change his mind and decide to turn pro.
Also in the 2019 draft, the Yankees used their first-round pick to select shortstop Anthony Volpe, Leiter's high school teammate in New Jersey who also would have been his teammate at Vanderbilt had he not signed. Volpe did sign, however. The Yankees paid him a $2.7 million bonus and he is currently enjoying a monster breakout season in the low minors.
Anthony Volpe GRAND SLAM pic.twitter.com/yViIQ6Bt7Z
— Florida Prospects Report (@league_fl) July 1, 2021
Prior to his recent promotion to High Class-A, Volpe authored a .302/.455/.623 batting line with 12 home runs, 21 steals in 26 attempts, and more walks (51) than strikeouts (43) in 54 Low Class-A games. The Low-A Southeast league is using the automated strike zone this year and Volpe is the only player in the league with more walks than strikeouts (min. 200 plate appearances).
Also, because Low-A Southeast is based in Florida with games played at the various spring training ballparks, Statcast data is available, and we know Volpe had the third-highest average exit velocity in the league (min. 50 batted balls):
- Jordan Walker, Cardinals: 93.2 mph
- Yunior Severino, Twins: 91.6 mph
- Anthony Volpe, Yankees: 91.5 mph
- Jaylen Palmer, Mets: 91.2 mph
- Chad Bell, Yankees: 91.2 mph
Volpe did all that age 20 -- he is a year-and-a-half younger than the average player in Low-A Southeast -- and after losing all of 2020 to the pandemic, and missing most of 2019 with mono. He currently leads the minors with a 176 wRC+ (i.e. he's been 76 percent better than the average hitter once adjusted for his league's offensive environment) and the reviews are glowing.
Yep. From Day One this year, the reports on Volpe have been very, very loud. https://t.co/4BkzO2gyei
— Josh Norris (@jnorris427) July 14, 2021
"By all accounts, he has a high baseball IQ and a great work ethic, and it's showing this year in all aspects of his game," The Athletic's Keith Law wrote in a piece examining players he would have liked to have seen at the Futures Game. "... (Volpe) looks like an outstanding pick."
Coming into the season Volpe did not rank among New York's top 10 prospects according to the various scouting publications. Now he's a top-100 prospect according to Baseball America (No. 99) and Baseball Prospectus (No. 49). Prospects are suspects until proven otherwise, but Volpe's first pro season is going about as well as the Yankees could've hoped, especially after he lost his age 19 season to the pandemic. His development has surpassed reasonable expectations for the No. 30 pick in the draft.
"There's nothing that you can dislike about what he does," Yankees minor league hitting coordinator Dillon Lawson told NJ.com's Brendan Kuty last month. "First and foremost, he plays with an edge. He's one of the nicest people that you'll absolutely ever meet, and but he plays with this edge and this aggressiveness. He's a gamer, but he's got so much talent on top of that. But it's about making making contact and controlling the strike zone. It's a real skill and it's been about bolstering contact quality. He's done more than that. We've got a lot of people doing some amazing things this year. He's as exciting as anyone we have across the organization."
