$153M Yankees Player Officially Out for the Rest of the Season
For Red Sox Nation, Jacoby Ellsbury is a hero, patrolling the outfield for seven years in Boston including World Series runs in 2007 and 2013.
Even though he’s now in the employ of the hated rival Yankees, Ellsbury is still indirectly doing his old team a favor.
In a pennant race that was — before last weekend’s massacre at Fenway of the Yanks by the Sox — still close, Ellsbury is now officially out for the season, having given New York zero productivity this year despite his lucrative contract.
Ellsbury underwent surgery Monday to repair a torn labrum in his left hip.
The 34-year-old will need six months to recover, which places his return in time for spring training in 2019.
Ellsbury signed a seven-year, $153 million contract with the Yankees in 2013 as they pried him away from his Boston teammates with a “Godfather” offer that felt less like a betrayal and more like one of those “that’s just too much money, good for him for getting it” moves.
He has been battling injury since March, dealing first with oblique and heel injuries during spring training before tearing the labrum in April during his efforts to rehab from the previous injuries.
Ellsbury has not played a single game with the Yankees in 2018, and in the five years of his seven-year deal, he has twice missed 50 games.
Indeed, the main reason the Red Sox let Ellsbury walk in the first place was that tendency to spend more time on the DL than on the field.
Ellsbury played just 18 games for the Sox in 2010 and 74 in 2012, and he missed 28 games in the World Series year in 2013 as well. Injury-prone players simply do not get nearly $22 million a year from teams with sensible payroll economics.
Even when he’s been healthy, Ellsbury hasn’t been effective for the Yankees.
He put up an OPS of just .663 in 2015 and .703 in 2016, and in 2017 he added just 1.7 wins against replacement; 2.0 is considered the minimum for a starter-level player.
The Yankees did win 7-0 over the White Sox on Monday, but since the All-Star break they’ve played the Mets, Rays, Orioles and Royals, teams that a contender should be able to smack around, and went a paltry 6-5 against them.
Teams with playoff aspirations need to put up better than the equivalent of an 88-74 record over 162 games against some of the worst teams in baseball. Throw in the games against various-colored Sox and the Yankees are, post-All-Star, putting up a 71-91 full-season pace.
Losing Ellsbury is bad enough. Gary Sanchez and Aaron Judge also have missed time, and only two of New York’s nine starters, Didi Gregorious and Giancarlo Stanton, have played in 90 percent or more of the team’s 111 games.
The Yankees will probably make the playoffs — the Mariners are in free-fall as they regress hard to their run differential, so the wild-card game is all but guaranteed to be New York vs. Oakland — but their hopes for a World Series championship are somewhere between slim and none.
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