Gio Urshela Undergoes Elbow Surgery
Yankees third baseman Gio Urshela underwent surgery Friday to remove a bone chip from his right elbow, the team announced. He’ll need three months to recover.
Based on the estimated timeline of his recovery, Urshela should be in line to return by the start of next season. If not, the Yankees could hand third base to Miguel Andujar, who was their solution at the hot corner in 2018 before injuries cut him dow the next year. He didn’t play much at all last season, totaling 65 plate appearances in Urshela’s shadow. Andujar has hit a weak .193/.219/.257 with one home run in 105 plate appearances dating back to 2019.
Andujar once looked like the Yankees’ long-term option at third, but his health troubles opened the door for Urshela, a former Indian and Blue Jay who has unexpectedly thrived since New York acquired him from Toronto in August 2018. Going back to 2019, Urshela has slashed .310/.358/.523 (132 wRC+) with 27 homers in 650 trips to the plate.
Yankees Reinstate Giancarlo Stanton, Gio Urshela, Jonathan Loaisiga From Injured List
The Yankees announced that outfielder Giancarlo Stanton, infielder Gio Urshela and right-hander Jonathan Loaisiga have all been reinstated from the 10-day injured list. Miguel Andujar and Mike Ford were optioned to the alternate training site in corresponding moves, and the Yankees already had an open roster space since right-hander Clarke Schmidt was optioned after Sunday’s game.
Stanton hit the IL with a left hamstring strain back on August 9, and the Yankees and their fans are hoping that the slugger can finally enjoy a sustained run of healthy play after almost two full seasons of inactivity due to various leg injuries. Stanton played in only 18 games in 2019 and appeared in 14 games this season before going on the injured list, with this year’s absence being particularly disappointing since Stanton was off to a huge start (hitting .293/.453/.585 with three homers in 54 PA).
However, Stanton’s return gives him time to get ramped up prior to the postseason, as the Yankees are starting to get healthy at perhaps just the right time. Urshela will back to action after a minimal 10-day placement due to a bone spur in his right elbow, and the third baseman has followed up his breakout 2019 campaign with a strong .272/.358/.515 slash line and six homers in 120 PA this season. Aaron Judge is also expected to soon return from a calf injury.
Loaisiga’s return is also welcome news for the Yankees, especially considering the rather unusual nature of his IL placement. On September 4, the Yankees said Loaisiga was suffering from “a medical condition that prevents him from playing and necessitates placement on the injured list,” with manager Aaron Boone later specifying that the right-hander’s absence was not due to COVID-19. Regardless, it is good to see Loaisiga back in relatively quick fashion. The 25-year-old has a 3.18 ERA, 5.00 K/BB rate, and 10.6 K/9 over 17 innings this season.
Yankees Place Gio Urshela, Jonathan Loaisiga On Injured List
The Yankees announced Friday that third baseman Gio Urshela and right-hander Jonathan Loaisiga have been placed on the 10-day injured list. Urshela is dealing with a bone spur in his right elbow, while Loasigia has “a medical condition that prevents him from playing and necessitates placement on the injured list,” per the team’s release. Manager Aaron Boone tells reporters (Twitter link via The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler) that Loaisiga’s condition is not Covid-19 related. Infielder/outfielder Miguel Andujar and righty Miguel Yajure are up from the team’s alternate site.
Urshela, 28, has continued last year’s breakout showing in 2020, getting out to a very strong .272/.358/.515 start at the plate and swatting six homers in his first 120 plate appearances. He heads to the injured list, alongside shortstop Gleyber Torres, less than a week after DJ LeMahieu returned from the injured list. The Yankees are also without key sluggers Aaron Judge (strained calf) and Giancarlo Stanton (strained hamstring).
There’s no further information on Loaisiga at this point. It’s a rather ominous update on the 25-year-old righty, who has pitched quite well in 17 frames with the Yankees in 2020. Loaisiga has a 20-to-4 K/BB ratio and a 3.18 ERA in that short time, and he’s also induced grounders at a solid 48.8 percent clip. His absence will be felt by the Yankee pitching staff, but the greater concern is his overall well-being. Best wishes to the young right-hander on a full recovery.
The One Who Got Away From Cleveland
Tomorrow marks the two-year anniversary of a seemingly innocuous decision that ultimately backfired. On May 4, 2018, the Indians designated third baseman Gio Urshela for assignment. Five days later, they traded him to the Blue Jays for cash considerations, ending his decade-long tenure in the organization.
The decision to move on from Urshela made perfect sense at the time. He had never been a top prospect, instead profiling as a glove-first depth infielder. His offensive numbers in the high minors were fine but unspectacular. That wasn’t the case in MLB, though, as he’d hit just .225/.273/.314 (56 wRC+) in parts of three seasons. Most pressing, he’d exhausted all his minor-league options by 2018. Rather than carrying Urshela on an active roster already featuring Francisco Lindor, José Ramírez, Jason Kipnis and Erik González (himself out of options and capable of playing shortstop), the front office elected to move on.
Urshela played in just 19 games in Toronto before they too cut him loose. He cleared waivers, was traded to the Yankees, and didn’t return to the majors in 2018. He became a minor-league free agent after the season. Presumably finding no MLB interest, he returned to the Yankees on a minor-league deal last November.
That under-the-radar series of events proved massively important in 2019. With Miguel Andújar injured, the Yankees turned third base over to Urshela. He responded with an out-of-nowhere breakout, hitting .314/.355/.534 (132 wRC+) in 476 plate appearances. It’s an open question whether he can sustain anything approaching that production moving forward, but his underlying batted ball metrics were fantastic. In February, 68% of MLBTR readers opined the hot corner in the Bronx was Urshela’s to lose, even with Andújar returning. The 28-year-old is under team control through 2024, making him a potential long-term asset for the New York organization.
For the Indians (and to a lesser extent, the Jays), seeing Urshela’s success with an AL rival has to be a bitter pill to swallow. Obviously, they couldn’t have seen his 2019 season coming. No one around the league did, seeing as Urshela was available for little more than an MLB roster spot an offseason ago. Every team has players they wish they hadn’t let get away in retrospect (some significantly more painful than losing Urshela). Perhaps the 28-year-old simply needed a change of scenery and/or a new voice on the player development side to unlock another gear. Regardless of how and why it happened, there’s no doubt Urshela washing out in Cleveland proved to be a huge gain for the Yankees.
MLBTR Poll: Yankees’ Third Base Situation
A year ago at this time, Miguel Andujar was the clear-cut favorite to open the season at third base for the Yankees. Had it not been for an out-of-this-world two-way showing from the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani in 2018, Andujar would have entered the season fresh off AL Rookie of the Year honors. Andujar fell short to Ohtani, though, and then endured a year to forget in the second season of his career.
Shoulder problems limited Andujar to just 12 games in 2019, but the Yankees had no trouble carrying on without him, evidenced by their 103-59 record and their first AL East title since 2012. One reason the Yankees finally regained control of the division? Gio Urshela, who grabbed the reins at third base as a result of Andujar’s health woes and became one of the injury-riddled Yankees’ most valuable players. It was a shocking rise for Urshela, who had never been known for his offense in prior major league stints with the Indians (2015, 2017) and Blue Jays (2018).
Before last year, Urshela had not hit more than 15 home runs in a professional season, yet he managed to mash 21 in the majors in 2019. That career-high HR total helped Urshela to an outstanding .314/.355/.534 line with 3.1 fWAR and a personal-best hard-hit rate in 476 plate appearances.
Urshela’s track record of success isn’t long, but the World Series hopeful Yankees are believers. General manager Brian Cashman has made it known that Urshela’s the front-runner to open the upcoming campaign at the hot corner for New York. So, despite his impressive performance as a rookie, Andujar’s behind on the Yankees’ depth chart. They’re even giving the soon-to-be 25-year-old work at first base and in the outfield early this spring in an effort to keep his bat in the lineup, per Bryan Hoch of MLB.com.
Andujar may be hard-pressed to struggle more at first or in the outfield than he has at third, where he accounted for minus-25 Defensive Runs Saved and a minus-16 Ultimate Zone Rating in his first season. But make no mistake, Andujar can hit. In his first season in the majors, he piled up 606 trips to the plate and batted .297/.328/.527 with 76 extra-base hits (47 doubles, 27 homers, two triples).
Considering his offensive upside, Andujar may well return to his past role as the Yankees’ primary third baseman sometime this year. Urshela, 28, will have to relinquish the job first, though. Which of the two do you think will log more time at the hot corner for the Yankees in 2020?
(Poll link for app users)
Who will get more playing time at third base in 2020?
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Gio Urshela 68% (8,353)
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Miguel Andujar 32% (3,890)
Total votes: 12,243
Rep 1 Agency Acquires Peter E. Greenberg And Associates
Rep 1 Baseball has agreed to acquire Peter E. Greenberg and Associates, making it one of the largest agencies in the game. It now has over 60 major league clients on its roster and more than 150 in the minors.
Rep 1 already counted Edwin Encarnacion, Rafael Devers, Luis Severino, Dee Gordon and Eloy Jimenez among its high-profile players before this acquisition, as reflected in MLBTR’s Agency Database. It will now add the likes of Ronald Acuna Jr., Starling Marte and Gio Urshela, among other familiar names in the bigs.
It’s been an active past year on the contract front for several of the aforementioned players. Encarnacion signed a one-year, $12MM deal with the White Sox this offseason. He’s now teammates with Jimenez, whom the White Sox last March inked to a then-record contract for a player with no MLB service time (six years, $43MM). The Yankees’ Severino (four years, $40MM) and the Braves’ Acuna (eight years, $100MM) also joined in on the 2019 extension bonanza. Devers, who had a star-caliber 2019 with the Red Sox, could be next, but the 22-year-old still has one more season left before he’s even eligible for arbitration.
Yankees Activate Gio Urshela From IL
As expected, the Yankees announced today they have activated third baseman Gio Urshela from the 10-day injured list. The 27-year-old missed the minimum amount of time due to a left groin injury.
Urshela’s breakout stands as one of the most surprising and remarkable stories of the 2019 season. A career .225/.274/.315 hitter entering the year, Urshela was forced into unexpected action by a rash of injuries, most notably Miguel Andújar’s season-ending labrum surgery. To say Urshela took advantage doesn’t come close to doing him justice.
Over 414 plate appearances this season, Urshela has mashed to the tune of a .331/.370/.555 line (142 wRC+), putting him in position to contend for the AL batting crown before this recent IL stint ended his chances of reaching the requisite number of plate appearances to qualify. To be sure, he’s not likely to keep up this level of output. His .366 BABIP seems unsustainable and dwarfs any batted-ball results he’d managed in his career pre-2019. It’s also fair to look askance at MLB’s twelfth-highest chase rate (minimum 400 plate appearances), although players like Javier Báez and Rafael Devers have made similarly aggressive approaches work in recent seasons.
Even if Urshela won’t be quite this good a hitter moving forward, he’s certainly set himself up as a valuable piece for a Yankee franchise that couldn’t have anticipated him doing so a few months back. Statcast loves him, for instance, crediting him with an 80th percentile average exit velocity and above-average hard contact rate, helping to explain his strong ball-in-play results. Urshela also comes with a reputation as a strong defender at the hot corner, even if his advanced metrics suggest he’s more competent than Gold Glove-worthy. What’s more, he comes with four years of team control beyond this season and won’t be arbitration-eligible until after next year, making him an affordable option throughout his prime seasons.
Urshela’s 2019 performance seemingly gives him the inside track on the 2020 third base job in the Bronx, which will lead to an interesting offseason for Brian Cashman and company to decide how to handle Andújar as he returns to a crowded corner infield/DH mix next season. More immediately, Urshela will look to help the Yankees secure home field advantage in the postseason, as they enter Sunday tied with Houston for the AL’s best record.
Yankees Activate Luke Voit, Place Gio Urshela On IL
The Yankees announced Friday that they’ve reinstated first baseman Luke Voit from the injured list and placed third baseman Gio Urshela on the 10-day IL due to a left groin injury.
Voit, 28, hasn’t played in a month thanks to an abdominal injury that, at one point, looked like it could require surgery. Rather than undergo a sports hernia procedure, though, the burgeoning slugger was able to rest and rehab the injury sufficiently enough to suit up for a minor league rehab assignment recently. To say that Voit didn’t miss a beat would perhaps be putting things mildly; in four games with Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, he went 8-for-17 with two doubles, two home runs and two walks (against two strikeouts).
This marked the second time in 2019 that Voit missed time due to abdominal injuries, but those have been the only blemish on an otherwise excellent showing in his first full season of big league duty. In 94 games (416 plate appearances), he’s hitting .278/.392/.493 with 19 home runs, 16 doubles and a triple. Overall, he’s raked at a .293/.395/.547 clip in Yankee Pinstripes, although the trade that brought him from St. Louis to the Bronx now looks quite a bit less lopsided in light of righty Giovanny Gallegos‘ own breakout in the Cardinals’ bullpen.
Speaking of breakouts (and of players named Giovanny), the 27-year-old Urshela has erupted at the plate this summer. Long touted as a steady defender with questionable offensive capabilities, he’s not only looked like a potential regular but been one of the Yankees’ best hitters. In 414 trips to the dish, he’s laid waste to MLB pitching with a .331/.370/.555 batting line.
While his .366 average on balls in play still looks ripe for some regression, Urshela’s hard-hit rate and average exit velocity are both well above the league average. Statcast pegs him as one of the game’s leaders in expected batting average, slugging percentage and weight on-base average. In short: he’s hitting with excellent power and demonstrating previously unseen levels of power. Offensive breakouts throughout the league abound in 2019 amid questions about structural changes to the baseball itself, but it’s impossible to ignore just how valuable Urshela has been for the Yankees to date.
The Yankees didn’t provide any sort of timeline on Urshela, so it remains unclear just how long he’ll be sidelined. Presumably, manager Aaron Boone will have an update later tonight. In his absence, the Yankees can still lean on a high-quality quartet of Voit, DJ LeMahieu, Didi Gregorius and Gleyber Torres around the infield, though the roster is unequivocally stronger with a healthy Urshela in tow.
Brian Cashman Reflects On Gio Urshela Acquisition
Even though the Yankees had 2018 AL Rookie of the Year runner-up Miguel Andujar manning third base, surprise abounded when they didn’t aggressively pursue free agent Manny Machado in the offseason. Plenty has changed for those two players since then. Machado took a 10-year, $300MM offer from the Padres and has gone on to post a solid but unspectacular season. Andujar, meanwhile, amassed just 49 plate appearances – during which a shoulder injury limited him to a disastrous .128/.143/.128 line – before undergoing season-ending surgery in mid-May.
The lack of Machado and Andujar could have made the hot corner a black hole for this year’s Yankees, but the position has unexpectedly been a significant strength. Once-anonymous third baseman Gio Urshela is one of many Yankees who have come from nowhere to flourish, thus helping the club to a major league-best 81-42 record.
Urshela joined the Yankees in what looked like a minor trade with the division-rival Blue Jays last August. New York parted with cash considerations for Urshela, whom Toronto had just designated for assignment. It was understandable that the Blue Jays (and the Indians before them) gave up on Urshela. After all, at the time the Jays sent him to the Yankees, Urshela was just a .225/.274/.315 major league hitter over 499 plate appearances. He wasn’t exactly a force in the minors, either.
Despite the less-than-stellar pro track record Urshela once had, general manager Brian Cashman explained to Mike Mazzeo of Yahoo Sports this week that the club “had been trying to acquire him for awhile. We daydreamed about him being a very versatile utility player. We loved his glove. We were very fortunate that we ran into him at the proper time of his development.” Cashman admitted, though, that “nobody thought Gio would be this guy” and “no one expected him to be Manny Machado.”
If the Yankees had splurged on Machado over the winter, they wouldn’t have complained had he opened his Bronx tenure with a .337/.379/.585 batting line, 18 home runs and 3.1 fWAR in 364 PA. Amazingly, that’s the production they’ve received this season from the 27-year-old Urshela, whom the Yankees re-signed to a minor league deal during the winter. His offensive output since then has been an astounding 50 percent better than that of the typical MLB hitter, according to FanGraphs’ wRC+ metric. Urshela ranks eighth in the league in that category among batters with 350-plus PA, sandwiched between Anthony Rendon and Fernando Tatis Jr.
Whether Urshela can continue to handle opposing pitchers to this extent is rightly in question, though there are encouraging signs. Thanks to help from Triple-A Scranton hitting coach Phil Plantier, Urshela’s “staying through his legs more,” said Cashman, who added Urshela has also gotten stronger. Cashman believes those factors have“created a whole new dynamic.”
After entering the year with a nonthreatening .090 isolated power figure, the stronger Urshela has put up an imposing .248 mark this season. He hasn’t had to sell out for it with more strikeouts, having fanned in only 15.9 percent of plate trips and swung and missed at an above-average 10.4 percent clip. With an 81.3 percent contact rate, Urshela sits 5 percent better than average in that regard. His ability to consistently put the bat on the ball has helped offset a paltry walk rate (5.5 percent), and Statcast is mostly buying into Urshela’s enormous uptick in meaningful contact. He ranks toward the top of the league in hard-hit rate (75th percentile), average exit velocity (87th), expected slugging percentage (91st) and expected batting average (98th). Urshela’s also in the 91st percentile in expected weighted on-base average, owning a .382 mark that isn’t a great distance from his real wOBA (.403).
The Yankees may have found a bargain gem in Urshela, who’s on a minimum salary this year and still has three seasons of arbitration eligibility. Come 2020, the presences of Urshela and what should be a healthy Andujar ought to make for an intriguing setup. Having battled a litany of injuries to key players this year, the Yankees will likely be thrilled to have the depth.
Gleyber Torres, Gio Urshela Removed From Game With Injuries
12:30AM: Eusebio Torres, Gleyber’s father, tweeted (hat tip to MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch for the translation) that his son is headed to Baltimore with the team, and “everything is fine” following his release from hospital. Urshela also told Hoch and other reporters that he was traveling with the team, though Hoch noted that Urshela’s legs were both wrapped in bandages.
11:33PM: The injury-riddled Yankees are once again having to hold their breath about some health situations, as infielders Gleyber Torres and Gio Urshela both made early exits from Sunday’s 7-4 win over the Red Sox.
Torres left the game after the seventh inning with what manager Aaron Boone described as “a core issue” in his postgame talk with media (including the YES Network). Boone was “not sure” when the injury occurred, and Torres was undergoing tests to further explore the problem.
Urshela’s issue was less mysterious, as he fouled two different pitches off his right knee area and left shin within the same at-bat in the sixth inning. Despite an on-field visit from team trainers, Urshela remained in the game through the next two frames, before finally being replaced in the field prior to the top of the ninth inning. In positive news, Boone said x-rays were negative on Urshela.
Torres and Urshela are two of the few Bronx Bombers who have avoided the injured list this year, and Torres is New York’s team leader in games played (103 of 111 contests). Torres is enjoying another excellent year, hitting .286/.353/.514 with 23 homers over 432 plate appearances.
Urshela isn’t far behind, with a .314/.359/.522 slash line and 12 homers over 320 PA. It’s been an astonishing breakout performance for a player who hadn’t shown anything remotely close to this level of offensive production in 499 Major League PA prior to this season, or over his 11 professional seasons in the major and minor leagues.
It’s been because of unheralded bench players like Urshela that the unbreakable Yankees have surged to a 72-39 record this season, despite losing almost every single member of their roster to the IL at one time or another with injuries ranging from minor setbacks to season-ending concerns. If either Torres or Urshela had to go on the IL, DJ LeMahieu would likely be shifted away from first base (as he was covering the position since Luke Voit and Edwin Encarnacion are both sidelined with injuries) and Breyvic Valera is on hand as the utility infielder. Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada are on hand both at Triple-A for further depth.