In fact, the decision for the 2026 Yankees’ Least Valuable Player has only ever been boiled down to two players. The two candidates for this ignominious award were Ryan McMahon and Trent Grisham, and for similar reasons. Apart from their bats polluting the black line, it was feared from the start that they would ever be able to provide the amount of value commensurate with the money they were earning. The combined pair of Yankees would cost a hair over $38 million in 2026 — 11.3 percent of the estimated $335.8 million in luxury tax dollars — and yet combined for just 1.2 fWAR, or a 2.8 percent improvement over the team’s 43.1 overall fWAR. McMahon narrowly edges Grisham for the distinction for their 20-point gap in wRC+ (78 vs. 98) and regression in the one area where he’s supposed to excel: defense.
When it became apparent that the key to forcing the Run It Back operation was to continue with McMahon as the team’s starting third baseman, the mental gymnastics required to rationalize this plan began to tie fans’ minds in knots. “If the Yankees can find a way to improve their shortstop at Yankee Stadium and bring them closer to league average production, this, along with their stellar defense, should make the team a reliable hot corner player with plenty of value through 2026,” was the common chant.
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The problem with this wishful thinking is immediately apparent when you realize that McMahon has never put up a league average or better season on the board by wRC+ despite playing the first eight and a half seasons of his career at Coors Field, lending credence to the idea that you can suddenly transform a 31-year-old hitter into something he never missed.
McMahon’s season started worse than even the worst fan could have predicted with just a 51 wRC+ and a 33-percent strikeout rate through the end of April. A run of walks that wiped out the nominal value list and bled his bat speed, leading to a tweak in his batting range that provided a slight improvement, but still nothing close to the 91 wRC+ hitter he had been five seasons ago. McMahon missed 38 games after suffering a throat infection and a mid-August Grade 2 sprain, at which point he was already giving up third reps to a pair of seemingly worse defenders in José Caballero and Amed Rosario.
He abandoned the Gold Glove-caliber defense that convinced the Yankees to acquire him from the Rockies at the 2025 trade deadline. It got to the point where the Yankees were giving practice reps to Antonio Volpe at the hot corner — a position he never played in his professional career — in the days leading up to the playoffs. It ended in a play that really sums up his season in a nutshell, McMahon’s use of a grounder by Yandy Díaz, the first batter the Rays sent to the plate in Game 2 of the ALDS. That error started an avalanche of defensive miscues that ended with four foul errors in a 5-2 loss.
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Being brought to the player’s defense, he asked, “What are you doing here?” McMahon was benched in Game 3 as the Yankees took the sweep, ending perhaps the worst season of the major leaguers’ career when all the factors combined. He finished with a blistering .213/.279/.357 triple-hit line, with 11 home runs, 41 RBIs, a 78 wRC+, and 0.5 fWAR in 360 plate appearances over 124 games. His .279 OBP and 78 wRC+ placed him among the 20 worst in MLB with at least 350 PAs in 2026. His 11 home runs, 78 wRC+, 7.8-percent walk rate, no Statcast Outs Above Average, and 0.5 fWAR were all the lowest marks of his career after the 2020 pandemic-shortened season and easily the worst marks of any season, including he elaborated.
Even in a larger environment, the group cannot be separated. His presence on the Yankees roster re-arranged with Rosario over the winter to reprise his platoon partner role. In what turned into an unmitigated disaster, Rosario promptly forgot how to hit against lefties — which was supposed to be one good thing — while producing an almost impossibly bad -7 OAA in just 394 innings, his seven errors coming in the third innings that contributed to the Yankees’ shot at the division.
The saddest aspect of all the charades is that everyone could see it coming. It’s not so much an indictment of McMahon — a known quantity who happened to regress in the one area where he still provided some value — as it is of the Yankees’ front office for allowing third base to remain a perennial black hole. In the words of our intrepid leader Andrew Mearns, it all started with “the original sin of donating DJ LeMahieu six years to keep the taxable AAV.”
With LeMahieu signing to that second contract before the start of the 2021 season, eleven players have made at least 100 plate appearances while holding third base for the Yankees. Below is a breakdown of the amount of guarantee money to be paid to each player and the most troublesome production and price;
Data courtesy of FanGraphs, Spotrac
In total, the Yankees spent $222.5 million on players who spent most of their playing time at the hot corners. The 89 wRC+ for those players ranks 21st in baseball while their 11.5 fWAR ranks just 19th. Plenty of teams have committed nine-figure sums in that span — Manny Machado, Rafael Devers, Nolan Arenado, Antonio Rendon, Carlos Correa, Austin Leo, Alex Bregman, José Ramírez, Matt Chapman, and Kevin McGonigle all signed for more than $150 million — but outside of Rendon and Correa, no team is investing.
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McMahon is just the latest figure in this maddening trend. The Yankees owe him $16 million in 2027. After a disastrous 2026 campaign, McMahon’s question isn’t whether he can fill that cost with on-field value. It’s whether the Yankees will follow a similar path with LeMahieu in 2015, Aaron Hicks in 2013, and Jacoby Ellsbury in 2019 and cut the meat this offseason, eating dead money for not having the privilege of subjecting their poor fans to playing.