Heliot Ramos Is a Yankee: The Rest of the Selloff We Have Not Talked About

I wrote about Arraez. I wrote about Ray. I did not write about the other three because they happened so fast I could not keep up, and one of them is the one that actually hurts. Heliot Ramos, ours since he was a teenager, is in pinstripes.

We developed him. Somebody else gets him.

Heliot Ramos is a Yankee. Sit with that for a second before you tell me about the return.

This is a kid we drafted, a kid we sat through the bad years with, a kid who spent seasons getting told he was a bust by people who had never watched a minor league game in their lives, and then he became an All-Star in our uniform. He was one of maybe three players on this roster you could point at and say that one is ours, we made that. And the second he had actual trade value, we shipped him to the one franchise in America that has never in its history had to develop anybody, because they just buy whatever the rest of us grow.

Back come Henry Lalane, a left-hander who was New York's fifth-ranked prospect, and Kaeden Kent, an infielder who was their thirteenth. And yes, before somebody emails me, that is Jeff Kent's son, which is a fun little circle for a franchise that cannot stop reliving 2002 because nothing good has happened since Bumgarner left.

I am not going to sit here and tell you Lalane is nothing. Fifth-ranked in that system is real, and the whole point of this teardown was arms, and Posey went and got arms. Fine. But there is a difference between a trade being defensible and a trade feeling good, and this one is defensible the way a root canal is defensible.

The Miller trade is the one I actually like, and I am terrified of it

Erik Miller and outfield prospect Carlos Gutierrez to Boston for Marcelo Mayer. This is the swing. This is the only move all deadline where we bought a name instead of collecting lottery tickets.

Mayer went fourth overall in 2021. He was the crown jewel of that Red Sox system for years, the guy Boston fans argued about on the radio for four straight winters. He is 23. He debuted last summer. If he is what he was supposed to be, you just got a middle infielder for a left-handed reliever and a prospect nobody outside the org could name, and that is the kind of trade that gets a front office statues.

And here is the part where I turn back into myself. He has been hurt since late June with a forearm problem and nobody has given a firm date on when he plays again. Boston is not stupid. Boston does not hand over a former fourth overall pick for a middle reliever because they are feeling generous in August. They moved him for a reason, and the reason is either the arm or the bat, and I have watched this organization talk itself into buy-low guys before.

So I want to be excited. I am going to try to be excited. Ask me in April.

Mahle to Atlanta, and that is that

Tyler Mahle went to the Braves for Anthony Molina, a 24-year-old arm who got sent straight to Sacramento. That is not a headline, that is a transaction, and I only bring it up because Mahle was the guy who kept giving us quality starts right up until the end while everybody wrote about whether he would be moved. He never made it weird. He just pitched. Good luck in Atlanta.

Five trades. Eight new guys. One question.

Posey did five deals in under twenty-four hours and brought in eight players, and I will give him this much: he did not freeze. This front office has spent years being too cute at deadlines, holding onto expiring veterans because somebody upstairs wanted to protect a .500 record that nobody was going to remember anyway. That did not happen this time. He looked at a team that is buried, he decided, and he executed. That is a real thing and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But the question is the same one it always is here, and nobody in that building has answered it in a decade. Who develops these guys?

Because we did not have a prospect problem in 2021 either. We had a turning-prospects-into-major-leaguers problem. Ramos is the exception that proves it, and we just traded the exception. So now there are eight new names in the system, most of them arms, and every single one of them is going to run through the same player development machine that has been spitting out the same result for years.

What is left

What is left is Eldridge, Basabe, a rotation of kids, two months of games nobody is going to watch past the fourth inning, and a manager who still cannot write the same lineup twice. And in September, when the Yankees are playing meaningful baseball, Heliot Ramos is going to hit a ball into the short porch and some broadcaster is going to say the Giants gave up on him.

They will not be wrong. That is the whole problem with this organization. We are extremely good at finding them and extremely good at explaining why we had to let them go.

Go Giants. Develop somebody. Please.

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