Yankees sign ex-Red Sox pitcher and lose 2021 ‘Next Man Up’

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times on the Yankees‘ minor-league transaction wire on Thursday evening.

But hey — mid-lockout, this is literally the only place to live if you love news. We won’t argue.

New York’s most impactful move on Thursday was an addition who you may remember from recent iterations of the Red Sox rivalry.

While checking out the details on the wire, though, a few eagle-eyed observers noticed that the Yanks had also lost several familiar names out of the upper levels of their minor-league system over the past several weeks, too.

First off, the addition: Ryan Weber, welcome to the Bronx!

Though his painfully slow fastball made him somewhat mockable on the whole, and though his 2021 numbers were next-level bad at several stops, he was actually infuriatingly great at inducing soft contact in 2020.

Yankees sign Ryan Weber, lose Trey Amburgey in minor-league shuffle.

Weber was, uh, a work in progress in 2021 with the Sox, posting a 17.57 ERA in 5.2 innings of work that led to him finding new employment in both Milwaukee (one scoreless inning) and Seattle (three innings, one hit, two earned runs).

We promise he was decent in 2020 for a horrid Red Sox team, though, posting a 4.40 ERA in 43 innings (44 hits allowed) as mostly the mop-up man. At the very least, we’d rather see his wonky arsenal taking to the mound midway through a 6-1 game than Brooks Kriske. He’d be a more intriguing white flag.

As for those we lost, Yankees fans will probably be most upset about Trey Amburgey, a fill-in outfielder who battled for his chance at the bigs last year and made the literal tiniest of cameos before getting injured himself in the wake of New York’s midsummer COVID disaster.

Yankees lose Trey Amburgey, others to Reds, Rockies, Padres

Amburgey’s painfully short moment in the sun represented, in many ways, the painful futility that shaded the 2021 season and made it feel a little more like 2019 with every tweaked hamstring and tired shoulder.

Friends and family in the stands. National spotlight against the Red Sox. Unexpected opportunity you’ve always fought for … and you go 0-4 and Moonlight Graham it with the injury running to first.

In the same series we lost Tim Locastro, too. What a week.

Isiah Gilliam, still just 25 years old, crushed the Sally League in 2017, hitting 15 bombs, knocking in 85 runs, and posting an .824 OPS, but he never quite reached those heights in his remaining years in the system. The Reds will try to coax it out of him alongside Amburgey, and he might just be a big-leaguer, too.

As for Holder and Milone? The Yankees’ failure in the 2015 draft came to mind the last time Holder departed with very little fanfare, and it has done so again this time. The slick-fielding shortstop could’ve been Austin Riley or Ke’Bryan Hayes. Milone fulfilled his duty as a solid minor-league veteran last year at the upper levels, and was a candidate for the same chance Amburgey received and depressingly squandered. We wish him well, too.

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