3 Yankees DFA/trade candidates who could lose 40-man roster spot before Opening Day

2. Deivi Garcia

After successive seasons where a DFA always seemed to be around the corner, it now feels unlikely that Garcia's roster spot will be outright chopped.

Garcia's past two minor-league seasons, after an effective 2020 cameo in the bigs, have been horrific; he's posted ERAs of 6.85 and 6.89, with garish 1.88 and 1.44 WHIPs to match. After tinkering with some grips and trying to reshape his pitches, Garcia's control and command both went haywire, making him hard to predict, but easy to square up.

This spring, though, he's looked good. His velocity's higher. He's holding onto a 1.09 WHIP (in an insanely small sample size) and has already been demoted to minor-league camp, as the praise pieces about his ramp-up run from all corners.

So ... do the Yankees really trust Garcia all of a sudden? Or are they just buttering him up to be a piece in a potential trade?

This might be an all-new, reworked Garcia, and a beautiful evocation of the prospect we were once told could be Pedro Martínez light. Of course, it could also just be a small-sample-size mirage. If he's survived this many 40-man purges, maybe the Yankees really are committed to him ... or maybe they just couldn't flip the asset these past two years. His spring numbers are set. An implosion would be the outlier data point (he added some more excellent work in windy Lakeland on Friday). Anyone interested?