7 Yankees facing uncertain futures heading into 2023 season

Aaron Hicks

How about a couple of players that will still be under contract beyond 2023? Hicks is signed through 2025 at $10 million per season, so he's the definition of untradeable right now. Nobody is taking that remaining money for his lengthy injury history and concerning play in recent seasons.

But 2023 might be the end of the road for him in New York regardless. The Yankees have a number of promising outfield prospects coming up the pipeline (Jasson Dominguez, Everson Pereira, Elijah Dunham, Spencer Jones) that are on accelerated timelines after their promising showings in 2022. Even though the Yankees are usually hesitant on the prospect front, they can't keep "hoping" Hicks magically turns it around and reproduces the sole, above-average full campaign he put forth in 2018.

There are two ways this unfolds: Hicks is average or below average and the Yankees (hopefully) release him after the season, or he rediscovers a semblance of what the Yankees thought he was previously capable of and he's (hopefully) traded to speed things up.

Gleyber Torres

Torres' Yankees career is a depressing one, but he's still a valuable player despite 2020 and 2021 negating everything he accomplished from 2018-2019. He somewhat redeemed himself in 2022, but he fell off a cliff in August after he was thrown off his game by being mentioned in trade rumors prior to the deadline. His August was so bad that it dragged down his overall numbers significantly.

With the hustle issues, failed transition to shortstop, previous conflict with the front office, and presence of Peraza, Cabrera and Volpe, though, Torres' future in New York has never been questioned so intensely. Though we'd argue he's an important piece to hang onto because of how hard it is to develop/find impactful middle infielders, the Yankees could stand to save a lot of money by trading him prior to this year's deadline or even in the offseason (he's making $9.95 million this year, and that number should increase to $12-$13 million for 2024).

The 26-year-old has already been a prominent name mentioned in trade talks dating back to last year, and that probably won't change with Peraza, Cabrera and Volpe coming full steam ahead -- unless, of course, Torres reverts back to his 2018-2019 All-Star form.