Trent Grisham's poor start doesn't mean the Yankees made a $22 million mistake

The decision to extend Trent Grisham the qualifying offer (and his acceptance of it) was the most divisive move of the New York Yankees' offseason. After a stellar, breakout 2025 regular season and a dismal showing in the playoffs, the 29-year-old entered spring training under immense pressure to prove his career year was no fluke.

The heat only intensified as his spring didn't go as planned. Grisham hit just .171/.292/.195 during warm-ups and was outproduced by both Jasson Dominguez and Spencer Jones, the two exciting youngsters that his presence pushed off the roster.

Now that the games count, the bottom of the lineup is the biggest concern, but Grisham's frigid start, a .162/.354/.243 line over his first 12 games, he has started to draw criticism as well.

It's hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from stats until the end of April at least, but when there are correlations to the past, results start to hold more weight. While that argument can be made for Grisham being a $22 million bust, there's a counterpoint that objectively proves the opposite.

The underlying metrics should have Yankees fans believing in Trent Grisham

On the surface, it looks like Grisham is turning into a pumpkin again, but if you boil down hitting to its most basic essence, that hasn't been the case. A hitter's primary job is to swing at good pitches with the hopes of making hard contact and lay off bad pitches that he can't drive with authority. Expanding that out a bit further, if you execute that philosophy, you'll consistently get on base via the walk and avoid the most empty type of out  —  the strikeout.

Expected stats and quality of contact metrics can tell us how well a hitter is executing on those basic functions, and as a result, help us predict his actual performance moving forward. For instance, Ben Rice's 2024 campaign was a disappointment, with him slashing .171/.264/.349 over 50 games, which resulted in a very subpar .269 wOBA. However, the quality of contact stats and expected stats painted a much different picture, with Rice's performance generating a .340 wOBA. For those who were looking, that telegraphed his breakout a year ago and his superb performance last year foreshadowed his hot start to 2026.

The expected data last year proved that Grisham's career-defining performance was not a fluke, and we're seeing the same trends this year, even as the actual result doesn't line up with what's going on under the hood. So far, his expected stats are similar to his expected stats from a year ago, which in turn lined up nicely with his actual performance.

The chart above makes it clear that not only did Grisham's 2025 expected performance line up nicely with his 2025 results, but his 2026 expected and contact numbers line up very well with what he did in 2025.

When it comes to those primary objectives, avoiding swinging at tough pitches, swinging at good pitches to hit, and hitting the ball hard, Grisham is doing exactly what you'd want to see. As a result, he's also walking at a 22.9% clip this year while striking out just 18.8% of the time. That would seem to indicate that he's seeing the ball well and hitting it hard, but isn't having much luck.

An important thing to watch is his wOBA versus his xwOBA, as these will be the most telling without having to get too far into the weeds.

The old adage, "A walk is as good as a hit," is a falsehood that wOBA helps to eliminate. For example, with a runner on second, a walk doesn't score him, but a single likely does. All the ways a batter can reach base safely are not created equal, so wOBA takes the run values of each outcome and scales the result to on-base percentage.

Its cousin, xwOBA, works similarly except it factors out everything that is beyond a batter's control. It uses Statcast data like exit velocity and launch angle to determine the probability of a hit and the damage done, and scales it just like wOBA does. This eliminates the impact a defender has on the play. For example, if Grisham scalds a line drive down the right field line, but the right fielder is playing closer than normal to the line and makes the catch, it's an out even though it normally would have gone down as a double.

xWOBA, and many other expected stats, stabilize after roughly 70-100 balls in play. Grisham has 28 batted-ball events so far, so we're nearly halfway there. Once that happens, we can essentially lock in these beneath the surface stats as truth. In the meantime, the link back to last season should build a lot of confidence.

There's a very good chance that Grisham is not a bust and will soon revert to his 2025 performance. In the meantime, Yankees fans can take solace in the fact that he's doing everything in his power to be a productive hitter at the plate. The most probable outcome is that his luck eventually turns around.