Trying to understand Jasson Dominguez's downfall with the Yankees

Patience is wearing thin with New York Yankees outfielder Jasson Dominguez. Once known as the Martian for his otherworldly skills, the 23-year-old is hitting just .230/.270/.380 for an 80 wRC+, which, when combined with mostly shoddy defense coming primarily in right field, has led him to produce exactly 0.0 fWAR through 40 games. Forget terrestrial, he's been downright pedestrian.

How did a player who was a speedy center fielder with five-tool potential become not even average, but replacement-level? What happened along the way to have him go from the next great hope for the fanbase to a guy many fans would be happy to never have to watch play again?

Dominguez, along with Spencer Jones, has become the center of trade rumors, and the pair are essentially this generation's Miguel Andujar and Clint Frazier. In the eyes of some, Dominguez has even fallen behind Jones, and they've called for his demotion in favor of the six-foot-seven slugger.

The factors that have killed Jasson Dominguez's hype and put his Yankees future in doubt

Dominguez peaked on MLB Pipeline's top 100 list at No. 21, and that wasn't all that long ago. It was entering the 2025 season he earned that lofty ranking, but the write-up by those experts was telling.

"It always was going to be impossible for Domínguez to live up to the hype of Bo Jackson, Mickey Mantle and Mike Trout comparisons and projections of well-above-average tools across the board when he signed for $5.1 million out of the Dominican Republic in 2019," MLB Pipeline wrote about him at the time.

Becoming the next Mickey Mantle, Bo Jackson, or Mike Trout is an unfair expectation to hit any prospect with, but those lofty comparisons didn't just come out of thin air. Dominguez was one of the Yankees' most hyped prospects ever, even when he was a 16-year-old signing a seven-figure deal coming out of the Dominican Republic.

It was the Yankees who fueled the hype around Dominguez, setting the scene for the sky-high expectations. Brian Cashman called him an "anomaly" and praised his work ethic after his first full pro season in 2021. That would have been fine if the club had intended to trade him at the peak of his value, but instead, the Yankees bought into their own propaganda.

That leads us to Dominguez's development, which is also questionable. The youngster signed with the Yankees in July of 2019, meaning 2020 should have been his first season in pro ball if the minor league season hadn't been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After playing 56 games in 2021, Dominguez rose three levels in 2022, starting in Single-A, advancing to High-A, and finishing with a five-game cameo in Double-A. 2023 saw him spend the majority of the season at Double-A, save for nine games at Triple-A before making his big league debut for an eight-game cup of coffee.

Dominguez tore his UCL at the end of 2023, and that meant he lost a large chunk of the 2024 season, playing just 44 games in Scranton. That meant that he only played 53 Triple-A games before becoming a pseudo-regular with the Yankees in 2025. Combine that with the developmental time he missed at the beginning of his career, and you can see that he wasn't fully baked.

Still, he didn't perform all that poorly last season for a 22-year-old rookie. Yes, he was a butcher in left field, but he posted a 103 wRC+, which for most rookies in their early 20s isn't terrible. Yet it wasn't enough for the Yankees to grant him a clear pathway for playing time in 2026. New York loudly sought upgrades from Dominguez, and ultimately stuck him in Scranton in favor of Randal Grichuk.

Since he's gotten a chance this season, it's clear that his approach at the plate is drastically different. Dominguez's chase rate is up significantly, jumping from 30.8% last season to 35.4% this year. As a result, his contact rate outside of the strike zone has jumped from 54.5% to 62.1%. Making suboptimal contact has caused his hard-hit rate to fall from 49.6% to 38.7% and his average exit velocity drop from 90.6 miles per hour to 88 miles per hour.

It seems as if Dominguez is less confident at the plate, causing him to flail at quality pitches outside of the zone and making a lot of suboptimal contact in the process. It's fair to say that he should have been held down a bit longer in 2025 and had more faith shown in him in 2026. Since those things didn't happen, he's pressing and appears to have lost his confidence.

It's hard to break into the majors as a rookie on the Yankees, and it's darn near impossible to do it successfully when you've been ballyhooed as the next big thing for the most storied franchise in sports. That creates a situation where overnight success is expected, and the repercussions of not achieving icon status immediately can shake one's confidence to the core.

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