Yankees decide not to roll the dice, don’t extend qualifying offer to Gleyber Torres

It’s been long enough since the Yankees last made the World Series that I know I’d forgotten how quickly the MLB news cycle shifts from the highest stakes games of the season to a steady drumbeat of hot stove activity. The 2024 Yankees season was hardly cold before options had to be accepted or declined, Gerrit Cole opted out, and back in, to his contract, and qualifying offer decisions had to be made.

On the QO front, things went as expected for the Yankees, with New York extending a qualifying offer to Juan Soto, but not to Gleyber Torres (for those in need of a refresher on the qualifying offer system, check here). Coming off an overall down 2024 campaign for Torres, the Yankees never seemed likely to extend the QO to Gleyber, with both MLB.com and MLBTradeRumors predicting that they’d pass on doing so.

It’s a fair enough decision, what with Torres’ bat and glove both regressing in 2024, and one that won’t make or break this offseason. If you take in the full context of Torres the player, though, I think it’s possible the Yankees left a bit of meat on the bone here.

Torres can be a polarizing player, and he has his highs and lows. He’s often streaky at the plate, and he started this season with a particularly ugly cold streak, entering the All-Star Break hitting a paltry .231/.307/.347. Never an ace with the glove, Torres also looked shakier than ever at second base, showing limited range and occasionally lapsing on simple plays.

Though a second-half hot streak carried his line back to respectability, Torres still finished with a merely decent 104 wRC+, his worst figure since 2021. Combined with his shoddy work in the field and on the bases, he clocked in just below 2 WAR, just about league average in totality.

From that perspective, it seems almost a no-brainer not to tender a QO, with the offer coming in at $21 million for 2025. But if you zoom out, or zoom in, Torres on a one-year deal looks a much more appetizing prospect.

Most simply, though 2024 was a down season for Torres, his broader track record is strong enough to feel confident betting on a bounceback 2025. Torres still hasn’t turned 28, and prior to 2024 was coming off a pair of very solid seasons, over the course of which he hit .266/.330/.452, good for a 117 wRC+, with 49 homers and 23 steals. He was basically a 3-4 WAR player; not a superstar, but a quality first division regular who hit more than enough to cover up for his flaws.

There’s also reason for optimism if we dive deeper on his 2024 season. We all know the overall arc of his year, with the dismal first few months cancelled out by a excellent finish. After his permanent move to the leadoff spot in August, Torres hit .313/.386/.453, consistently setting the table for Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. Two seasons ago, I wondered if Torres would ever be able to marry his hard-hitting ability with on-base ability at the same time. This was the closest we’d really seen him come, as though his power stroke wasn’t fully on display down the stretch, Torres did hit at a 20-homer pace while dependably getting on base, and showing just a solid overall plate approach all the while.

It’d be foolish to take Torres’ second-half production and project it across a full season next year, but we can look at Torres’ process later in the season and use it as a reason for hope that he’ll be able to sustain some of the gains he made. Torres started to swing harder down the stretch, with his average bat speed trending upward as the season progressed and peaking during the playoffs. Yet even as he was swinging harder, Torres was chasing less:

And making contact in the zone more:

Swinging at fewer balls, swinging harder and making more contact in the zone is a brilliant combination, one that Torres pulled off in the second half. It’s enough for optimism regarding his 2025 campaign; if he can either maintain some of his late 2024 surge, or recapture his pre-2024 form, he’d be well worth paying $21 million to start at second base for the 2025 Yankees.

Not only that, extending Torres the QO would have other down stream effects. An accepted qualifying offer stabilizes the roster a bit as the Yankees make a number of key decisions with several players hitting free agency. And in the event that Torres turned down the QO, the Yankees would then stand to gain a draft pick, the value of which would depend on the signing team and size of the new contract.

In all, the QO for Torres would have been a medium-to-low risk move that came with medium-to-high upside. Torres very well could have taken the offer and outplayed the subsequent salary, or he could’ve declined it and netted the Yankees a pick (or returned on a long-term deal that satisfied both sides). The worst-case scenario involved Torres returning and underperforming, certainly a possibility as we just saw in 2024, but one I would have been willing to bet against given Torres’ track record and age.

In any event, this move won’t swing the Yankees’ offseason to success or failure (Soto is the only man that can do that on his own). But I’d have liked to have seen them play this scenario a little less conservatively. Torres will now test the market without the specter of draft-pick compensation, a boon for him. We’ll see if a reunion in the Bronx still remains in the cards.