The Yankees are in agreement with free agent first baseman Anthony Rizzo, as was first reported by Jordan Brown (Twitter link). It’s a two-year, $32MM guarantee with an opt-out clause after the first season, Brown adds. Bob Nightengale of USA Today reports (on Twitter) it’ll pay flat $16MM salaries in each season, leaving Rizzo with a $16MM decision next offseason. The deal is pending a physical.
Rizzo will be returning to the Bronx, where he finished the 2021 campaign. New York acquired him from the Cubs in advance of the trade deadline, and he hit .249/.340/.428 in 200 plate appearances in pinstripes down the stretch. That was more or less in line with the .248/.346/.446 mark he’d put up in 376 trips to the plate with Chicago over the season’s first couple months.
It was the second straight season of reasonable but unexciting production for Rizzo. He’d posted a .222/.342/.414 line during the shortened 2020 campaign. Going back two seasons, he owns a .240/.343/.432 line over 819 plate appearances. By measure of wRC+, that production checks in nine percentage points above the league average hitter’s. It’s actually bit below the standard (.254/.335/.455, 113 wRC+) set by first basemen around the league.
It’s been a rather sharp downturn for Rizzo as he’s entered his 30s. The left-handed hitter broke out with the Cubs in 2014, his age-24 campaign. Over the next six seasons, he never posted a wRC+ below 126. Overall, Rizzo hit .284/.388/.513 between 2014-19, with his 141 wRC+ in that stretch tying for twelfth among 375 qualified hitters.
Rizzo was a lineup anchor for the Cubs as they emerged from their rebuild, and he was also highly-regarded for his leadership and presence in the clubhouse. That combination made him perhaps the face of the Cubs’ most successful run in over a century. He appeared in three consecutive All-Star games from 2014-16, finishing in the top ten in NL MVP voting each season. Rizzo played a key role on Chicago’s curse-breaking World Series winning club in 2016, and he remained highly productive for three years beyond that even as the team never recaptured that level of postseason success.
The Yankees would be thrilled with their investment if he were to recapture anything near that form next season in the Bronx. Yet there’s clearly some trepidation around the league regarding Rizzo’s back-to-back relative down years. Just 12 months ago, Ken Rosenthal and Patrick Mooney of the Athletic reported that the Cubs had put a five-year, $70MM extension offer on the table. Rizzo declined Chicago’s overture, preferring to bet on himself after his middle-of-the-road 2020 season. After continuing to produce at a similar level over a full schedule in 2021, though, Rizzo essentially finds himself accepting a pillow contract and betting on a bounceback once again.
More to come.