Yankees add Bellinger, Cubs dump Bellinger’s contract

It’s probably been an awkward few weeks for Cody Bellinger. It was an open secret that the Chicago Cubs were looking to move him despite signing him to a three-year, $80 million contract just one offseason ago. Pete Crow-Armstrong’s emergence as a credible hitter had already made Bellinger (and/or Seiya Suzuki) expendable, and once the Cubs won the Kyle Tucker sweepstakes, it was just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop .

And what a beautiful striped shoe it is. The New York Yankees graciously agreed to take Bellinger off the hands of the Cubs and absorb all but $5 million of his remaining contract. Chicago also gets right-handed pitcher Cody Poteet in the deal. Thus Codys Great Cosmic Balance remains undisturbed.

Bellinger’s time in Chicago ended because he committed the unforgivable sin of simply being good when his contract demanded more. Bellinger hit .307/.356/.525 in his first season with the Cubs, on a one-year prove-it deal. In 2024, he was a little more pedestrian: .266/.325/.426 with just 18 home runs – still good for a 109 WRC+, and with an average defense in center field, 2.2 WAR.

Bellinger will earn $27.5 million in 2025 and $25 million in 2026, but can opt out after next season for a $5 million buyout. That means if Bellinger sucks in 2026, the Yankees (or, previously, the Cubs) would be on the hook for one more season at $25 million. But if he’s good enough to try his luck in free agency for the third time in four years, Bellinger could exercise his waiver, effectively costing the Yankees $32.5 million for a single season.

If Bellinger puts up something like a five-win season, the Yankees would probably be happy with that deal, but it will give this trade a little less upside than your garden-variety salary drop.

Luckily, the Yankees have an extra $31 million in payroll to throw around after getting Juan Soto off their books.

It’s the latest strange twist for a player whose career has amazed and confounded in equal measure. A first baseman who developed into a good center fielder, a Rookie of the Year at 22, an MVP at 24 and a World Series winner at 25, Bellinger spent the final two seasons of his Dodgers tenure battling a multitude of injuries and a multi-year crisis.

Peak Bellinger was able to crush 40 homers with ease, while maintaining a strikeout rate not too much above his walk rate. Now it’s gone, or at least the power is; he has posted an ISO above .180 just once in the last four seasons.

Bellinger’s 2023 resurgence also had the signs of a mirage: He topped his xwOBA by 43 points and posted a BABIP of .319, after hitting .277 over the first six seasons of his career. Has there been a regression in Bellinger’s batted ball luck in 2024? In a way, but he didn’t hit the ball that hard. His xwOBACON dropped from .357 in 2023 to a career-low .326 in 2024, and that previous mark was also down more than 100 points from his MVP season.

Nowadays, Bellinger is the exact opposite of the type of player he resembles. He stands 6-foot-4 and weighs 203 pounds, and up close you’d swear he’s at least 20 percent bigger in every dimension, but he generates a lot of soft contact.

I apologize for giving the impression that I disagree with Bellinger, because he is truly a good fit for the Yankees in many ways. Even before we get to the tangible things on the field, Bellinger is, as I just said, a giant of a man, and that fits the Yankees’ atmosphere. Additionally, his father, Clay, played nearly his entire major league career with the Yankees, where he earned more World Series rings than career extra-base hits. (This isn’t literally true, but it’s quite plausible that you were going to go looking for it.)

Mainly it’s about this. Here are the five players who played at least one inning in center field for New York last season, plus Bellinger.

Judge was the best overall center fielder in baseball in 2024, but it depends entirely on the strength of his bat. He could probably ride around on a unicycle wearing hockey gloves and still be an overall above-average player. But Judge was a below-average center fielder, and ideally you probably want him to play right field.

Which he can do now, because both of the Yankees’ previous incumbent corner outfielders – Verdugo and Soto – are no longer with the team. Put the judge on the right, Domínguez on the left, and find someone to stand between them. Chisholm has extensive big league experience as a center, but using him there would open a hole at second or third base and that would require an outside solution.

That leaves Grisham, who is a good fielder, but nowhere near as close a hitter as Bellinger is in the final phase. With the Cubs, Bellinger was expected to lead the lineup. The Yankees already have that guy, so if Bellinger is just an above-average hitter and a solid center fielder, that’s great. Bellinger still has the ability to play first base, where he started 57 games and logged more than 500 innings in two seasons in Chicago. So if the Yankees don’t sign someone else and the Ben Rice experiment fails at some point, Bellinger can give them an option at another position of weakness.

And as you’re reading this, you’re probably screaming into your phone on the subway and scaring strangers, because I didn’t mention the best part: Bellinger is about to get a huge boost from a more favorable home playing field. In 2024, he had a 99 WRC+ at home and a 117 WRC+ on the road. Friendly Confines were anything but. And there’s a specific reason to expect Bellinger to take advantage of it: Wrigley Field has a large cutout in right field that puts the foul pole 353 feet from home plate — 39 feet farther than the right field fence at Yankee Stadium . And I expect that to be a big deal for a hitter with Bellinger’s specific characteristics.

You see, most home runs aren’t actually screaming from 450 feet on the upper deck. If you hit the ball in the right place, you don’t have to hit it particularly hard to end up in a trot. And Bellinger hits the ball in the right place: He’s a pull-side shooter who loves the fly ball.

This means Bellinger hits a lot of home runs thanks to his relatively limited hitting. In 2024, he had just 67 balls in play with an exit velocity of at least 100 mph, which is two more than Rob Refsnyder. But nearly a quarter of Bellinger’s triple-digit batted balls — 23.9%, the 13th highest percentage among nearly 200 hitters with 10 or more home runs — landed in the seats. Once again, Bellinger plays half of his games at Wrigley.

According to Baseball Savant’s projected home run chart, Yankee Stadium would have been the third-friendliest home run park for Bellinger last season, after Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati and Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Bellinger hit 18 home runs in 2024; if he had played all his games at Yankee Stadium, he would have scored 24. If he had played all his games at Wrigley (instead of occasionally going on the road, as major league baseball players are forced to do), he would have scored only 15 : The total was the fifth lowest of the 30 parks. Whatever Bellinger’s feelings about Chicago and the Cubs in general, he’s probably happy to be rid of his bitter tormentor.

And the Cubs will be just as happy to be rid of his contract.

The Cubs unloaded a sizable financial commitment for a player who no longer filled a position of need. I have no idea whether the Cubs’ savings will return to the major league roster, or whether they will be shuffled into God knows what corner of the Ricketts family’s banking, real estate and political empire. I hope, for the sake of Cubs fans and the country, that’s the first thing.

And I suppose it’s worth mentioning Poteet, a 30-year-old right-hander who came to the Yankees as a free agent a year ago after bouncing around the Marlins and Royals farm systems for a while. Poteet made 24 big league appearances, 13 of them as a starter, over parts of three seasons. He mixes five pitches, ranging from an upper-70s curveball to a low-90s four-seam fastball/sinker combination.

With the Marlins, he was quicker at changing the ball, but the Yankees had him lean more on his slower pitches: a sweeper and the aforementioned curveball. In five appearances (four starts) over 24 1/3 innings, Poteet’s results were strong: a 3-0 record and a 2.22 ERA. But he gave up more hard contact than those numbers would indicate, and in those 24 1/3 innings, he struck out just 16 batters, against 18 hits, eight walks and one hit batter.

Poteet is a serviceable swingman and has two options left, but if the Yankees needed him in the majors they would use him. And while you can never have too much starting pitching depth, the Cubs were already pretty well stocked. Poteet would be no higher than seventh on the Cubs’ starting pitching depth chart, and possibly as high as 10th, depending on how Cade Horton’s shoulder feels. And that’s assuming the Cubs, who have been linked to Jesús Luzardo on the market, don’t go out and keep adding.

All of this reinforces the idea that Bellinger’s contract is the big moving part here. The Yankees are basically just paying cash, albeit in bulk, for a player you can’t get on the open market this year. Our Free Agent Tracker lists Harrison Bader as the best remaining free agent center fielder within the projected WAR for 2025. Even counting players who have already signed, the list gets to Mike Tauchman much faster than the Yankees probably would like. If Tyler O’Neill is worth $49.5 million over three seasons, that can’t be the case That much more than a payment.

Bellinger won’t fill the wound left in the Yankees’ psyche when Soto left. But he will fill the hole in midfield.