From the moment the team very publicly washed its hands of Gleyber Torres, New York Yankees fans have been begging Brian Cashman to add another infielder. Second baseman, third baseman, it didn’t matter; anyone who could pair with Jazz Chisholm Jr. and represent some sort of upgrade on the team’s internal options would do.

And yet, one by one, every potential free agent target or trade candidate fell by the wayside, until eventually it felt inevitable that New York would enter spring training with some combination of DJ LeMahieu, Oswaldo Cabrera and Oswald Peraza competing for a starting spot. None of those names inspired a ton of confidence for a team looking to erase the memory of last year’s World Series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, but especially not LeMahieu, who was among the very worst hitters in baseball last year on the rare occasoins in which he was healthy enough to actually take the field.

Despite ample evidence that LeMahieu was very much Not It, Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone insisted otherwise, promising that everyone would be changing their tune now that the veteran was rested and ready after a full offseason. The spin campaign continued in the first week of camp, with Boone arguing that “it wasn’t long ago when DJ was one of the best hitters in the American League.”

Which is, technically speaking, true enough, depending on how you’d like to define “long ago” — LeMahieu was indeed one of the best in the game in 2019 and 2020, and was an above-average hitter as recently as 2022. But he’s 36 now, 37 in July, with evaporating skills and an ever-lengthening injury list. And it hardly took him much time at all to show Yankees fans that they can’t trust a word Boone and Cashman have to say on the matter.

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Early spring training suggests reports of a DJ LeMahieu comeback have been greatly exaggerated

Unfortunately for Yankees brass, plenty of reporters are hanging around Tampa to watch the team work out this month, and those reporters also come with cameras. That’s bad news for LeMahieu, who’s been repeatedly spotted looking … well, like pretty much exactly the guy New York saw put up a .527 OPS last season.

A “possible single”! Another accurate descriptor would be “a ground ball,” which LeMahieu produced a whopping 57.8 percent of the time in 2024. And even that was an improvement on some of the at-bats he’s taken in live batting practice so far this spring.

Of course, these are necessarily an incomplete picture, little snippets taken out of context. We have no idea what LeMahieu looks like behind the scenes; maybe he’s vastly improved, and Cashman and Boone know something we don’t. More likely, though, is that this is just the player LeMahieu is now, a still-versatile and valuable defender who simply isn’t a Major League hitter at this point in his career. That’s a great player to have on the bench (even at a bloated salary), but it’s not one that you can afford to pencil into your lineup every day as a legitimate World Series contender. The sooner the team can be honest about that, the better.