In truth, the decision for the Least Valuable Player of the 2026 Yankees only ever boiled down to two players. The two standout candidates for this ignominious award were Ryan McMahon and Trent Grisham, and for very similar reasons. In addition to their black hole bats polluting the lineup, there was apprehension from the start that they could ever provide the amount of value commensurate with the amount of money they were earning. The pair combined to cost the Yankees a hair over $38 million in 2026 — 11.3-percent of their estimated $335.8 million luxury tax payroll — and yet combined to produce just 1.2 fWAR, or a measly 2.8-percent of the team's 43.1 overall fWAR. McMahon narrowly edges Grisham for the distinction for the 20-point gap in their wRC+ (78 vs. 98) and regression in the one area where he was supposed to excel: defense.
When it became apparent that a key cog of Operation Run It Back concerned persisting with McMahon as the team's starting third baseman, the mental gymnastics required to rationalize this decision began tying fans' minds in knots. "If the Yankees can find a way to help his bat take advantage of the Yankee Stadium short porch and bring it closer to league average production, this along with his reliably stellar defense at the hot corner creates a player with plenty of value to the 2026 team," was a common refrain.
The problem with this wishful thinking became immediately obvious when you realize that McMahon has never posted a league average or better season at the plate by wRC+ despite playing the first eight-and-a-half seasons of his career at Coors field, rendering the belief that you could suddenly transform a 31-year-old hitter into something he had never been a folly.
McMahon's season began worse than even the most pessimistic fan could have predicted with just a 51 wRC+ and 33-percent strikeout rate through the end of April. The walk rate that had provided a nominal floor of offensive value was drying up and he was bleeding bat speed, leading to a tweak in the width of his batting stance that provided a modest improvement but still nothing close to the 91 wRC+ hitter he had been over the previous five seasons. McMahon missed 38 games after dealing with a late-June throat infection and a mid-August Grade 2 thumb sprain, but by that point was already ceding reps at third to a pair of ostensibly worse defenders in José Caballero and Amed Rosario.
The Gold Glove caliber defense which convinced the Yankees to acquire him from the Rockies at the 2025 trade deadline had deserted him. It got to the point where the Yankees were giving practice reps to Anthony Volpe at the hot corner — a position he had never played in his professional career — in the days leading up to the playoffs. It culminated in a play which really summarized his season in a nutshell, McMahon booting a routine grounder from Yandy Díaz, the first batter the Rays sent to the plate in Game 2 of the ALDS. That error started an avalanche of defensive miscues that ended with four errors in an ugly 5-2 loss.
For a player brought in for his defense, it begged the question "what do you even do here?" McMahon rode the bench in Game 3 as the Yankees got swept, bringing an end to possibly the worst season of his big league career when combining all the factors. He finished with a putrid .213/.279/.357 triple slash line, with 11 home runs, 41 RBIs, a 78 wRC+, and 0.5 fWAR in 360 plate appearances across 124 games. His .279 OBP and 78 wRC+ placed him among the 20 worst hitters in MLB with at least 350 PAs in 2026. His 11 home runs, 78 wRC+, 7.8-percent walk rate, zero Statcast Outs Above Average, and 0.5 fWAR were all the lowest marks of his career since the COVID-shortened season of 2020 and easily the worst marks of any season in which he played at least 100 games.
He also cannot be separated from the broader context of the team. His presence on the roster emboldened the Yankees to re-up with Rosario over the winter to reprise his platoon partner role. That turned into an unmitigated disaster, Rosario immediately forgetting how to hit against lefties — the one thing he was supposed to be good at — while producing an almost impossibly bad -7 OAA in just 394 innings, his seven errors at third coming in moments that contributed to costing the Yankees a shot at the division.
The most disheartening aspect of the whole charade is that everybody could see it coming. It is therefore not so much an indictment on McMahon — a known quantity who happened to regress in the one area where he still provided some value — as it is on the Yankees front office for allowing third base to remain a perennial black hole. In the words of our fearless leader Andrew Mearns, it all started with "the original sin of giving DJ LeMahieu six years to save on taxable AAV."
Since signing LeMahieu to that second contract prior to the start of the 2021 season, eleven players have taken at least 100 plate appearances while manning third base for the Yankees. Below is a breakdown of the amount of guaranteed money paid out to each of those players and the offensive production and value they provided:
It total, the Yankees have paid out $222.5 million to players who have soaked up the majority of playing time at the hot corner. The 89 wRC+ those players have returned ranks 21st in baseball while the 11.5 fWAR is only a touch better in 19th place. Plenty of teams have committed nine-figure sums to the position during that span — Manny Machado, Rafael Devers, Nolan Arenado, Anthony Rendon, Carlos Correa, Austin Riley, Alex Bregman, José Ramírez, Matt Chapman, and Kevin McGonigle have all signed deals in excess of $150 million — but outside of Rendon and Correa no team gets a consistently worse return on the amount of money they invest in third base than the Yankees.
McMahon is just the latest figurehead of this maddening trend. The Yankees owe him $16 million in 2027. After a disastrous 2026 campaign, the question for McMahon is not whether he can fulfill that outlay with value on the field. It's whether the Yankees will follow a similar path as they did with LeMahieu in 2025, Aaron Hicks in 2023, and Jacoby Ellsbury in 2019 and cut bait this offseason, eating the dead money for the privilege of not having to subject fans to his poor play.
