After failing to reel in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Yankees have cast their net wide — other-side-of-the-ocean wide — and are exploring a pitcher who has publicly battled with plenty around baseball, including their general manager.
The Yankees are at least considering a union with Marcus Stroman, a veteran with experience as a solid, middle-of-the-rotation option and with experience in exchanging jabs with Brian Cashman.
The Yankees are not alone in engaging with Stroman, a source said, but his actions — notably ridding his Twitter account of previous, anti-Yankees tweets — suggests that a signing that would seem like an impossibility is no longer so impossible.
In monetary cost or in prospect cost, the Yankees are finding prices too high to fill out their rotation, which at the moment would have an unknown in Clayton Beeter or Will Warren as the No. 5.
Cashman & Co. would rather not pay the significant dollars that Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell would command, and they would rather not part with the significant prospect haul that it would take to pry, say, Dylan Cease from the White Sox or Corbin Burnes from the Brewers.
In a market overflowing with demand and short on supply, the Yankees are entertaining the thought of burying the hatchet and bringing in Stroman.
The discord between the two dates back to the 2019 trade deadline, when then-Blue Jay Stroman was dealt to the Mets.
In the aftermath, Cashman told Yahoo Sports that he did not seek out Stroman because he was not a “difference-maker” and because the righty would be in the Yankees’ bullpen in the postseason.
Stroman — who is listed at 5 foot 7 and who literally wears his underdog status on his sleeve, with his apparel company HDMH (Height Doesn’t Measure Heart) — took the slight personally.
As the Yankees continued to flame out in postseason after postseason, the Long Island native would take digs at the Yankees, sometimes comparing his own stats with their staff’s.
“Besides [Gerrit] Cole, there’s no current yankee pitcher who will be anywhere in my league over the next 5-7 years,’’ Stroman wrote after the 2020 postseason. “Their pitching always folds in the end. That lineup and payroll should be winning World Series’ left and right … yet they’re in a drought! Lol.”
Such tweets no longer exist, Stroman presumably cleaning up his image to make himself as appealing as possible.
Solely as a pitcher, the 32-year-old makes a lot of sense for the Yankees.
Since 2019, Stroman has been an All-Star twice, has pitched to a 3.38 ERA in 638 ²/₃ innings (the 33rd-most in baseball in the span despite sitting out the 2020 season) and generally has been a reliable option for the Blue Jays, Mets and Cubs.
He might be trending the wrong direction — injuries have kept him from reaching 140 innings in the past two seasons — but he is among the most dependable free agents out there. His style, too — inducing a heavy dose of ground balls primarily through a heavy sinker — lends itself to pitching in The Bronx.
The concerns stretch beyond his relationship with Cashman.
Stroman is a fiery competitor on the mound and off it and has been known as a polarizing figure wherever he has gone.
His public controversies with the Mets included “liking” a tweet that called a reporter an Italian slur (to which Stroman later said he “would never downgrade another race”).
After leaving the Mets for the Cubs ahead of the 2022 season, Stroman alleged Mets fans slurred him, and the club’s front office “didn’t care about any of that,” he wrote on Twitter.
That tweet is still in existence, the bridge to the Mets already burned.
Ahead of what could be a bizarre alliance, Stroman appears to be open to a Yankees team he has knocked, and the Yankees are at least open to a personality they had become too familiar with from afar.