Around the Empire: Yankees news - 1/2/22

NJ.com | Randy Miller: Alex Rodriguez, one of the greatest players of all time, and one of the poster boys for baseball’s PED history, is Hall of Fame eligible for the first time. With 110 votes made public at the time of writing, A-Rod falls well short of enshrinement, garnering around 47 percent of the total vote. Contrast this with fellow first timer David Ortiz, sitting at north of 80 percent of the ballots, and it’s hard to see a way for Alex to get into Cooperstown this cycle.

Twitter | Joe Migliaccio: When the Yankees hired Dillon Lawson as their big league hitting coach for 2022, it meant that they would have to find a new minor league hitting coordinator. The team has found its man for the job, and the news came straight from the source himself: Joe Migliaccio. A former college coach, he joined his old friend Lawson with the Yankees in 2019 as the then-High-A Tampa Tarpons’ hitting coach, and in 2021, he helped the Somerset Patriots become one of Double-A’s top offenses. Migliaccio will now take on a greater role in the organization.

For more on Migliaccio’s background, check out our own Dan Kelly’s two-part interview with him from September 2020.

New York Post | Rich Calder: Minor league baseball can be a bit of a Wild West when it comes to promotions and team gear. We’ve seen teams like the Baby Cakes and Trash Pandas in MiLB, and apparently, the one-time Yankee affiliate Staten Island Yankees’ Pizza Rat promotion irked Yankee COO Lonn Trost. Trost stated in internal emails that the Pizza Rat temporary name change tarnished the image of the big-league club, which I think says a lot about the belief structure of the folks running this organization.

MLB.com | Sarah Langs: It’s a new year, and Sarah kicks us off with a fun little ranking of the calendar years that produced the most cumulative WAR. Yankee stalwarts like Bernie Williams, Mike Mussina, Gary Sheffield, and the aforementioned A-Rod all boost their birth years into the top five.