Around the Empire: Yankees news - 8/23/23

MLB Trade Rumors | Steve Adams and Darragh McDonald: With the odds of a postseason berth looking about as likely as acing the final exam after not showing up to class all semester, the New York Yankees made a series of moves yesterday with an eye towards the future. They recalled a pair of top prospects, Oswald Peraza and Everson Pereira, and immediately slotted the former into the hot corner and the latter into left field last night; to make room for them, Greg Allen was DFA’ed and Billy McKinney was sent to the IL with back spasms. Carlos Rodón, meanwhile, was reinstated from the 15-day IL, in the hope that the southpaw can finish a battered first year in pinstripes on a positive note.

New York Daily News | Gary Phillips: One of my favorite genre of baseball stories is players learning about their first career call-up to The Show. While not quite on the level of Chicago White Sox pitcher Declan Cronin’s famous chess match earlier this month, Pereira has his own fun story: Scranton RailRiders manager Shelley Duncan and hitting coach Trevor Amicone called him into his office to go over the next day’s starting pitcher, then showed him video/scouting reports of Washington Nationals starter Josiah Gray.

Also within this article, Amicone discusses how Peraza has carried himself despite losing the starting shortstop job in spring training and struggling in his cups of coffee in the majors this year and Jasson Domínguez’s promotion to Triple-A. Aaron Boone also mentions that Austin Wells is “on the radar” for a possible promotion to the Bronx this year.

Sports Illustarted | Matthew Postins: Speaking of Domínguez, he finished up his Double-A career in style, winning the Eastern League Player of the Week. The Martian was unstoppable this past week, going 13-for-28 with two home runs, five doubles, eight runs, eight runs batted in, and three walks. This capped off a month of August in which he posted an otherworldly 1.046 OPS.

The Wall Street Journal | Lindsey Adler: Lindsey Adler spent several years on the Yankees beat as a writer for The Athletic. Thanks to this experience, she had a front row seat to the process that resulted in their worst season since the early 1990s. And while there’s quite a bit of blame to go around, most notably the failure of the team’s elite group of prospects in 2017 (if you recall, their farm system ranked top three after the 2016 deadline), Adler highlight’s the organization’s lack of direction in recent years that seems to be pinned on the organization not acting out of its own best interest, but in the best interest of its public perception — as I would put it, to build the team off of what the callers on WFAN say at three in the morning and not what the scouts and analysts say.

Baseball Prospectus | Patrick Dubuque: This season has seen two major organizations, the Yankees and Cardinals, underperform massively, with both teams sitting in the cellar after entering the season with postseason aspirations. If you have a BP subscription, this is another excellent outside perspective on what has gone wrong with the 2023 Yankees.