Each season, we award to players rankings according to outstanding performances during the season. Using this system, here’s how the Batters and Pitchers of the New York Yankees placed:

Batters:

(Last season’s position in brackets, uniform number after hyphen)

1 (3) Gleyber Torres – 25

2 (1) Aaron Judge – 99

3 (4) DJ LeMahieu – 26

4 (7) Anthony Rizzo – 48

5 (-) Isiah Kiner-Falefa – 12

6 (Rookie) Anthony Volpe – 11

Pitchers:

(Last season’s position in brackets, uniform number after hyphen)

1 (2) Gerrit Cole – 45

2 (7) Michael King – 34

3 (4) Clay Holmes – 35

4 (-) Wandy Peralta – 58

5 (New to roster) Ian Hamilton -71

6 (New signing) Keynan Middleton – 93

In the list of the Top Yankees players on Baseballreference.com (compiled by WAR alone), Tommy Kahnle, Randy Vasquez and Nick Ramirez are ranked in the top 12.

As well as our visual assessment of a players contribution to a game, we use primarily the good old fashioned standard statistics (batting average, home runs, RBIs, ERA, Wins and losses, saves), rather than a system of sabermetrics.

Taking into the account the time that Anthony Rizzo played with an unrecognised injury, we have weighted his contribution to the season during the period that he was fit to play higher than the remaining time. This brings him onto our list.

Isiah Kiner-Falefa makes our list given the amount of time he was played in positions that he had little experience of. Anthony Volpe seems to us to be inevitably massively over-ranked using the WAR system.

One remaining player who makes our list but was not listed in the top 12 on baseballreference.com is Keynan Middleton who played exceptionally well in August.

We have retained our policy of having an even number of batters and pitchers and a minimum qualifying standard. This means that last season 16 players were judged to have made a high enough standard (an 8-8 divide between batters and pitchers). This season only 12 players make our list (a 6-6 split). The baseballreference.com 12 splits 4 batters to 8 pitchers as they insist on listing 12 whether you are the 2023 Texas Rangers, 2023 Atlanta Braves, or the 2023 Oakland Athletics, or the 2023 Kansas City Royals. We simply think you can’t call somebody the “Best” if they contributed so little on a team that won less than 60 games.

Our 2022 Yankees player of the year was Aaron Judge. That title for 2023 moves to Gerrit Cole who is our 2023 Yankees player of the year.