The New York Yankees started the 2023-2024 season as one of the best teams in baseball, and for a while, it looked as if they would run away with the American League East. However, the team quickly fell back to earth. The product that Aaron Boone has been putting out on the field for the last few months would be unrecognizable to fans who stopped watching after the first two months of the season.
The team may take drastic measures to improve at the trade deadline and salvage the season, but Jasson Dominguez is one prospect who should be off-limits in any trade discussions. The deadline would only give them a puncher's chance once the postseason arrives. Dominguez could be the team's future at center field or left field for the next decade and a half, so it’s not worth giving that up for a marginal chance at winning one year.
Let’s take a closer look at why the Yankees must hold on to this top prospect.
Who is Jasson Dominguez?
Jasson Dominguez was the Yankees' $5.1 million international free agent who signed with the team out of the Dominican Republic at 16 years old in the summer of 2019. Dominguez is one of the highest-rated prospects of all time, and he has been described as a modern-day Mickey Mantle or a teenage switch-hitting version of Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout.
Dominguez is one of the rare five-tool players who can do everything on the baseball diamond. He has a good eye, can hit for average and power, is explosive on the basepaths, and is an elite outfielder with a strong arm.
Slow starts are the norm for Dominguez throughout his minor league career. He started in Rookie Ball and was quickly promoted to low-A. He struggled a bit at Low-A, but figured things out towards the summer of 2022 and was promoted to High-A. He took some time to acclimate to High-A ball, but ended up being promoted to Double-A toward the end of the 2022 season.
He exploded onto the scene in the Double-A playoffs but fell back to earth during the spring of 2023. He figured things out in the summer and became one of the best players in the Eastern League.
The young star has already conquered Double-A, which is widely considered to be the hardest level for any minor league player to break through. He struggled for three to four months at Somerset before things finally clicked for him. Once he acclimated to the talent level, he took off like he was on a spaceship to Mars.
Dominguez started skyrocketing through the prospect rankings and never looked back. He earned a quick promotion to Triple-A after tearing the cover off the ball for several weeks at Somerset. Once Dominguez made it to Scranton, all he did was hit close to the .500 mark for a little over a week before earning a quick bump up to the big leagues.
Dominguez was promoted to the big league club when rosters expanded in September, and he did not disappoint.
Dominguez immediately showed what all the hype was about as he smashed a home run off future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander in his very first big league at-bat. From there, Dominguez only continued to shine. He hit three more home runs before a brutal injury forced him out of the lineup and ultimately led to Tommy John surgery. The young star's rapid ascension was put on hold, but only temporarily. Dominguez was firmly on the rise, and there’s seemingly nothing that can stop him at this point.
Jasson Dominguez hasn't missed a beat this year in Triple-A
After a grueling rehab process, Dominguez made it back to baseball activities in May. He started his rehab at Low-A and was quickly promoted to Somerset after just a few games. Once he had his legs back under him and started to regain his timing at Somerset, he was sent to Triple-A to continue his rehab and wait for a spot to open up on the big league roster.
Unfortunately, Dominguez suffered another injury setback when he checked his swing during a game in late June and suffered an oblique injury.
The timing was particularly cruel, because Giancarlo Stanton went down with an injury just a week later. If Dominguez had been healthy, he almost certainly would have been called out after Stanton’s injury.
Even with Stanton returning, his health will always be in question. Alex Verdugo got off to a quick start this season, but he has been one of the major culprits in the team's recent struggles. The former Boston Red Sox outfielder has been one of the worst hitters in baseball for almost two months now, and he hasn't shown much to inspire confidence that he is on the verge of turning things around.
Dominguez will serve as an insurance policy against another Stanton injury or continued underperformance by Verdugo. Dominguez also has upside that nobody else on the team has. his combination of contact and power gives him a higher ceiling at the play then Anthony Volpe, Ben Rice, Austin Wells or any of the Yankees' other top prospects.
The ceiling for Dominguez is a player who is in the same stratosphere as Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. It's not a guarantee that Dominguez reaches the height of those players have reached, but the fact that it's even a possibility is a good enough reason not to trade the Martian.
Dominguez recently returned to action in Scranton and started where he left off, with a scorching line drive for a base hit in his first game back.
Why the Yankees would consider trading Dominguez
The only reason that the Yankees would even consider trading Dominguez is if they genuinely believe that Juan Soto will leave in free agency. If the Yankees don’t believe that they can retain Soto, it would make sense to go all-in during the year that he is with the team. It would be organizational malpractice not to, right? That makes sense, but not so fast. The Yankees didn’t give up a massive haul for Soto, and Dominguez has been viewed as the team's future for five seasons.
If they wait until Dominguez is right on the verge of the big leagues, and then deal away their future just because they’re afraid that Soto will leave, it would be doubling down on a bad hand. They shouldn’t have traded for Soto if they were not prepared to do everything in their power to keep him in free agency.
Unless the asking price gets to be north of $1 billion or even higher, the Yankees must be committed to retaining Soto. If they make the mistake of letting him walk, they shouldn’t compound that with another mistake by trading the next 15 years of their franchise for one shot at a championship that’s 50-50 at best.
Winning the World Series is more about luck than talent
It takes talent to get to the postseason, sure. But baseball is a game that relies significantly on large sample sizes and there can be incredible variance in what happens during a series of seven games. Any team can get hot for a couple of games and win a series.
This means that a team with enough talent to have a credible chance at winning the World Series in five different seasons will have a better chance to actually win a title than a team that is the clear-cut best team in the league for one year.
Dominguez will be around for the next decade in his performance will go a long way toward ensuring that the Yankees are one of those teams with enough talent to contend year in and year out. This will give them a better chance of winning not only one but multiple World Series titles.
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