One More Ride for Paul Goldschmidt

On Friday afternoon, the Yankees and Paul Goldschmidt agreed to a one-year deal worth $4 million, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported. Friday in the early evening, I began contemplating how I’d like my career to end. These are related incidents.

Three years ago, Goldschmidt stood at the pinnacle of the game. He’d just won NL MVP on the back of a spectacular all-around offensive season, carrying the Cardinals to the playoffs in a rousing capper to his long, decorated career. It was his eighth straight season receiving MVP votes, and brought his career WAR total to 52. Have you ever considered retiring at the top of your game? With two years left on his contract, Goldschmidt must have given the idea some thought. Finish those two out well, get a bit more hardware, and ride off into the sunset toward Cooperstown.

The next two years didn’t cooperate, however. In 2023, Goldschmidt managed 3.4 WAR, a gentle decline, but the Cards collapsed, finishing last in the NL Central for the first time in 33 years. The following season was even worse; Goldschmidt hit .245/.302/.414, for a 100 wRC+, easily the worst mark of his career. The Cardinals missed the playoffs again and tilted toward a rebuild. Goldschmidt didn’t fit in St. Louis anymore. But he couldn’t go out like this, with an outlier down season, the worst of his career, closing out his time in the majors. And so he departed for New York in free agency on a one-year, $12.5 million contract.

His 2025 proved that 2024 was no fluke. Goldschmidt more or less equaled his 2024 numbers in slightly less playing time. His 103 wRC+ was a minor improvement over the prior year, thanks to a huge improvement in strikeout rate (18.7%, down from 26.5%), but his power went missing as he traded damage for contact. The Yankees turned him into a platoon bat toward the end of the season, and it’s no mystery why: He hit .336/.411/.570 (.412 wOBA) against lefties and .247/.289/.329 (.273) against righties. Goldschmidt has always performed better with the platoon advantage — he’s a whopping 17% better against lefties across nearly 9,000 career plate appearances (.422 wOBA vs. lefties, .361 vs. righties) — so it’s clear last year’s splits were no small sample mirage. This more extreme version — an even more absurd 51% better against southpaws in 2025 — might just be who he is at this point.

That brings me to the contemplation of careers that I referenced earlier. It’s no longer a question of whether Goldschmidt is one of the game’s best players; two straight seasons of league average offense have put an end to that line of thought. Rather, at age 38, he’s a situational player. He faced as many lefties in 2025 as he did in 2024, but 120 fewer right-handers. Unless he’s forced into more playing time because other players get hurt, that trend is only going to accelerate in 2026. That must be a strange feeling for a guy who led baseball in plate appearances from his full-time debut in 2012 until the end of 2024.

Would you stick around if you went from the most important person at your job to merely one of the cogs in the machine? Would you stick around if you went from accepting awards to being employed part-time? Would you back up the teammates who used to support you? Would they have to pry the uniform off you?

That question is complicated by all of the legacy achievements Goldschmidt is chasing. As Jay Jaffe noted in his annual Cooperstown progress report, Goldschmidt has surpassed the JAWS score for first basemen but could still use some counting-statistic padding to make him more of a lock for the Hall of Fame. Making it to 400 home runs and/or 2,500 hits would go a long way toward guaranteeing him a plaque. There’s an obvious problem here, though: Goldschmidt isn’t going to reach either of those milestones this year. He’s 28 homers and 210 hits short, and we project him for less than half of each of those in 2026. He’s not adding much to his career WAR at this rate, either.

A World Series title – or even playing in the Series – would be a bigger prize. Goldschmidt has had a ships-passing-in-the-night relationship with the Fall Classic. The Diamondbacks teams he led early in his career never made it past the NLDS – their run to the 2023 Series came long after he was gone. The Cards got swept out of the NLCS in his first year with them and never advanced past the wild card round again. The Yankees made the World Series a year before Goldschmidt arrived, and then lost to the Blue Jays in the 2025 ALDS.

A ring is a powerful motivator. I suspect that it’s a bittersweet one for Goldschmidt, though. For the first decade of his career, he was one of baseball’s main characters. If any of his squads made a run to the promised land, his name would have been atop the marquee. Even if he’d accomplished it toward the start of his downswing, he’d be a key secondary cog. Now he’s a role player on roughly the same deal the Yankees gave Amed Rosario to also be a short-side-platoon player. The fall from the top can be dizzying.

Regardless of what made Goldy want to come back, his decision is a boon for the Bronx Bombers. Their regular starting lineup features six left-handed hitters. Between the short right field porch and the desire to surround Aaron Judge with opposite-handed hitters, it’s only natural. And that means there will be no shortage of platoon opportunities for Goldschmidt. The Yankees probably had more need for a part-time righty first baseman than any other team in the league, in fact.

Signing a competent part-time first baseman also unlocks Ben Rice’s positional versatility. Rice will get most of his playing time as the starting first baseman, but he moonlighted at catcher, his natural position, for 229 innings last year. Manager Aaron Boone specifically noted that Goldschmidt’s return would let Rice move behind the plate more frequently to keep more offense in the lineup.

This kind of offensive upgrade usually costs more than $4 million on a one-year deal. Most hitters who crush lefties as much as Goldschmidt does won’t accept part-time roles, for one thing, because they typically hit righties better than he does. His platoon splits are so big that even as our projection systems think he’ll continue to decline, Steamer has him down for a projected 120 wRC+ against lefties, compared to a 100 mark against righties. Marcell Ozuna, with basically the same projection vs. lefties (124), just got $12 million from the Pirates because he’s better against righties (113 projected wRC+ vs. righties). But the Yankees don’t really need production against righties, what with their unending procession of left-handed thumpers and all. It’s a perfect pairing between a player with a very specific set of skills and a team that needed exactly that.

Maybe that’s the real answer to my idle musing about Goldschmidt’s motivation. Would he prefer to still be the big man on campus? I’m sure he would. But there’s a joy in being a perfect fit for your job. The Yankees need Goldschmidt. They probably need him more than he needs them. Four million dollars isn’t doing anything for a man with nine-figure career earnings. If he decided to retire tomorrow, he’d be just fine. But even if you’re not at the top of the game anymore, there must be something very satisfying about being needed. When I’ve hit the platoon-baseball-analyst phase of my writing career, I hope that someone needs my skills as much as the Yankees need Goldschmidt’s.