The New York Yankees continue to collect former San Diego Padres.
Jeff Passan of ESPN reported Thursday that the New York Yankees have agreed to sign veteran reliever Tim Hill. The left-hander Hill is getting a one-year, major-league deal from the Yankees just days after being designated for assignment by the Chicago White Sox.
The Yankees announced that they are designating fellow lefty pitcher Clayton Andrews for assignment in a corresponding move.
Hill, 34, has spent time with three different teams ever since his MLB debut in 2018. That includes the Padres, whom Hill pitched for from 2020-23. He was teammates there with current Yankees star Juan Soto for the last two of those seasons.
On his own merits, Hill was not moving the needle much this year, posting a woeful 5.87 ERA in 27 relief appearances before getting DFA’d by the MLB-worst White Sox. But the Yankees have a number of relievers currently on the injured list and will now turn to Hill as another bridge option.
Yankees outfielder Jasson Dominguez is going to miss a lot time with an oblique strain. SNY relayed video on X of manager Aaron Boone discussing the issue, with the skipper saying Dominguez will miss “up to eight weeks” before he can play in games because the strain is “pretty significant.” It’s yet another unfortunate setback for Dominguez, who arrived in the big leagues with such flair last year. With the Yankees playing out a lost season in 2023, the prospect was brought up as a September call-up, then went on to hit four home runs in his first eight games. Unfortunately, Dominguez subsequently required Tommy John surgery, which ended that exciting debut and put him on track for a challenging 2024. He began the season on the injured list while rehabbing from that surgery and was only reinstated last week. Since the Yankees have a solid big league outfield consisting of Juan Soto, Aaron Judge and Alex Verdugo, with Giancarlo Stanton in the designated hitter slot and Trent Grisham on the bench, Dominguez was optioned to get regular at-bats in Triple-A. But this past weekend, just a few days after being reinstated from the IL, he was placed on the minor league IL with some side tightness. Now it seems he’s slated for another lengthy injury layoff, with the eight-week timeline set to take him into the middle of August. It’s a rough blow for the Yankees on a number of fronts. In the short term, the big league outfield is in good shape, as mentioned. But if any of their major league outfielders should suffer an injury, this will leave their outfield depth thin. Everson Pereira, another of the club’s outfield prospects, recently underwent UCL surgery and is out for the year. With Dominguez now out as well, the Yankees don’t have an outfielder on the 40-man roster who could be recalled to cover for someone else’s absence. In the longer term, it’s obviously less than ideal for a top prospect to lose almost an entire season of development like this. Both Verdugo and Soto are slated for free agency after this season while Grisham will be a non-tender candidate, giving the club little certainty in the outfield going forward apart from Judge. They obviously hope to re-sign Soto but that’s no guarantee and they will need to replace Verdugo and likely Grisham even if they can lure Soto back. Ideally, Dominguez would be getting regular playing time and convincing the Yankees that he can be a part of their 2025 club, but that will have to be on pause for now. He should still have a few weeks of playing time at the end of the season if things progress as planned from here, but it’s more of the waiting game for Dominguez now.
