The most disappointing player in baseball this year signed his big contract by refusing to sign one at all.
Trent Grisham never hit free agency. On November 18 he accepted the Yankees' qualifying offer, a one-year deal worth $22.025 million, and he earned that payday off the best season of his life. In 2025 he slashed .235/.348/.464 across 143 games, set career highs almost everywhere, including 34 home runs and an .812 OPS, and did it all on a $5 million arbitration salary. The Yankees looked at that year, decided it was the real Grisham, and handed him more than four times the money to run it back.
He did not run it back. In 2026 he hit .211/.308/.395 with 18 home runs and 59 RBI across 121 games. The slugging dropped, and the batting average collapsed. The player New York thought it was buying never showed up. A career year priced as the baseline turned into the regression skeptics warned about the moment he accepted the qualifying offer.
The ending was merciless. In a win-or-go-home ALDS Game 3 against the Rays, Grisham batted leadoff and went 0-for-5 with three strikeouts. The last of them, swinging through Bryan Baker with a runner standing on second base, ended the Yankees' season. The $22 million man made the final out.
He strained his right hamstring in early September, a grade two strain, and injuries aren't a character flaw. But that doesn't explain April, May, June, or July. Grisham played 121 games, enough to show a full season of a hitter producing nowhere near what his contract demanded. The injury is a footnote on a down year. It doesn't excuse it.
Half of Yankee fandom will say the whole roster let them down and it's unfair to pin a season on one man. Not everyone on that roster bet $22 million on their own 2025 numbers, though. Grisham did. When you're the guy who took the premium deal, you're the guy who gets measured against it. That's the trade. He took the leverage and the money; he gets the scrutiny when the bat goes quiet.
Contrast him with a genuine injury story, the kind fans keep confusing with underperformance. Ben Brown opened the year as a Cubs bullpen piece, got shoved into the rotation when arms kept breaking, and was outstanding, a 1.70 ERA across eight starts before a stress reaction in his neck shut him down for the rest of the season. Nobody should write Brown's name on a disappointment list. He was pitching the best baseball of anyone's expectations when his body quit on him. Brown's season was taken from him. Grisham's was just a bad one that cost his team a fortune.
The cleanest disappointment in the sport is a player who looked at the best season of his life, told his employer that's who he is now, got paid like it, and then spent six months proving otherwise. The Yankees believed the platform year. Grisham cashed the check for it. Then he struck out with the season on the line, the last image of what $22 million bought.
