Will Yankees' Jasson Dominguez start season in minors?
New York Yankees left fielder Jasson Domínguez alone on the bench after ALDS Game 4 against the Toronto Blue Jays on Oct 8, 2025, at Yankee Stadium. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
TAMPA, Fla. — What a difference a year makes when it comes to Jasson Dominguez.
And not in too many ways positive regarding the 23-year-old’s 2026 big-league prospects.
At least at the start of the season.
Dominguez, as hyped a player as the Yankees have had in the last quarter-century during his steady climb through the minor leagues, entered spring training last year with the starting job in leftfield his to lose.
This year?
Dominguez — nicknamed “The Martian” because of his seemingly other-worldly skill set shortly after the Yankees gave him a franchise-record $5.1 million signing bonus at the age of 16 out of the Dominican Republic — will be fortunate to avoid starting the season with Triple-A Scranton-Wilkes/Barre.
That became a distinct possibility when the Yankees secured outfielder Cody Bellinger, whose re-signing was the club’s top offseason priority, on a five-year, $162.5 million deal late last month.
Bellinger back in the fold as the everyday leftfielder leaves Dominguez in the position of trying to make the big-league club as its fourth outfielder (assuming Bellinger, centerfielder Trent Grisham or rightfielder Aaron Judge do not suffer injuries in spring training).
And it will be an uphill battle for Dominguez to make the roster even as the fourth outfielder.
The switch hitter, who played winter ball in the Dominican Republic in the offseason, is far from a finished product. There is the thought organizationally — though certainly not a universal thought — that he would be better served continuing that development by playing every day in the minors rather than sporadically seeing time as a reserve in the majors.
Then there is the matter of Dominguez’s struggles as a righthanded hitter. He had a .204/.279/.290 slash line while batting righthanded last season — significantly worse than his .274/.348/.420 slash line while batting lefthanded — among the reasons the Yankees, on the eve of pitchers and catchers reporting, are still looking for a righthanded-hitting outfielder.
And there is this: Dominguez simply isn’t good enough in leftfield yet. That has been a work in progress for Dominguez, who came up through the Yankees’ system primarily as a centerfielder, since late in the 2024 season, when he got a taste of leftfield and was a liability there.
He played leftfield pretty much all of spring training last year, and, though he came a long way from the early part of the Grapefruit League season, when he consistently took poor routes to the ball, the improvement wasn’t to the point that, in the words of one veteran rival American League scout, Dominguez “looked like a player you could trust out there.”
The scout added: “The Yankees obviously didn’t think so.”
The Yankees, of course, never put it that way. But in matters such as these — and, really, all matters — it generally is helpful to ignore what the Yankees say and focus on what they do.
And Dominguez’s playing time, especially in the season’s second half, dried up. Much of that had to do with the consistent output by Judge, Grisham and Bellinger, but Dominguez’s difficulties in the field and as a righthanded hitter factored in plenty.
Dominguez, who hit .257 with 10 homers, 47 RBIs and a .719 OPS in 123 games, got only one at-bat in the postseason (he doubled as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning of the Yankees’ seventh and final postseason game, the Game 4 loss to the Blue Jays in the ALDS).
During a late January Zoom news conference discussing the re-signing of Bellinger, Aaron Boone, who doesn’t always publicly acknowledge the obvious, did so when it came to the impact Bellinger’s return would have on Dominguez and one of the club’s top prospects, Spencer Jones.
”[It] maybe complicates some things,” Boone said.
The seashells-and-balloons manager later added: “The reality is we have a lot of really good players, and Jasson and Spencer are part of that.”
Speaking early last week during an interview on WFAN, Boone again was asked about Dominguez.
“I think what gets lost sometimes is that last year was his age-22 season,” Boone said. “And he very much held his own. And while he’s still a work in progress defensively . . . I think he’s showing signs he still has a chance to be a really good player in this league.
“How that shakes out initially, we’ll see. So let’s not write the script on him too early.”
All true.
The question is, when the regular season begins, at what level will the script continue to get written?
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
