It’s probably been an unpleasant few weeks for Cody Bellinger. It’s an open secret that the Chicago Cubs tried to sign him even though they signed him to a three-year, $80 million contract just an offseason ago. The emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong as a credible hitter had already made Bellinger (and/or Seiya Suzuki) expendable, and after winning the Kyle Tucker sweepstakes, the Cubs just had to wait for the other shoe to drop.

And what a great striped shoe this is. The New York Yankees have graciously agreed to take Bellinger off the hands of the Cubs and assume all but $5 million of his remaining contract. Chicago also receives right-handed pitcher Cody Poteet as part of the deal. Thus, Cody’s great cosmic balance remains undisturbed.

Bellinger’s time in Chicago came to an end because he committed the unforgivable sin of simply being pretty good even though his contract demanded more. Bellinger hit .307/.356/.525 in his first season with the Cubs, on a one-year tryout contract. In 2024, he was a little more average: .266/.325/.426 with just 18 home runs – still good for a 109 wRC+ and with an average defense in the middle of the field of 2.2 WAR.

Bellinger will make $27.5 million in 2025 and $25 million in 2026, but can opt out after next season for a $5 million buyout. That means if Bellinger fails in 2026, the Yankees (or previously the Cubs) would be on the hook for another season at $25 million. But if he’s good enough to try his luck in free agency for the third time in four years, Bellinger could exercise his opt-out, effectively costing the Yankees $32.5 million for just one season.

If Bellinger has something like a five-win season, the Yankees would probably be happy with this deal, but it gives this trade a little less lift than your garden-variety salary dump.

Fortunately, after cutting Juan Soto, the Yankees still have $31 million in salary available to them.

It’s the latest strange twist for a player whose career has posed equal parts awe and mystery. Bellinger was a first baseman who developed into a good defensive center fielder, a rookie of the year at 22, an MVP at 24, and a World Series winner at 25. Bellinger was a multi-year slump.

Peak Bellinger was able to hit 40 home runs with ease while still maintaining a strikeout rate not much higher than his walk rate. That’s gone now, or at least the power is gone; He has only achieved an ISO above .180 once in the last four seasons.

Even Bellinger’s renaissance in 2023 had the signs of a mirage: He exceeded his xwOBA by 43 points and posted a BABIP of .319 after posting a .277 mark in the first six seasons of his career. Was there a decline in Bellinger’s batted ball luck in 2024? To a certain extent, but he also just didn’t hit the ball that hard. His xwOBACON fell from .357 in 2023 to a career-low .326 in 2024, and even that previous mark was more than 100 points below his MVP season.

These days, Bellinger is the complete opposite of the type of player he looks like. He’s 6’3″ tall and weighs 200lbs, and up close you’d swear he’s at least 20% taller in all dimensions, but he creates plenty of gentle contact.

I apologize for giving the impression that I’m inferior to Bellinger, because he’s a really good fit for the Yankees in more ways than one. Even before you get to the tangibles on the field, Bellinger is, as I just said, a gigantic man, and that fits the Yankees’ overall vibe. Additionally, his father, Clay, played almost his entire major league career with the Yankees, where he had more World Series rings than career extra-base hits. (That’s not literally true, but it’s plausible enough that you just wanted to look it up.)

Most of the time it depends. Here are the five players who played at least one inning in center field for New York last season, plus Bellinger.

Judge was the best center fielder in baseball overall in 2024, but that’s entirely due to the strength of his bat. He probably could have ridden around on a unicycle with hockey gloves on and still been an above-average player. But Judge was a below-average defender in center, and ideally you’d probably want him to play right field.

What he can do now that the Yankees’ two incumbent corner outfielders – Verdugo and Soto – are no longer with the team. Place Judge on the right and Domínguez on the left and find someone to stand between them. Chisholm has extensive big league experience at center, but inserting him there would create a hole at either second or third base and that would require an outside solution.

That leaves Grisham, who is a good defender but is nowhere near the hitter that even Bellinger is late in the game. For the Cubs, Bellinger was expected to take over the lineup. The Yankees already have this guy. So if Bellinger is just an above-average hitter and a solid defender in center, that’s great. Bellinger also still has the opportunity to play first base, where he started 57 games and logged more than 500 innings over two seasons in Chicago. So unless the Yankees sign someone else and the Ben Rice experiment eventually fails, Bellinger can offer them an option on another weak spot.

And as you read this, you’re probably screaming into your phone on the subway and scaring strangers, because I haven’t mentioned the best part yet: Bellinger will get a huge boost from a cheaper home stadium. In 2024, he posted a 99 wRC+ at home and a 117 wRC+ on the road. The friendly confines were anything but that. And there’s a particular reason to believe Bellinger will benefit: Wrigley Field has a large cutout in right field that places the foul pole 353 feet from home plate – 39 feet further than the right field fence at Yankee Stadium. And I expect that will be a big deal for a hitter with Bellinger’s specific attributes.

See, most home runs aren’t actually 450-foot screamers on the upper deck. If you hit the ball in the right place, you don’t have to hit it particularly hard to end up trotting. And Bellinger hits the ball in the right place: He’s a pull-side hitter who likes to deal with flying balls.

That means Bellinger gets a lot of home runs for his relatively limited hit. In 2024, he had just 67 balls in play with a departure speed of at least 100 miles per hour, two more than Rob Refsnyder. But nearly a quarter of Bellinger’s triple-digit balls hit – 23.9%, the 13th-highest percentage among roughly 200 batters with 10 or more home runs – ended up on pitches. Again, Bellinger plays half of his games at Wrigley.

According to Baseball Savant’s expected home runs chart, Yankee Stadium would have been the park with the most home runs for Bellinger last season, behind Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati and Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Bellinger hit 18 home runs in 2024; If he had played all of his games at Yankee Stadium, he would have scored 24 points. Had he played all of his games at Wrigley Stadium (instead of occasionally going away, as major league ballplayers are required to do), he would have hit just 15 – that total was the fifth lowest among the 30 parks. Whatever Bellinger may feel about Chicago and the Cubs in general, he’s probably happy to be without his whiny tormentor.

And the Cubs will be just as happy to get rid of his contract.

The Cubs made a significant financial commitment for a player who no longer held a pressing position. I have no idea whether the Cubs’ savings will flow back into the Major League roster or whether they will end up in God knows what corner of the Ricketts family’s banking, real estate and political empire. For the sake of Cubs fans and the country, I hope it’s the former.

And I think it’s worth mentioning Poteet, a 30-year-old right-hander who joined the Yankees as a free agent a year ago after bouncing around the Marlins and Royals farm systems for a while. Poteet has appeared in 24 big league games in three seasons, including 13 as a starter. He mixes five pitches, from an upper-70s curveball to a four-seamer-sinker fastball combination in the lower 90s.

With the Marlins he was more of a fastball-slider changeup, but with the Yankees he relied more heavily on his slower breaking pitches: a sweeper and the aforementioned curveball. In five appearances (four starts) over 24 1/3 innings, Poteet posted great results: a 3-0 record and a 2.22 ERA. But he allowed more hard contact than those numbers suggested, striking out just 16 batters in those 24 1/3 innings while allowing 18 hits, eight walks and one hit batter.

Poteet is a serviceable swingman and he still has two options, but if the Yankees needed him in the majors, they would have used him. And while you can never have enough starting depth, the Cubs were already pretty deep. Poteet would be no higher than seventh on the Cubs’ starting pitching depth chart and possibly as low as 10th depending on how Cade Horton’s shoulder feels. And that’s assuming the Cubs — who have been linked to Jesús Luzardo on the trade market — don’t go out and add more.

All of this reinforces the idea that Bellinger’s contract is the deciding factor here. The Yankees are essentially just paying cash – albeit a lot – for a player you can’t get on the open market this year. Our free agent tracker lists Harrison Bader as the top remaining free agent center fielder by projected WAR in 2025. Even counting players who have already signed, the list is going to Mike Tauchman much faster than the Yankees would probably like. If Tyler O’Neill is worth $49.5 million over three seasons, that can’t be right The paid way too much.

Bellinger won’t fill the wound left in the Yankees’ psyche when Soto left. But he will fill the gap in midfield.