Oswald Peraza had every right to be bitter at the New York Yankees in 2023, but he’s done himself no favors since.
Peraza was once a consensus Top 100 prospect in all of baseball, and he played very well in his first, brief major league call-up in 2022. But in spring training the next year, he lost the starting shortstop competition to Anthony Volpe, who has held the job ever since.
Though he’s finally been in the big leagues for a full season in 2025, Peraza isn’t playing much. He turned 25 earlier this month and still has only 388 big-league plate appearances under his belt. And this season, he has a brutal .522 OPS.
According to one Yankees insider, the end of the road for Peraza could be approaching if anything changes with the current roster.
On Tuesday, Chris Kirschner of The Athletic wrote that Peraza would be the first Yankees position player to get kicked off the 40-man roster in the event they need space for a new acquisition.
“If Peraza had value, I think he would have been traded by now. He’s next in line, on the position player side, to get DFA’d,” Kirschner wrote.
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“Maybe a rebuilding team would send a lottery-ticket prospect to the Yankees to skip the waiver-wire line. But, yeah, Peraza has been disappointing.”
Peraza is a good infielder, and the only player on the roster besides Volpe who can handle shortstop. That might be his saving grace, because New York cannot afford to leave itself unprotected in the event Volpe gets injured.
However, Peraza hasn’t left himself with much wiggle room. If the team brings in a veteran infielder with some shortstop experience at the trade deadline, his Yankees tenure, which started out on such a promising note three years ago, could end abruptly.
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