Before the euphor­ic walk-off wins, 52–18 start and way-to-ear­ly parade plans, the Yan­kees were raked over the coals for not doing enough with their offseason.

When the 2021 sea­son end­ed with heart­break in the Wild Card Game at Fen­way Park, a few things were abun­dant­ly clear. Gley­ber Tor­res couldn’t be the every­day short­stop any­more and Gary Sanchez had run his course, fail­ing to make any sig­nif­i­cant strides on defense while wield­ing an incon­sis­tent bat.

But instead of wran­gling house­hold names to replace them, the Yan­kees insert­ed two play­ers who could gen­er­ous­ly be described as no names, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the North­east. A vast major­i­ty of Yan­kee fans knew very lit­tle about Isi­ah Kin­er-Fale­fa and Jose Trevi­no, play­ers who debuted with the Rangers in 2018 and had spent their entire careers in anonymi­ty as Texas start­ed to rebuild.

Now, near­ing the season’s halfway point, Trevi­no and Kin­er-Fale­fa have proven to be inte­gral pieces of this whirring Yan­kee machine. While nei­ther is a super­star — or even some­one who will hit in the top six of the bat­ting order — that is kind of the point. The Yan­kees specif­i­cal­ly decid­ed to tar­get the ex-Rangers because of their defense, a decid­ed­ly unsexy char­ac­ter­is­tic in a mod­ern game that pri­or­i­tizes on-base and slug­ging percentages.

But even with Kin­er-Fale­fa slug­ging .321 (low­er than his .319 on-base per­cent­age), he’s been very adept at his offen­sive role. Enter­ing Friday’s game, he leads the team with 10 stolen bases, is tied for sec­ond on the team in base hits and dou­bles, and is tied for third in runs scored. Fan­Graphs has him as the Yan­kees’ best base run­ner as well, pro­vid­ing 1.6 more runs on the base paths than the aver­age big lea­guer. Since 2020, the Hawaii native also ranks sixth among MLB short­stops in hits.

Sure, Kin­er-Fale­fa is still search­ing for his first Yan­kee home run, but the things he does around the mar­gins have made the team notice­ably bet­ter. The front office want­ed ath­leti­cism, sure hands and patient plate appear­ances that led to the ball being put in play. They’ll take Kiner-Falefa’s lack of pow­er and 85 wRC+ to keep being a bot­tom of the order pres­ence that can slap an infield sin­gle, steal sec­ond, and score on some­one else’s ball in the gap.

Then there’s Trevi­no, who became an entire­ly dif­fer­ent hit­ter the moment he put on the pin­stripes. Trevi­no has spo­ken sev­er­al times about the admi­ra­tion he had for the Yan­kees as a kid, his late father’s Yan­kee fan­dom, and how he idol­ized Derek Jeter grow­ing up. Play­ing for this boy­hood team put a jolt into the catcher’s bat, as he’s hit­ting .282/.336/.470 for the sea­son, well above his career slash line of .252/.283/.384. Picked up in a trade for minor lea­guer Rob­by Ahlstrom and reliev­er Albert Abreu (who the Yan­kees just reac­quired any­way), Trevi­no has been miles bet­ter than any­one could have rea­son­ably expected.

In the first four years of his career, Trevi­no had a 66 wRC+, mean­ing he was 34% less pro­duc­tive than the aver­age hit­ter. Now, he’s all the way up at 131, 31% bet­ter than league aver­age. The Yan­kees iden­ti­fied him as a Sanchez replace­ment pri­mar­i­ly because of his defense, but the things he’s done in the batter’s box have made Trevi­no an unde­ni­ably sol­id all-around play­er, one that man­ag­er Aaron Boone has cam­paigned for to make the All-Star team. He only just recent­ly eclipsed Kyle Higash­io­ka in plate appear­ances, and regres­sion could cer­tain­ly come for Trevi­no as he gets more reg­u­lar play­ing time, but his emer­gence is one of the rea­sons why the Yan­kees have gone from mere­ly good to unbeat­able in 2022.

The beau­ty of all this for the Yan­kees is that every­thing that Kin­er-Fale­fa and Trevi­no pro­vide on offense is com­ple­men­tary, not the main dish. Aaron Judge, Gian­car­lo Stan­ton and Antho­ny Riz­zo will keep doing the heavy lift­ing, and if the Ranger castoffs have a few bad months at the plate, the team will survive.

Every per­son in the Yan­kees’ club­house will also keep repeat­ing the com­pa­ny line that win­ning is the only thing that real­ly mat­ters, whether they’re hit­ting .100 or .400. That’s easy to say when you’re clob­ber­ing every team and win­ning 74% of your games, but the fact of the mat­ter is, that win­ning per­cent­age wouldn’t be so high if not for the new faces at the tail of the lineup.

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