The Yankees promoted Spencer Jones from Triple A to the majors on Friday, giving the 25-year-old outfielder a chance to join the club before its weekend series against the Milwaukee Brewers. New York also recalled right-handed reliever Kervin Castro from Triple A as Jasson Domínguez headed to the injured list after crashing into the outfield wall in Thursday’s 9-2 win over the Texas Rangers.
Jones arrives on the strength of a strong run in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, where he put up a.958 OPS with 11 home runs and 41 RBIs and led the International League in RBIs. Manager Aaron Boone said Jones had been getting “a lot of consistent at-bats” over the last three or four weeks, adding that the power had been there and the swing-and-miss had come down. Boone said Jones had cleaned up some of the swing-and-miss issues that showed up in spring training.
Domínguez is expected to miss a few weeks with an AC joint sprain in his left shoulder, which left the Yankees looking for a quick answer in the outfield. He had been playing nearly every day since Giancarlo Stanton went on the injured list with a calf strain, and Jones could be in line for a similar role, with the outfielder facing right-handed pitching and Paul Goldschmidt getting at-bats against lefties.
The move gives the Yankees a look at one of their most closely watched prospects at a moment when they need coverage. Jones, whom Keith Law ranked as the club’s No. 7 prospect coming into the 2026 season, was once considered a top-100 prospect by Baseball America after the Yankees took him in the first round out of Vanderbilt in 2022 and gave him a $2,880,800 signing bonus.
Jones has long been known for his power, but the contact questions have followed him. He overhauled his mechanics this offseason to mimic Shohei Ohtani’s swing, and while his whiff rate last season at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre was 41.5 percent, it has been 43.8 percent this season, according to Prospect Savant. Even so, his overall strikeout percentage has dropped by a few percentage points year over year, and his in-zone contact rate in Triple A was 71.1 percent, a figure that would rank second-worst among big leaguers.
Aaron Judge said earlier in the season that Jones looked ready at the plate and that the quickness of his toe-tap could be a game-changer. For the Yankees, the next test is simpler: whether Jones can turn a hot month in Triple A into enough production to hold a role while Domínguez is out.
