The Yankees were not particularly fazed by Matt Garza or that thing he had growing off of his chin this year. In three starts against the Yanks, Garza threw 16.2 innings of 8.10 ERA ball. Despite 14 strike outs, the Bombers drew seven walks and blasted five home runs in those three starts, and Garza hardly resembled the pitcher who threw a one-walk no-hitter against the Tigers in July.
Still, three starts does not a pitcher make, and over the past few seasons with Tampa Bay, Garza has been a reliable right-hander who has succeeded in the AL East. In his three full years with the Rays, he put up a combined 7.9 fWAR by missing bats and keeping the ball in the park. His numbers slipped a bit in 2010, but his 200 innings of pitching well above replacement level makes him a valuable commodity.
Last week, then, it was only natural for Yankee fans to ask if Garza would be a potential target. After all, he’s far better than Sergio Mitre or Ivan Nova, two pitchers still projected to be in the Yanks’ Opening Day rotation, and in fact, in his mailbag on Friday shortly before the Cubs landed Garza, Mike fielded a Garza-related question. Mike wrote an answer one could call prescient today:
He’d be an ideal target, but I can’t see the Rays trading him within the division. Andrew Friedman’s been calling the shots in Tampa Bay since the end of the 2005 season, and he’s made exactly three trades within the AL East: He acquired Chad Bradford and Gregg Zaun from the Orioles in separate deals, and he also dealt Nick Green to the Yankees. Just not gonna happen, not at a reasonable cost anyway.
As Garza went to the Cubs in the NL, the point was a moot one fairly quickly, but as fallout from the trade percolated over the weekend, the ties that bound the Yankees to Garza were perhaps a bit stronger than we first expected. The Yanks and Rays had briefly talked about Garza, but Tampa Bay wanted too much from their intra-division rival.
“We never got off the dime,” Brian Cashman said to reporters, “but strong impressions were that it would be something that would cost us more because we are in the division, kind of like Roy Halladay. We like Matt Garza and I had a conversation early in the winter and it was clear that what it would take would be more significant than I wanted to do. And there was also reluctance from them to trading within the division.”
That’s the business of baseball in a nutshell. The Mariners were so eager to trade Cliff Lee to the Rangers because it netted them one of their key division rival’s top prospects. The Blue Jays wanted Jesus Montero plus more for Halladay because such a move would have left the Doc in the AL East. In a vacuum, the Yanks knew what Garza was worth on the open market, and they knew what his AL East asking price would be. It wasn’t worth the further discussions.
Now, the Yanks and Rays could, as Chad Jennings explored this weekend, fight over some remaining pieces. Both teams have some dollars to spend and both teams need a right-handed bat and some bullpen arms, and for the Yanks, the hunt for a pitcher continues with one less arm on the market.
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