Three weeks! Three weeks until something that kinda sorta resembles baseball begins to happen. I’m setting the over/under on the number of moves the Yankees make these next three weeks that impact the big league roster at 0.5. I’ll be bold and take the over. Anyway, I have some thoughts on things.
1. Really good work by the Yankees with their (first annual?) Winter Warm-Up event last week. Most of the events took place behind closed doors — several players served food at a church and others spent time at a senior center, for example — though I’m glad they finally put together some sort of offseason community outreach program. The town hall with Brian Cashman and various prospects was the highlight of the week. (Here’s the 87-minute video, if you missed it.) What stood out most to me was the way the Winter Warm-Up focused on prospects, not big leaguers. Starlin Castro was the only big league player at the town hall, for example. The rest were all prospects. The same was true at other events throughout the week. There were a few actual Yankees involved each day, but, for the most part, the emphasis was on the kids and the future. Only a really small percentage of fans follow prospects and read RAB. For lots of folks, this was their first introduction to guys like James Kaprielian and Gleyber Torres. Nice work by the Yankees promoting the future last week. That was neat.
2. Speaking of Castro, he made what I thought was an interesting point to Steven Marcus recently, about how he went from the rebuilding Cubs to a Yankees team that is essentially rebuilding as well. When the Cubs were ready to make the jump from team on the rise to bonafide contender, Castro was dumped in favor of younger players. It’s entirely possible the same thing may happen to him with the Yankees. Here’s what he told Marcus:
“I don’t really think about this. I just try to do my job. I don’t have any control of this. Whatever they want to do, they have to do it … That’s the second time (being part of a youth movement has) happened to me. That happened my last year in the Cubs. All the younger guys coming to the team. Here, the same thing.”
Castro said all the right things — “I just try to do my job,” etc. — but I have to imagine the possibility of being pushed aside in favor of a younger player again is in the back of his mind. He admitted at last week’s town hall he was a bit sad when the Cubs won the World Series because he sat through all the ugly rebuilding years without getting to experience the reward, and man, that must really stink. Who knows how things will shake out a year or two down the line. Hopefully Starlin uses his past experience with the Cubs as motivation and finally takes his game to another level as he enters what should be the prime of his career. That’s the best possible outcome here. The Yankees having to make difficult decisions when the kids arrive because they have too many quality players.
3. Yesterday we learned Masahiro Tanaka will not participate in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and that’s a relief. Losing your ace to a season-ending injury in the WBC is every team’s worst nightmare. At the same time, Tanaka could just as easily get hurt during Grapefruit League play with the Yankees. Pitching is still pitching. It’s an unnatural act and injuries happen. Heck, you could easily argue that if Tanaka is going to get hurt, you’d rather have it happen at the WBC, because then the WBC would cover his salary while he’s on the disabled list. That’s what happened with Mark Teixeira and his wrist in 2013. No one wants any player to get hurt in the WBC, but in this case, is it really any safer for Tanaka to pitch for the Yankees in Spring Training than it is Japan in the WBC? Does the increased intensity matter that much? Starters are kept on strict pitch counts in the WBC, you know. It’s not like they’re asking these guys to throw seven innings on March 10th.
4. What about signing Matt Wieters? He’s sitting out there in free agency, waiting for someone to sign him, and it appears his number of potential landing spots is dwindling. (The Braves just signed Kurt Suzuki.) I said many times I was in favor of keeping Brian McCann — barring a massive trade return, of course, which I don’t think the Yankees received — as a part-time catcher/part-time designated hitter and veteran mentor for Gary Sanchez. Wieters could fill the same role, though these days he’s neither the hitter nor defender McCann is. Still, he’s better than Austin Romine, and he shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. (One year, $6M?) Granted, this will never ever ever happen, for a few reasons, but the thought crossed my mind. I like the idea of having a veteran (i.e. better than Romine) backup to lighten the load on Sanchez when things get tough. It’s a long season. Bumps in the road for a young catcher are inevitable. Wieters went through them himself.
5. One phase of the game the Yankees seem likely perform better going forward: baserunning. Over the last six months or so, the team cut ties with the thoroughly immobile quartet of McCann, Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez, and Carlos Beltran. Those guys were true old school basecloggers who went station-to-station because that’s all they could handle at that point of their careers. No one is expecting Sanchez or Greg Bird to swipe 20 bags or anything, but the collective infusion of youth should help the Yankees some on the bases. Last season New York took the extra base in only 37% of their opportunities, which ranked 27th among the 30 teams. (That’s going first-to-third on a single, etc.) Just getting back to league average (roughly 41%) would be a nice little improvement.
6. Based on this year’s voting results and the newcomers to the ballot, my guess is we get a four-man Hall of Fame class next year: Trevor Hoffman, Vlad Guerrero, Chipper Jones, and Jim Thome. Hoffman fell five votes shy of induction this year (five!) while Guerrero fell 15 short, and historically, when a player gets that close, they get in the next year. Chipper and Thome will be on the ballot for the first time and are no-brainers as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Thome gets lumped in with the suspected performance-enhancing drug guys because he, you know, hit homers, but he was such an unbelievably nice guy that I think the BBWAA voters put him in on the first ballot. It shouldn’t work like that, but it does. Anyway, that’s next year. The following year is when the Hall of Fame watch starts to get fun for Yankees fans. Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte will join the ballot in two years, and Derek Jeter the year after that. Rivera and Jeter are first ballot locks. I don’t think Pettitte gets in, though hopefully he doesn’t fall off the ballot the first year like Jorge Posada. That sucked so hard.
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