The Yankees were thought to have the “best rotation in baseball” and now 40 percent of the rotation is injured.
The Yankees were thought to have the “best rotation in baseball” for 2023. Now that rotation is down 40 percent of its members with Nestor Cortes working through a hamstring injury and Frankie Montas set to undergo shoulder surgery. Cortes is expected back for the start of the season, if all goes right, but Montas’ best-case scenario is to be back sometime late in the season. The Yankees’ pitching depth will be tested right away, and the depth isn’t what it was before the trade for Montas.
There are two names and only two names that should have a chance at being the team’s Opening Day shortstop: Oswald Peraza or Anthony Volpe.
The Yankees’ first baseman missed one-fifth of last season with debilitating back problems; their second baseman is still rehabbing a foot fracture from last summer that may need surgery; their other second baseman was the worst hitter in baseball for a six-week stretch and they unsuccessfully tried to trade him at the deadline; their shortstop was benched in the postseason; their third baseman experienced career lows in every offensive statistic; they don’t have a left fielder (at least not a major-league-caliber one); no one knows what to expect from center field and their designated hitter is coming off the worst “full” season of his career. Outside of Aaron Judge, the entire Yankees lineup is full of question marks, including at shortstop, where, like left field, they haven’t officially named a starter.
Aaron Boone doesn’t think it’s a problem. Then again, he thought showing highlights of the worst postseason loss in Yankees history to his Yankees team would spark them to win four straight against the Astros. (His team blew an early three-run lead and a late one-run lead in the ensuing game and was swept.) So excuse me if I don’t think Boone thinking not having a starting shortstop isn’t an issue.
Not only does Boone not think it’s an issue, he thinks the Yankees have four everyday-worthy options at the position.
“I’m really excited about penciling in any name,” Boone said on Wednesday on the first day of spring training about possibly naming Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Oswald Peraza, Oswaldo Cabrera or Anthony Volpe as his Opening Day shortstop.
I’m not. No Yankees fan is. There are two names and only two names that should have a chance at being the team’s Opening Day shortstop: Oswald Peraza or Anthony Volpe. The two names Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman cited a year ago as the reason why the Yankees sat out on the best free-agent shortstop class in history. The same reason they sat out on big-name free-agent shortstops again this offseason.
It would seem nearly impossible for Volpe to pass Peraza and Kiner-Falefa and start the season in the majors with such a small amount of time at Triple-A (even though other organizations called up their top prospects from Double-A without hesitation last season), though Boone doesn’t think so.
“If I feel like he looks like the best option,” Boone said. “Then we wouldn’t be averse to doing that.”
I love Boone saying, “If I feel like,” as if he has the power to make such a decision (and I think he does think he has the power to make such a decision). I’m glad he was smart enough to throw the “we” in there on the backend of his comment to cover up his foolishness.
Volpe’s out, for now. Cabrera isn’t truly an option the same way he isn’t truly an option to be the team’s starting left fielder: because the Yankees want to use him at a different position every day. That leaves Peraza and Kiner-Falefa, and that really only leaves Peraza.
Five weeks ago I wrote: Be on the lookout for the first day of spring training quotes talking about how hard Kiner-Falefa worked tirelessly over the winter on his defense.
“I think IKF has had a really good winter,” Boone said with a straight face on Wednesday.
A really good winter? Financially speaking, yes, Kiner-Falefa had a good winter getting tendered a $6 million contract from the Yankees to play baseball for a living. But we know Boone wasn’t speaking about Kiner-Falefa’s salary.
Kiner-Falefa hasn’t played an actual game since Game 4 of the 2022 ALCS. I guess maybe that’s it? He had a good winter because he hasn’t played an actual game. There weren’t any first-pitch, breaking balls outside of the zone to roll over for an easy out, and there weren’t any routine ground balls to boot.
We all know what Boone meant. Kiner-Falefa worked out and worked hard on his defense and plate discipline and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Forget this winter. Kiner-Falefa hasn’t had a good spring, summer or fall as a major leaguer. He’s now entering his age 28 season and has a career .264/.316/.347 slash line. A .663 OPS over 534 major-league games, having never finished in the .700s in any of his five major league seasons. It’s more likely Josh Donaldson wins AL MVP this season than it is that four months of not playing baseball made Kiner-Falefa good enough to play over the organization’s Top 2 shortstop prospects.
Kiner-Falefa was brought in to be a one-year stopgap. The gap was stopped (though not well). It stopped when Peraza was called up last August, only to outperform Kiner-Falefa and remain on the bench. A second season of Kiner-Falefa as the starting shortstop would not only be an embarrassment to a team preaching championship aspirations, but it would be an organization failure.
Unfortunately, for Peraza, Boone is a Kiner-Falefa supporter and defender. He went to great lengths all of last year to sell Kiner-Falefa to the media and public as if the games aren’t televised, as if stats and information aren’t readily available, as if we are all blind. Boone cited vague and secret internal metrics that rated Kiner-Falefa as one of the best shortstops in the league.
When the Yankees’ season was on the line in Game 4 of the ALCS, who did Boone start at shortstop? Kiner-Falefa. It would take the Yankees putting more stock into Peraza’s spring training play than him actually outplaying Kiner-Falefa in August, September and October. If Peraza wasn’t good enough in Boone’s eyes to start over Kiner-Falefa then, how could he be now with the Yankees having played zero games since the last time Boone played Kiner-Falefa over Peraza (while facing elimination)?
It’s also hard for me to see Peraza being named the official starting shortstop because of owed money. Owed money trumps all when it comes o the Yankees. It’s why Donaldson will be starting at third base and batting fifth again this season. It’s why Cashman said two weeks ago he thinks Aaron Hicks will be a starting outfielder this season. The Yankees would rather lose than have owed money sitting on the bench in favor of a better, less expensive player, and they would rather watch countless runners get left on third base with less than two outs than release owed money for nothing. When trying to decide on a supposed spring training competition, look at the payroll and you’ll find the answer. Kiner-Falefa is on the books for $6 million in 2023. That’s $6 million of guaranteed money, which is a lot more than the league minimum Peraza commands.
I really hope I’m wrong. After not making any position player offseason additions, after staying nearly all right-handed again, after bringing back Kiner-Falefa, Donaldson and Hicks, I pray the Yankees get one thing right by having Peraza starting at short come Opening Day. But until he’s standing between second and third on the Yankee Stadium infield and acknowledging the Bleacher Creatures in the top of the first on Opening Day, I won’t believe it’s his job.
The Rangers have traded for the Blues’ Vladimir Tarasenko in a move that has zero downside for the Blueshirts.
There’s still more than three weeks until the trade deadline, but the Rangers decided not to wait until the last minute, trading for the Blues’ Vladimir Tarasenko, who will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season.
The Rangers sent Sammy Blais, Hunter Skinner, a conditional first-round pick an a conditional fourth-round pick to the Blues in exchange for Tarasenko and Niko Mikkola with the Blues also retaining 50 percent of Tarasenko’s cap hit.
There isn’t a single negative to the trade for the Rangers. It’s an unbelievable job by Chris Drury.
The Rangers showed the sizable gap between a team that’s contending for a championship and a team that seems to have no plan on Wednesday night against the Canucks.
The Rangers showed the sizable gap between a team that’s contending for a championship and a team that seems to have no plan when they wanted to on Wednesday night against the Canucks. In the end, they got the expected two points, but it wasn’t as easy as it probably should have been.
Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.
1. There aren’t many games I expect the Rangers to win, but Wednesday night against the Canucks was one of them. The Canucks are a poorly-run organization with a bad on-ice product that just changed head coaches midseason in the oddest way possible and also traded their captain a month before the the trade deadline. They are a mess. They are a team that has Connor Bedard aspirations and the Rangers are a team that has Lord Stanley aspirations, and the disparity was evident when the Rangers wanted it to be on Wednesday.
2. The Rangers scored 6:53 into the game on a beautiful, no-look pass from Vincent Trocheck to Chris Kreider on a 2-on-1. From just inside the blue line until his pass, Trocheck kept his eyes on Spencer Martin, making everyone believe Trocheck would shoot. He didn’t and the Rangers took a 1-0 lead. One minute and 38 seconds later, the Rangers scored again.
Filip Chytil scored his 19th of the season to extend his goal-scoring streak to five straight with his seventh in the last five games. (He now has 11 goals in the last 13 games as well.) It’s easy to forget Chytil is 23 years old because this is his sixth season in the league, having debuted in 2017-18. Chytil is going to get paid if he keeps up this level of play and production (as he should) as a true second center (again, if this is who he truly is). You would like to think the Rangers will be able to find a way to keep him, but unfortunately, the money owed to Trocheck is likely the money needed for Chytil.
After the Chytil goal, Rick Tocchet’s face had an expression equivalent of someone who gave up a nice TV gig to join a disaster. Eight minutes and 31 seconds into the game, and the game was essentially over. Or rather it should have been.
3. In typical Rangers fashion, they didn’t score the next goal, which would have made the remainder of the game a formality. With two minutes and 24 seconds left in the first, Conor Garland scored after the Rangers let Quinn Hughes weave his way around the top of the offensive zone without any pressure. Of course the Canucks were able to get on the board against the Rangers’ fourth line and third defensive pair.
“We were playing real good hockey and then all of a sudden we change our game a little bit and started turning pucks over in the neutral zone and going cross-ice and stuff like that,” Gerard Gallant said. “You get up and think it’s going to be easy and then all of a sudden it’s a hockey game.”
I’m sure Vitali Kravtsov and Julien Gauthier held back a good laugh upstairs, watching the site of Will Cuylle, Sammy Blais and Jake Leschyshyn contributing nothing positive in yet another game. It’s beyond frustrating that Kravtsov and Gauthier, two players who could potentially be difference makers, continue to not play, so that Gallant can get his traditional fourth line, even if that fourth line provides no offensive value and is a defensive liability.
4. In the opening minutes of the second, the Canucks drove the play, and it felt like yet another game in which the Rangers would blow a two-goal lead after growing comfortable with their early success. Thankfully, Alexis Lafreniere changed that at 6:23 in the second when he was able to finish off a Jacob Trouba shot by pushing the puck through the last inches of the crease and into the net. For Lafreniere, it was his second goal in as many games after this overtime winner on Monday, and for the Kid Line, it was their second goal of the game with all three members of it getting on the scoresheet.
5. “They were good again, scored a couple of big goals, tonight, obviously,” Gallant said after the game about the Kid Line. “I don’t think anybody was great defensively tonight, but the Kid Line created chances for us, for sure.”
A nice little backhanded compliment from the coach on the line he never seems to want to compliment from a group of players he never wants to praise. Luckily for him, the two goals they provided were the difference between the Rangers winning by a goal or losing by one, mostly thanks to his personally-constructed fourth line.
6. The Canucks didn’t go away, cutting the lead to a goal again after J.T. Miller found Vasily Podkolzin for his first goal of the year. It’s been five years since the Rangers traded Miller to the Lightning. As a Ranger, Miller produced 0.50 points per game in his age 19 through 24 seasons. With the Lightning, Miller had 0.69 points per game in his age 24 and 25 seasons. As a Canuck, Miller has averaged 1.04 points per game in 253 games over his age 26 through 29 seasons.
7. As a former first-round pick (15th overall in 2011), Miller is as good of cautionary tale as any that being a highly-touted prospect doesn’t translate to success in the NHL right away. Or it’s a cautionary tale that the Rangers have no idea how to develop their own potential high-end talent. The Rangers could use Miller. Every team could use a player of his caliber. Instead, they added him as a sweetener in the Ryan McDonagh package to the Lightning.
8. The same can be said for Pavel Buchnevich, who scored a career-high 30 goals With the Blues last season (in only 73 games) after being traded by the Rangers. Buchnevich has scored 15 goals in 38 games this season, totaling 45 goals in 111 games as a Blue (a 33-goal pace over 82 games). Buchnevich, like Miller, has become a more-than-a-point-per-game player since leaving the Rangers.
On a night in which the Rangers’ Kid Line (consisting of players that are 21 and 23 years old) scored two of the team’s four goals, Miller provided a reminder of what’s possible with patience with first-round talent, especially first- and second-overall first-round talent.
9. With just under four minutes left in the game, and the Rangers clinging to their 3-2 lead, Mika Zibajenad scored his 25th of the season to give the Rangers a two-goal for the third time. (Jacob Trouba picked up his second primary assist of the game on Zibanejad’s goal. A much-needed start to the “second half” for the captain.) But just like the previous two times in the game the Rangers held a two-goal lead, they let the lead get back to just one goal, and this time it only took 11 seconds for the Canucks to get it back. Elias Pettersson scored with 3:44 left in the game, and a game in which the Canucks were nearly 3-to-1 underdogs would be another hold-on-for-dear-life ending for the Rangers in the final minutes.
10. The Rangers did hold on for their third straight win, and are now six points ahead of Washington (with two games in hand) to stay out of a wild-card berth. I would prefer they got a wild-card berth if it meant playing the Hurricanes in the first round over the Devils, but obviously not if it means playing the Bruins. It’s safer to just stay in the Metropolitan bracket and facing the seem-to-be-superior Devils to avoid the chance of playing the Bruins.
The next 10 days will go a long way in helping determine where the Rangers end up in the postseason bracket. After Friday’s home game against the Kraken, the Rangers go on the road to play the Hurricanes, Canucks, Oilers and Flames before returning to the Garden to host the Jets. Beginning Friday, the Rangers will play six games in 11 days and their remaining 31 games in 63 days, nearly a Rangers game every other night.
The World Baseball Classic rosters were announced on Friday and three Yankees will be participating.
The World Baseball Classic rosters were announced on Friday and three Yankees will be participating: Kyle Higashioka, Nestor Cortes and Jonathan Loaisiga. I’m not worried about Higashioka participating. I’m somewhat worried about Cortes participating. I’m extremely worried about Loaisiga participating given his injury history.
