Yankees Thoughts – Page 49 – Keefe To The City

Dec 9, 2020

Yankees Thoughts: The Offseason Sucks

It’s been two months since the Yankees last played. A long two months.

It’s been two months since the Yankees last played. Two months today, actually, and it’s been a long two months. After the Yankees bowed out in Game 5 of the ALDS to the Rays, I had to watch the Astros fail to match the Red Sox’ historic 2004 ALCS comeback leaving the Yankees as the only team in baseball to ever blow a 3-0 series and then I had to watch the Dodgers overcome a 3-1 deficit in the NLCS and go on to win the World Series with my wife taunting me along the way. Yes, I’m (begrudgingly) happy my wife got to experience her favorite team winning a championship, but I have had to hear about it multiple times a day since. It’s not going to end anytime soon, and her daily wearing of 2020 world champion apparel isn’t helping. Two months down, more than two months to go until spring training. That is if spring training happens as scheduled which is about as sure of a thing as Clint Frazier playing over Brett Gardner (who isn’t even currently a Yankee) in 2021.

We’re long past the point of the offseason where click bait headlines are even remotely intriguing. The endless stories and “reports” about nearly every team being tied to a free agent are tiresome and in just a few weeks, we have had to hear about whether or not the Yankees will tender Gary Sanchez (no-brainer), if they will re-sign DJ LeMahieu (they better), that they might be interested in Yadier Molina (please, no), or maybe James McCann (pass), and that Michael Brantley is their Plan B if LeMahieu goes elsewhere (is it the 2018-19 offseason?) It’s not going to end anytime soon. Not until every last viable free agent is off the board.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. It’s going to be a dark day in the Keefe household if DJ LeMahieu doesn’t sign with the Yankees. If I didn’t have the responsiblity of taking care of another human now, I would have already bought blackout shades and curtains for my windows in the event LeMahieu signs elsewhere, so I could just stay in bed and watch his endless videos of his beautiful inside-out swing until Opening Day.

There’s no reason for the Yankees to not sign LeMahieu. None at all. The Yankees’ current championship window has already started to close, and it will close that much faster without LeMahieu on the team. All it will cost to bring him back is money, and reminder: the Yankees make more money than any other team in baseball.

I stay up at night thinking about the Yankees’ lineup without LeMahieu and how many strikeouts it would become capable of. I fear Aaron Hicks becoming the everyday leadoff hitter and what will happen to the infield defense with the removal of the team’s best (sorry, Aaron Judge) and most versatile player.

2. The idea Michael Brantley could be the Yankees’ Plan B if they don’t bring back LeMahieu is appalling. Brantley was a good idea … before the 2019 season, when the Yankees could have signed him to replace Brett Gardner and provide his All-Star-caliber offense for them instead of the eventual American League-champion Astros. I wrote and spoke endlessly about wanting Brantley on the Yankees instead of Gardner to no avail. Now Brantley is two years older and is better suited to be the designated hitter, which doesn’t really work on a team full of players best suited to be the designated hitter. If this were two years ago, I would be willing to go pick Brantley up myself. But to sign him because you cheapen out on signing your best player, no thanks.

3. There was never a question if the Yankees would tender Gary Sanchez a contract. Did that stop any media outlet from creating the headline “Yankees give Sanchez a contract” after he was officially given a new contract? Of course not! For as bad as Sanchez was in 2020, the Yankees were never going to let him walk for nothing. They aren’t the suddenly poor Cubs.

I will never stop believing the 2016 and 2017 versions of Sanchez still exist. I won’t stop because we see it at times. We saw it as recently as Game 2 against the Indians when he single-handedly saved the game, the series and the Yankees’ season (before he was unnecessarily benched for Kyle Higashioka).

I get that there are a lot of Yankees fans who have given up on Sanchez and who want to see Higashioka hit routine ground balls to short for an entire season in 2021. I have done my part in trying to rid the world of the fan clubs of Austin Romine (who posted a .582 OPS in 2020) and Higashioka (who walks less than every position player in the majors and some pitchers). It’s up to Sanchez to make them all look like the idiots they are.

4. The Yankees need starting pitching. This isn’t “the Yankees need starting pitching because you can never have enough starting pitching.” This is “the Yankees need starting pitching because right now their rotation is Gerrit Cole, Jordan Montgomery, Deivi Garcia, Clarke Schmidt and … Michael King?”

Montgomery, the Yankees didn’t trust to start a postseason game until he absolutely had to. Garcia, the Yankees allowed to pitch one postseason inning. Schmidt, the Yankees didn’t give a major league start to until the last game of the regular season, choosing to continue to start or “open” with King over him, who was anywhere from bad to abysmal in all of his appearances. Luis Severino isn’t expected back until midseason, and Masahiro Tanaka, James Paxton and J.A. Happ are all free agents. There’s a 100 percent chance the Yankees will enter the 2021 postseason with their rotation completely up for debate. It wouldn’t be October without the Yankees not having clear-cut options for Games 2 and 3 of a series.

5. Now just because they need starting pitching doesn’t mean they should sign Trevor Bauer. I don’t want the Yankees to sign Bauer. Let the Mets sign him and J.T. Realmuto and George Springer. As long as they don’t sign LeMahieu.

I understand Bauer won the 2020 NL Cy Young in an 11-start season, but I also understand he had a combined 4.48 ERA (4.34 FIP) in 2019 and has put together one great “full” season (2.21 ERA in 28 starts in 2018). It’s going to cost an undeserved amount of money to sign Bauer and put him on a team and in a clubhouse with Cole, who he has a known past and rift with. It doesn’t matter that the rift is from their college days at UCLA, what does matter is that Bauer is the only one to talk about it since. And he has talked about it because he wants as many options as possible as landing spots, and it would be wise to make sure the team that makes the most money in the sport isn’t excluded as a potential landing spot. I have never heard Cole comment on his relationship with Bauer and have never heard him say it’s water under the bridge or that they were young or that it was a long time ago. That’s probably because not such a long time ago, Bauer accused Cole of cheating or doctoring his pitches on Twitter after his success in Houston. There seems to still be something there, and Bauer isn’t good enough to not care about whatever is there.

Bauer is a good pitcher, who can be great at times. But he hasn’t been great enough to get the kind of contract he’s going to get this winter. And he’s not nearly great enough to force his personality into the New York market, and into’s Cole’s rotation and clubhouse.

6. There was a recent report the Blue Jays are interested with reuniting with Happ. This needs to happen. The Blue Jays already committed to Robbie Ray and have Hyun-Jin Ryu on a multi-year deal. Add Happ to the rotation and that’s three left-handed starters the Yankees will have a chance to see in the six series between the teams (if there’s a 162-game season). The Yankees crush left-handed pitching (because they still don’t have any left-handed-only hitters not named Gardner), and adding Happ’s quickly-declining fastball and inability to go five innings, and the path to the AL East title gets that much easier. Happ also owes the Yankees many, many wins from the last two seasons, and what better to make up his awful 2019 and 2020 than by pitching against the Yankees in 2021.

7. Charlie Morton signed with the Braves. The same Charlie Morton I wanted the Yankees to sign instead of Happ before 2019. The same Charlie Morton many Yankees fans told me was never an option because he would only pitch for the Rays to be close to his Tampa home. Last time I checked, Atlanta isn’t another name for Tampa. Atlanta is in Georgia. Tampa is in Florida. Atlanta to Tampa is an hour-plus flight or six-and-a-half-hour drive.

I have long said if the Yankees gave Morton more money than the Rays did he would have been a Yankee, and his decision to sign with the Braves proves it. The Yankees train in Tampa. They play three series a year in Tampa. New York to Tampa is a two-and-a-half-hour flight. Morton could have been a Yankee. And if he had been, maybe the Yankees’ World Series drought isn’t going on 12 years.

All Morton did with the Rays was go 18-8 with a 3.33 ERA and 282 strikeouts in 232 2/3 innngs in the regular season. In two postseasons with the Rays, here’s what he did in six starts: 30 IP, 26 H, 9 R, 7 ER, 10 BB, 36 K, 2 HR, 2.10 ERA, 1.200 WHIP. Yeah, the Yankees were better off letting Chad Green “open” Game 6 of the 2019 ALCS and let J.A. Happ do whatever you want to call what he did in Game 2 of the 2020 ALDS than they would have been with Morton. Morton went on to solidify himself as the best Game 7 pitcher in baseball history and the Yankees went on to two more early postseason exits.

In the last three-plus calendar years, the Yankees have passed on taking on Justin Verlander’s contract, including Clint Frazier or Miguel Andujar in a trade for Cole, signing Patrick Corbin and signing Morton. Verlander, Cole and Morton all went on to beat the Yankees in October and Corbin went on to win the World Series in his first season with the Nationals.

8. In Brian Cashman’s end-of-the-season press conference, he mentioned Gio Urshela having a bone chip in his right elbow that wouldn’t need surgery. In a tale as old as time, Urshela underwent surgery this past week to remove the bone chip and will be sidelined for three months. That means if everything goes right, Urshela will be able to play baseball in early March, giving him nearly a month to get ready for the 2021 (if it begins on April 1). But the last time everything went right for the Yankees was 11 years ago.

I don’t know what to say about the Yankees and their handling of injuries anymore. In 2019, they set the all-time single-season record for players placed on the injured list. They followed that up by not properly diagnosing Paxton’s back injury from September 2019 until February 2020, Severino’s elbow issue from October 2019 until February 2020 and Judge’s collapsed lung/broken rib suffered in September 2019 until the spring of 2020. These all came after Hicks rehabbed a torn elbow ligament on his own in the second half of 2019, and talked his way onto the 2019 postseason roster, before eventually needing Tommy John surgery.

Now if Urshela’s rehab has a single setback, the Yankees will have a third straight season affected by their inability to properly diagnose and treat injuries.

9. The Yankees spent the last three seasons letting Jonathan Holder ruin important games. It started in the third game of Aaron Boone’s tenure as manager in Game 3 of the 2018 regular season and it never ended.

Holder was allowed to pitch in the most important game of the 2018 regular season, the first game of a four-game August series in Boston with the division on the line. Holder faced seven batters and didn’t retire any of them. His line: 0.0 IP, 5 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 1 BB, 0 K, 1 HR. In June of 2019, Holder set the kind of record no one wants to hold, allowing another five earned runs without recording an out against the Blue Jays: 0.0 IP, 5 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 0 BB, 0 K, 2 HR.

Like every other mediore-to-bad Yankee, Holder inexplicably had his fans, and they never enjoyed my criticism of the right-hander who the Yankees never fully realized was incapable of getting big outs or preventing the elite arms from having to warm up or come into games they had no business being a part of. I like to think the fans infatuated with Holder and Hicks and Higashioka are the same who loved Romine and Swisher.

Rather than offer Holder a contract that is equivalent to couch change for the Yankees, the Yankees didn’t tender him a contract. In a season in which the Yankees would let Luis Avilan try to close out the Rays one day and then designate him for assignment the next, let Miguel Andujar pinch hit for Mike Tauchman in the ninth inning one day and then send him down the next, deem Mike Ford not good enough to be a Yankee in September but able to pinch hit in two postseason games with Sanchez and Frazier on the bench, the Yankees let Holder ruin games for one more season before deciding to not re-sign him.

10. Last week, Cashman said, “I’ve had three managers: 10 [years] with Joe Torre, 10 with Girardi and hopefully 10 more with Boone.”

I don’t think I can handle 10 more years of Boone. Unless there’s multiple championships over that 10 years. Another 10 years of Boone would take us through the 2030 season. 2030! The moment the Yankees signed Jacoby Ellsbury I began to count the days until he would no longer be a Yankee, and that was only a seven-year contract, which became a six-year contract, and because of his inevitable injuries, he only played in four of the years. That was nothing compared to what 10 years is.

Cashman doesn’t speak publicly about a manager or player unless he feels he has to, and he’s brutally honest when he does. So if he’s willing to go out of his way to publicly say he wants Boone as manager for 10 years, Boone will be manager as long as Cashman is general manager. It’s not good that mismanagement, especially in October, is acceptable, and that despite it in two of his three postseasons as Yankees manager Cashman is still publicly saying he wants Boone as manager for another 10 years.

A lot would have to change for me to be OK with Boone being Yankees manager for another decade. A lot.

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Offseason • Yankees Thoughts

Oct 30, 2020

Yankees Thoughts: First Two Offseason Moves

Zack Britton will be a Yankee in 2021 and 2022. As of now, Brett Gardner isn’t a Yankee, but that’s likely to change the way it has in recent offseasons.

This past season, I wrote Yankees Thoughts following each Yankees series. I wanted to do something similar this offseason since it’s once again an important offseason for the Yankees in their current championship window as the urgency to win a championship with this Yankees team continues to grow.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. Despite Hal Steinbrenner claiming the Yankees lost more revenue than any other team in baseball in 2020 (and conveniently leaving out that the Yankees make more than any othe team in normal seasons), the Yankees did what they had to do in bringing Zack Britton back for 2021 and 2022. And yes, they had to do it.

After trying to navigate the posteason with only three trustworthy bullpen arms (and at times not even that), Britton was the best and most trustworthy of them all. The other two were Chad Green, who faltered at times, like he has in each of his four postseasons with the Yankees, and Aroldis Chapman, who once again allowed a season-ending home run. After Britton, Green and Chapman, it was Adam Ottavino, who the Yankees clearly no longer have faith in, Jonathan Loaisiga, who the Yankees inexplicably promoted to high-leverage situations, Luis Cessa, who is still Luis Cessa, and then a wide array of fringe major league arms like Jonathan Holder and Nick Nelson, who you don’t want to see in a regular-season game let alone in a postseason game. The decision to let the homegrown star in Dellin Betances leave via free agency coupled with Tommy Kahnle’s season-ending Tommy John surgery really screwed up the Yankees’ Rays-like strategy to go to their bullpen whenever they wanted.

2. Bringing back the team’s best reliever when all it would cost is money (something the Yankees still make more of than any other team even as they have planted the seeds they won’t want to spend this offseason) was a no-brainer. Britton has gotten better and better the farther removed he has gotten from his Achillies injury, and after an up-and-down 2018 season with the Yankees following a trade deadline deal, Britton has been his old self (minus those 32 walks in 61 1/3 innings in 2019). As a left-handed reliever who can get both righties and lefties out, at $14 million, he’s a (pre-pandemic) bargain and with his ability to keep the ball in the park (his -6.8 launch angle was the lowest in the league this season), two more years of Britton even at age 33 and 34 is well worth it.

3. According to MLB.com, the Yankees declined Brett Gardner’s $10 million option for 2021. Gardner gets $2.5 million for being “bought out” of his option, which is a nice little gift for a player who had a horrendous regular season and who has now made roughly $85 million in his career. Gardner will be back though. The buyout was just a way for the Yankees to save some money, as they will “ultimately” (I had to get Aaron Boone’s favorite word in here) bring their longest-tenured player back for a 14th season.

After 2018, I didn’t want Gardner back. He had hit 236/.322/.368, posting the worst batting average and on-base percentage and second-worst slugging percentage of his career to go along with the worst OPS (.690) of his career. It didn’t make sense to re-sign a 35-year-old after putting up the worst statistical season of his career, is the streakiest hitter of all time and whose game is based around his legs. Gardner had played himself out of an everyday job when the Yankees traded for Andrew McCutchen, and yet, the team still thought they should re-sign him with a better option in Michael Brantley (who I begged for) available. Gardner only ended up playing in the 2018 ALDS because of an injury to Aaron Hicks (shocker) and he went 0-for-8 with three walks, looking incapable of putting the ball in play against elite pitching.

When Major League Baseball decided to completely change the construction of the baseball, it saved Gardner’s career. He mashed a career-high 28 home runs in 2019 and went from fourth outfielder to starting outfielder after Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Hicks all missed signifcant time. His trademark high on-base percentage was still awful (.325), but his flyball outs from the year before were never leaving the park at a record rate for him. His power emergence at age 35 led to Boone idiotically batting him third in the postseason.

4. This season, Gardner was putrid until the final two weeks of the regular season. The player I have referred to as “The Streak” for many years now couldn’t get on one of his patented hot streaks until right before the postseason. And though Boone and the Yankees have admitted they don’t believe in hot streaks or a player being “hot,” they must have changed their theory on the old baseball adage as Gardner’s final two weeks of the regular season were enough for him to start in the postseason over Clint Frazier, who had experienced a breakout and consistent regular season both offensively and defensively and who single-handedly carried the offense at times over the two-month season. When Judge and Stanton went down (like they always do) and Hicks was unproductive and Mike Tauchman turned back into the player the Rockies gave up on, it was Frazier who saved the outfield production and possibly the season. But a handful of Gardner at-bats against Blue Jays pitching was enough for Frazier’s season to be disregarded.

Two years ago I didn’t want Gardner back, but now I do. Tauchman can’t be trusted to be the the team’s fourth outfielder going on 30 with one great six-week run on his major league resume, and it’s inevitable Judge and Hicks will miss time and Brian Cashman admitted Stanton is no longer an outfield option. So I want Gardner back. As long as he’s not in the starting lineup over Frazier 11 months from now.

5. Masahiro Tanaka, James Paxton and J.A. Happ are now all free agents, which means right now, the Yankees’ 2021 Opening Day rotation is Gerrit Cole, Jordan Montgomery and Deivi Garcia. Montgomery, the Yankees didn’t trust to use in the postseason until it became a necessity, and Garcia, the Yankees only allowed to pitch for one inning in the postseason with Cashman citing “this stage of his career” as a reason to not let him truly start a postsason game (ask the Braves’ Ian Anderson who had the same six career regular-season starts before this postseason how important “this stage of his career” was in October). After those three, it’s Clarke Schmidt, who the Yankees didn’t give a major league start to until the last game of the regular season as they continued to choose to go with Michael King as an opener over their top-rated pitching prospect. If the season starts on time (enormous “if”), the Yankees won’t have Luis Severino back until June at the absolute earliest. The Yankees desperately need starting pitching.

6. I would re-sign Tanaka. Two bad postseason starts aside, he’s still a good pitcher, who I still trust, and who the Yankees need. I would let Paxton and his injury-plagued career walk, seeing as though I was against trading for him when it happened. (If only the Yankees had an inexpensive, left-handed rotation option. Oh that’s right, they traded that pitcher in Justus Sheffield for 34 Paxton starts around two injured-list stints, back surgery, lost velocity and one mediocre postseason.) I would obviously let Happ walk and block his and his agent’s phone number as well.

Luckily for the Yankees, one of the game’s best pitchers is a free agent in Trevor Bauer. All it will take to make him a Yankee is money (once again, something the Yankees make more of than any other team). Bauer makes too much sense for the Yankees. A rotation featuing Bauer, Cole and Severino would give the Yankees the best rotation (when healthy) in the league. (Though I guess signing Bauer is also dependent upon the current status of his relationship with Cole which was supposedly rocky when the two were at UCLA together).

In reality, the Yankees will re-sign Tanaka, because they don’t really have a choice, and then count on Severino coming back and being his dominant self right away, even though there’s a history of most pitchers not pitching like their usual selves until their second sesason removed from Tommy John surgery.

I fully expect the Yankees to once again have an incomplete rotation come October 2021 with the annual debate on who should start Games 2 and 3 in a postseason series.

7. At some point in each of the last 25 days, I have thought about Game 2 of the ALDS. This past week, I watched the video of Michael Kay ripping the Yankees on the YES postgame show following Game 2 and I also listened to CC Sabathia’s similar rant on his podcast. All this did was make me more angry than ever about a baseball game that is now nearly four weeks old. I still cant believe the Yankees did what they did in that game. I can’t belive Cashman allowed Boone to make such an important and wrong decision, which was first-guessed at the time by everyone and not second-guessed after the poor result. Happ’s legacy as a Yankee will be that he was great in the regular season post-deadline in 2018, lost Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS in the first inning, was horrible in the 2019 regular season, gave up a walk-off home run out of the bullpen to lose Game 2 of the 2019 ALCS, spent an inconsistent 2020 regular season openly complaining about his usage and his contract option and then pooped his pants on the Petco Park mound in the postseason against a nearly all-left-handed lineup.

8. Charlie Morton shut down the Yankees in the ALDS after shutting them down as an Astro in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS and he has now emerged as the best Game 7 pitcher in baseball history. The Yankees could have had Morton. I know there’s the idea Morton was only going to pitch for the Rays to be close to his Florida home, but I don’t buy it. The Yankees gave Happ more money than they gave Morton and had they given Morton the money they gave Happ or better (he was worth more), he would have been a Yankee. There’s no way he takes less money to pitch for the Rays. Not when the Yankees train in Tampa near his home. Not when the Yankees play three series per year in Tampa. Not when a flight from New York to Tampa is three hours at most. The Yankees could have had Morton and they chose Happ. Well, first, they could have had Patrick Corbin, and they chose to not give him the extra year he wanted, then they picked Happ over Morton. Both Corbin and Morton have pitched in the last two World Series.

9. Dusty Baker is 71. Tony La Russa is 72. Baker manages a team that came within a win of their third World Series in four years and La Russa now manages a team that was nearly the 1-seed in the American League, reached the postseason for the first time in 12 years and is set up to be the dominant team in the AL Central for the forseeable future. While the Yankees (Boone), Red Sox (Alex Cora), Mets (Carlos Beltran then Luis Rojas), Dodgers (Dave Roberts) and many other teams have turned to managers with no experience seen to be able to be easily molded by the front office as “puppets” (though Cashman said at his end-of-the-season press conference that Boone “isn’t a puppet”), two of the best rosters in baseball have gone against the grain of the new-age young and inexperienced manager.

No, I don’t want the Yankees to hire someone like Baker or La Russa. I just think it’s interesting teams are reverting back to old-school managers now. The Yankees need to make a managerial change. They aren’t going to, but they need to. But I wouldn’t have wanted them to hire either as their next manager.

10. For all the praise I have given Kevin Cash this season, he ruined his team’s season in Game 6 of the World Series. I understand the “third time through the order” and giving teams different looks, but there’s no justifable reason for taking Blake Snell out of that game after he had shut down the Dodgers for five innings and the top of the order, which was due up, was 0-for-6 with six strikeouts against him.

Both Cash and Dave Roberts made Boone-type moves in the World Series and the Dodgers are very lucky Roberts didn’t manage them to third their World Series loss in four years after his decisions in 2017 and 2018.

It’s good to know other teams deal with the same nonsensical decision making the Yankees are hampered with. It’s not good to know so many managers can’t make the simple, logical and right move in a big spot.

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Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Postseason • Yankees Postseason • Yankees Thoughts

Oct 12, 2020

The Aaron Boone Yankees Weren’t Good Enough Again and They Might Never Be

I thought this season would be different. I really did. Then again, I have thought the last three seasons would be different, and they haven’t been. Once again, these Yankees weren’t good enough to win in the postseason, and I’m not sure they will ever be ready to.

Most people think I’m negative or pessimistic when it comes to the Yankees. I try to tell those people I’m a realist. I’m optimistic when I need to be and pessmistic when I need to be. I write and speak facts about the Yankees and give my opinion on those facts. Most Yankees fans don’t want to read or listen to facts about their favorite team if they don’t toe the party line that the front office and manager have created. To believe every decision Brian Cashman and his team make is the right one and to think every move Aaron Boone makes is the best one, and to trust that neither can do no wrong takes a special kind of idiot. The Yankees have won one championship in the last 20 seasons and haven’t even appeared in the World Series in a decade.

***

When Cashman finally decided to pull the plug on Sonny Gray as a Yankee because Cashman’s pitching department couldn’t tap into the pitcher who David Ortiz referred to in 2015 as “the toughest guy I’ve faced in the last few seasons,” Cashman said the following: “I don’t feel like we can go through the same exercise and expect different results.”

Rather than try to continue what Cashman thought was attempting to jam a square peg into a round hole, Cashman decided to move Gray, who has pitched a 3.07 ERA with 277 strikeouts in 231 1/3 innings since being traded. Cashman traded a former (and now current) front-end starter for a single prospect in Shed Long. He then flipped Long to the Marieners for Josh Stowers. Stowers struck out 123 times in 105 games in Single-A for the Yankees.

The point isn’t that Cashman wrongfully gave up on a guy who still clearly had No. 1 stuff (and got absolutely nothing in return) because his pitching department wasn’t good enough to figure him out, the point is that Cashman got rid of Gray because he didn’t think it would work. A point he has yet to admit with the current Yankees roster he has constructed.

Each time Cashman has had a chance to put the Yankees over the top in the last four seasons, he has failed to do so and ownership has failed to allow him to do so. The Yankees could have had Justin Verlander at the August 2017 deadline, but they didn’t want to take on his salary. So he went to the Astros and single-handedly swung the ALCS with wins in Games 2 and 6.

The 2017 Yankees came within one win of the World Series after not trading for Verlander, and then they decided to cut payroll by $50 million for 2018. The Red Sox and Dodgers greatly outspent them that season, and guess which two teams met in the 2018 World Series?

Cashman tried to bolster the team’s staff for 2019 by trading top pitching prospect Justus Sheffield for the oft-injured James Paxton, who had never thrown more than 160 1/3 innings in a season in his career, a career which had been and still is one long injured-list stint with some innings in between rather than the other way around. In two seasons with the Yankees, Paxton was bad then hurt then good then hurt then bad then hurt again. The 24-year-old, left-handed Sheffield didn’t miss a start for the 2020 Mariners, pitched to a 3.58 ERA and allowed only two home runs in 55 1/3 innings. The Yankees could have used that arm this past week.

For 2020, the Yankees finally had starting pitching depth. Cashman and the Yankees created a rotation of Gerrit Cole, Luis Severino, Paxton, Masahiro Tanaka and J.A. Happ with Jordan Montgomery as insurance. But that was in February and before Severino needed Tommy John surgery and before Paxton underwent back surgery. The Yankees’ inability to properly diagnose Severino’s elbow injury from the previous October and Paxton’s back injury from the previous September had altered their 2020 plans. The Yankees had four months from the time the 2020 season was shut down until it finally started to add to their rotation, and they didn’t. When Tommy Kahnle went down in the first weekend of the shortened season, the Yankees decided not to add to their bullpen. The trade deadline came and went and the Yankees willingly decided to take their chances with a makeshift rotation, the kind of makeshift rotation they always seem have to by the time October rolls around, and three trustworthy bullpen arms.

In February, the Yankees had the best rotation, lineup and bullpen in baseball. But as injuries piled up for the second straight season despite Cashman and the front office’s investigation into the flaws of their training and medical staff from the previous year when they set the all-time record for most players placed on the injured list in a single season, the Yankees didn’t make a single move. Well, they made one move. They gave Deivi Garcia a chance to crack the rotation, and when he proved capable of doing so at age 21, they decided to use him as a one-inning opener in the postseason, giving the majority of the ALDS Game 2 innings to J.A. Happ who spent the 2020 season underperforming like he had in 2019 and openly complaining about his 2021 option through the media. The Yankees need starting pitching for 2021. When Severino returns, he will have made three regular-season and two postseason starts since October 2018. Paxton, Tanaka and Happ are all free agents.

Right now, the Yankees’ 2020 rotation is Cole, Montgomery, Garcia and Clarke Schmidt. Montgomery was used in this ALDS because the Yankees ran out of options. Garcia has made six career starts and was inexplicably not used as a starter this postseason. Schmidt has made one career start. I guess the other rotation spot would go to noted scumbag Domingo German, who it’s now impossible to root for, the same way it’s impossible to feel anything other than awful to need to also root for noted scumbag Aroldis Chapman to close out games for the Yankees. Unfortuantely for Hal Steinbrenner, I haven’t forgotten that either is a scumbag, the way he hoped Yankees fans would when he allowed the Yankees to trade for Chapman and then gave him a five-year deal and said, “Look, he admitted he messed up. He paid the penalty. Sooner or later, we forget, right?” I haven’t forgotten, and I certaintly didn’t forget when for the second straight season the highest-paid reliever of all time gave up a home run to end the Yankees’ season.

There’s a good chance a year from now I will be writing similar words after the Yankees’ lineup beats up on back-end starters and atrocious bullpens all regular season long only to perform its annual disappearing act against front-end starters and elite relievers come October. The Yankees built a lineup full of right-handed power hitters who are exceptionally prone to the strikeout. They have no left-handed balance, making it extremely easy for a team like the Rays to trot out right-handed relievers of varying ability to shut them down. The only true contact hitter and unshiftable presence in the Yankees’ lineup is DJ LeMahieu, and he’s now a free agent, and who knows what the Yankees will do when it comes to their league-leading payroll after the pandemic-shortened season. The Hal Steinbrenner Yankees have tried to save a penny any chance they have had, and lost 2020 revenue from the pandemic and 2021 season revenue which is impossible to project is the perfect excuse for ownership to stand pat again and pretend they’re suddenly poor.

Cashman has done a lot of great things as Yankees general manager. The Yankees have won four championships in his 23 seasons with the job title. He got ownership to buy in to a rebuild at the 2016 deadline and 14 months later the Yankees were in the ALCS. He has done amazing things recently via trade like turning Chasen Shreve and Giovanny Gallegos into Luke Voit and John Ryan Murphy into Aaron Hicks. He was able to acquire Giancarlo Stanton for Starlin Castro and got the Marlins to take on part of Stanton’s contract to boot. He purchased Gio Urshela’s contract from the Blue Jays for nothing and he signed international free agents in Tanaka, Luis Severino and Gary Sanchez. Cashman isn’t the problem, and isn’t even a problem. Yes, he had to ulitimately sign off on the foolish Game 2 pitching strategy, created by someone he hired and employs, but even so, Cashman has done far more good than bad as Yankees general manger, especially of late. With the exception of one thing.

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I often think about how much better my life would be if Tim Wakefield had struck out Boone. I definitely wouldn’t be sitting here right now waiting for a tweet to show up on my Twitter feed reading, “Source: Yankees not expected to offer Aaron Boone a new contract.” Without that home run and that moment, there’s no way the Yankees name some random third baseman they traded for at the 2003 trade deadline as their manager after moving on from Joe Girardi. There’s no way they hand over the keys to a team in a championship window to someone with no coaching experience, let alone managerial experience.

I don’t know how Cashman or the front office could have watched these seven Yankees postseason games and still believe Boone is the right man to continue to manage this team. Whether or not Boone creates the lineup or fills out the lineup card or determines scheduled days off for players in the regular season doesn’t matter. Neither does his ability to communicate with the players or the media. The goal is to win baseball games and that’s done on the field, not from playing cards on the plane on a West Coast trip or being candid with reporters before each game. Boone’s in-game management is ultimately what matters and what wins games, and in turn championships, and he’s horrible at it.

Boone was extremely bad in the 2018 regular season, his first as a manager at any level of baseball. That season was made worse when his ALDS Game 3 starter didn’t know what time the game started, and when his ALDS Game 3 bullpen management altered the series. After defending his unfathomable decision to let Luis Severino pitch a third inning in that Game 3 and allow him to load the bases with no outs before going to the bullpen and then going to Lance Lynn rather than any one of the four strikeout specialists the Yankees had in their bullpen, Boone followed it up with a Game 4 for the ages. He let CC Sabathia face the entire Red Sox’ lineup a second time because he claimed he liked the matchup of Sabathia against the Red Sox’ No. 9 hitter Jackie Bradley. That’s right, Boone let Sabathia face the first eight Red Sox hitters in their lineup to get to a favorable matchup with the 9-hitter, a hitter so bad he’s only in the majors because of his glove, and a hitter so bad anyone in the Yankees’ bullpen could get out and likely a few position players could get out as well. The Yankees’ season ended without Rookie of the Year runner-up Miguel Andujar having a chance to swing the bat in the Yankees’ final game.

Boone was able to navigate the Yankees to 103 wins in 2019 despite leading the league in injuries. He was given the credit for the Yankees’ replacement players’ success rather than the actual players themselves. (Oddly enough, when those same players didn’t perform in 2020, Boone didn’t get any of the blame for replacement players playing like replacement players.) Boone opened the 2019 postseason with Brett Gardner as his No. 3 hitter. Yes, that happened. Eventually, Boone realized Gleyber Torres should bat third and the Yankees’ young star single-handedly beat the Astros in the first game of the ALCS. But as the ALCS went on, Boone let J.A. Happ, a starter by trade in his career, lose Game 2 on a walk-off home run, and then decided the Yankees would be better suited to have Gardner back in the 3-hole, while Torres continued to be the only hitter other than DJ LeMahieu to hit in the series. The Yankees’ offense was so putrid in the 2019 ALCS that it didn’t allow Boone to really get his hands on any of the games the way he would have liked.

Boone’s in-game managing flaws reared their ugly head once again in this postseason. He single-handedly tried to lose Game 2 to the Indians and force a winner-take-all Game 3, and then against Tampa, his bullpen and pinch-hitting moves were comically bad. Boone knows the substantial amount of priase Kevin Cash gets for the job he does with a household-name less roster and a team with a total payroll equaling the salaries of the Yankees’ two top starting pitchers, and he desperately craves that praise and admiration. It’s why he tries to get his hands on any game as early as he can as often as he can. It’s why he does first-guessed, nonsensical things like pitching Jonathan Loaisiga in high-leverage situations, using Adam Ottavino with a one-run deficit, but Chad Green with a three-run deficit, or using Mike Ford as a pinch hitter with the season on the line instead of Clint Frazier or Sanchez and then citing an ability to get on base for using Ford even though Ford posted a .226. on-base percentage this season and wasn’t good enough to be a Yankee in September. Boone has spoken about how the Yankees as an organization don’t believe in “hot” or “being hot” or “hot streaks” and then he and the organization decide to start Gardner over Frazier when the postseason begins. And then after starting Frazier against Tyler Glasnow in Game 2 of the ALDS because of Frazier’s ability to catch up to Glasnow’s triple-digit velocity, it’s Gardner who starts against Glasnow in Game 5 despite being unable to catch up to that kind of heat, because Gardner had a good Game 4 against lesser pitching. Boone’s entire job as manager is to put his players in the best possible position to succeed and he rarely accomplishes that.

After the Game 5 loss, the Yankees tried to say all the right things as the Rays were busy celebrating on the Petco Park field using Frank Sinatra and “New York, New York” as their victory song, serving as the second team in three seasons to beat the Yankees and then use the Yankee Stadium victory anthem to rub their face in it, a right they earned by winning.

“(Aaron Boone) told us he was proud of us for continuing to battle down to the last out, and to continue to keep working,” Aaron Judge said. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done with this team, with each individual. Just continue to work and don’t forget that feeling.”

Boone is proud of his team for their third straight early postseason exit and second ALDS exit with him at the helm. Boone being proud of this group perfectly sums up his friend-first, manager-second, relaxed Southern California personality that has made the Yankees feel comfortable with losing since he took over. Go back and look up the postgame comments following any Yankees loss in an important game from this season or any of the two prior and you will find a quote (I have written about most of them) in which a Yankees player or pitcher talks about how they will just have come back and be better tomorrow. These Yankees believe there is always a tomorrow because their manager preaches about “tomorrow” to the media and all too often manages as if there’s always a tomorrow.

There shouldn’t be “a lot of work that still needs to done” when a team is in a championship window. You get inside a championship window by not having a lot of work to do. You’re in a championship window because you’re ready to win a championship. The Blue Jays? They have a lot of work to do. The White Sox? Same. The Yankees with their highest payroll in baseball? There shouldn’t be any work left to be done.

“In what’s been a real year of peaks and valleys for us on the field,” Boone said, “I feel like in a lot of ways we’re playing our best baseball right now,” Boone said after the season-ending loss.”

It’s ironic that on a night the Yankees’ season ended, Boone thought his team played their best baseball. Yes, he thinks their best baseball is losing three out of the last four games of the ALDS, the same way the Yankees lost four of the last five games of the 2019 ALCS, and the same way they lost the last two games of the 2018 ALDS by getting run out of their own building in embarrassing fashion. Boone thinks the Yankees’ best baseball is being eliminated in the ALDS. He’s not wrong, as a five-game series loss to the Rays is as good as it gets for the 2020 Yankees, who went 4-11 against the Rays, who were the much better and more complete team all season.

Yes, the Yankees lost to a really good team, and one that can win the organization’s first championship. But the Yankees could have won the series. After taking a 1-0 series lead, they had the advantage, and after winning Game 4, they had the advantage. They wasted both advantages.

“We lost to a really good team,” Boone said. “We’re going to get there. I know it. And it’s going to make it all the sweeter.”

The last three postseason debacles won’t make winning a championship anymore sweeter if these Yankees ever do win a championship. It will only make it more frustrating that they wasted so many opportunities along the way. Boone can’t speak to what it takes to win in October because he doesn’t know what it takes to win in October because he has never won in October. Not as a player and certainly not as a manger. The only 2020 Yankee to have ever won anything was Gardner and he hasn’t won anything in a long time.

I’m not sure if these Yankees will ever get past their postseason problems. I’m not sure if they will ever not hold their annual offensive October disappearing act or if they will ever have enough starting pitching to navigate the month-long tournament.

It would be a lot sweeter if Boone weren’t the manager for 2021 and beyond because then at least the front office will finally have done something Boone never has as Yankees manager: put the team in the best possible position to succeed.

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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Podcast • Yankees Postseason • Yankees Postseason • Yankees Thoughts

Oct 10, 2020

Yankees-Rays ALDS Game 5 Thoughts: Eliminated

One run. That’s all the Yankees were able to score in a winner-take-all Game 5. One run.

I didn’t expect the Yankees to win Game 4. I expected them to lose. I expected them to lose so much that I spent the last few innings of Game 3 and the hours from then until the start of Game 4 reflecting on the end of the season and trying to figure out what I would do during the offseason, not knowing how long it might be.

The Yankees won Game 4 in improbable fashion when the weakest starting pitching option in the team’s eyes allowed only one earned run over four innings and the Yankees’ three best relievers combined to throw five shutout innings. Game 4 was the hard part. Game 4 was the obstacle. Game 5 would be much easier with the Yankees’ No. 1 starter going on three days rest against the Rays’ No. 2 starter on two days rest. The Yankees were set up to beat the Rays in two consecutive games for the first time in 2020 and avenge their embarrassing performance against them in the regular seaso. The Yankees were set up to win the series.

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One run. That’s all the Yankees were able to score in a winner-take-all Game 5. One run. A solo home run off the bat of Aaron Judge who hit three solo home runs in the postseason and might as well have not even stepped into the box in all of his other plate appearances. The Yankees produced only three hits in their nine-inning flop to the Rays, despite Gerrit Cole’s outstanding performance (5.1 IP, 1 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 9K, 1 HR). A pair of singles from Gleyber Torres and Aaron Hicks was the rest of the Yankees’ offense, as the team went 3-for-29 with four walks and 11 strikeouts. It was the exact offensive performance Yankees fans have grown accustomed since the team’s last championship when it’s all on the line: a disappearing act.

Like the Astros in last year’s ALCS, who somehow managed to hit worse than the Yankees in the series and still win, the Rays didn’t exactly knock the cover off the ball. The Rays also recorded only three hits in Game 5, the difference being that two of theirs cleared the wall. The Rays tied the game on an Austin Meadows home run off Cole and would go on to win it after a Mike Brosseau home run allowed by Aroldis Chapman, the second season in a row aa long ball off Chapman ended the Yankees’ season.

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This one hurts. They all hurt, but this one especially because it was the Rays, because the Yankees were set up perfectly to win Game 5, because it’s another wasted season of this core’s window and because it begins an offseason without a real end date. Yes, the 2021 schedule is scheduled, but there’s no way of knowing if it will take place as currently constructed or when it will take place.

The long, cold offseason is here. For the 11th straight time it has come way too early.

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Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Postseason • Yankees Postseason • Yankees Thoughts

Oct 8, 2020

Yankees-Rays ALDS Game 4 Thoughts: Yankees Have Rays Right Where They Want Them

I couldn’t envision how the Yankees could possibly win Game 4. I expected them to lose. I thought they would need a miracle to save their season, and a miracle is what they got.

I couldn’t envision how the Yankees could possibly win Game 4. They were opting to start Jordan Montgomery, the starting pitcher they view to be the weakest of their five in an elimination game, five weeks after he couldn’t make it out of the first inning against the same Rays at Yankee Stadium. Their right-handed heavy lineup was going to see the Rays’ bullpen for nine innings, a group they have failed to hit against in 13 games in 2020. And the Yankees were going to have to piece together at least 15 outs from a bullpen that has two truly trustworthy relievers and a third who has fallen off of late.

I expected the Yankees to lose. Like I wrote after Game 3, they would need a miracle to save their season and get to a Gerrit Cole start in Game 5 on Friday. And a miracle is what they got.

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Here is what I wrote in my Game 3 Thoughts:

I hope the offense we saw in the first three postseason games returns and Montgomery is good enough to give the Yankees length and Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman can close it out. That’s asking for a lot. It’s asking for a miracle. But that’s what the Yankees will need to win this series and avoid wasting another season in their championship window: a miracle.

It was asking for a lot, but it all got answered.

Montgomery pitched four innings of one-run ball in Game 4, working in and out of trouble right from the first batter of the game when Yandy Diaz opened the night with a leadoff single. He put six runners on his outing, but limited the damage the way he has when he has been at his best in his young career.

The offense returned to score five runs in the game and the all-important first run of the game. Leading 2-1 in the sixth, the Yankees did what they did in the ninth inning of Game 1 of the series and something they failed to do all regular season: tack on runs. Gleyber Torres hit a two-run home run to increase the Yankees’ lead to 4-1, and in the eighth inning, Torres stole second with two outs and scored on a single to make it 5-1.

Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman did close it out. First, it was Chad Green in relief of Montgomery, and Green redeemed himself from his disastrous second inning of work the night before by pitching a perfect fifth and sixth. Then it was Britton who retired all four batters he faced, striking out three to get the Yankees within four outs of a win. Finally, Chapman came in for his first appearance of the series and slammed the door on the Rays and any hope they had of wrapping the series up in four games.

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Luke Voit decided to join the Yankees in the ALDS as the regular-season MVP candidate hit his first career postseason home run to give the Yankees an early 1-0 lead. I was waiting for Voit, Torres and Aaron Judge to join DJ LeMahieu, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Hicks as part of the offense in this series and Voit and Torres did. I’m still waiting on Judge.

After the Game 3 loss, Judge said, “Win or gome. Those are the games I like to play in. That’s what you live for as an athlete. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

It was a weird thing for Judge to say considering he entered Thursday 7-for-35 with 17 strikeouts and a .300 on-base percentage in nine career elimination games. (The Yankees have obviously been eliminated at some point in his three postseasons with the team.) In Game 4, Judge continued his elimination game slump with an 0-for-4 performance, though he did draw a walk. Judge struck out in his first plate appearance, rolled over a ground ball to third on a 2-0 pitch in his second, walked in his third, popped out to the catcher in his fourth and reached on an error in his fifth.

The Yankees need Judge at some point this postseason to put together some consistency. The two-run home run off Shane Bieber in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series and the solo home run off Blake Snell in Game 1 of this series aren’t going to hold up forever. That has sort of been Judge’s history in now four postseasons: starting off with a bang and then fading as October goes on. The Yankees need Judge if they’re going to go to where they want to get to. They might be able to win the final game of the ALDS without him providing any production, but it’s hard to imagine they can win another two series with him hitting like this.

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Aaron Boone had to make four decisions in the game, and they were all rather easy decisions that anyone could have made, but he still had to make them, and they all worked out. So since I’m in a great mood following the season-saving win and ecstatic that my nights aren’t going to be booked with TV Land re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens for the foreseeable future until baseball is played in 2021 (whenever that might be), I will give Boone some credit. The first of those moves was going to Green for the fith. The second was staying with Green for the sixth. The third was going to Britton for the seventh. The fourth was going to Chapman with two outs in the eighth. Everything Boone did worked out. (I can’t believe I just wrote that, let alone in the postseason. It really has been a miracle night.)

For a day, Boone is safe from my criticism (until the Game 5 lineup is announced, so not even a full day). I think he’s safe in his position no matter what happens in this series or this postseason after Cashman recently said he hopes Boone has a 10-year run as Yankees manager, considering Cashman is the one who decides if Boone is the Yankees’ manager. The best thing that can happen on Friday night in Game 5 is that Cole and the Yankees’ offense keep Boone in the dugout and away from the game. That’s the game plan every night: don’t let Boone have a say in the outcome of the game.

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I didn’t expect the Yankees to win Game 4, but I do expect them to win Game 5. Winning Game 4 was the hard part. Now they have the advantage in Game 5.

The Yankees have the Rays exactly where they want them. OK, maybe not exactly where they want them since I’m sure they would rather have Cole on four days rest instead of three, but they will have their No. 1 starter going with a chance to advance to the ALCS for a rematch against the hated Astros. The Rays can’t feel good about their chances after losing Game 4 in which they had a definitive advantage.

A year ago Saturday, Cole pitched against the Rays in the same situation: Game 5 of the ALDS. Cole’s Astros had blown a 2-0 series lead with back-to-back losses in Tampa, and the best pitcher in baseball in 2019 would take the ball with a chance to advance his team to the ALCS. His line from that game:

8 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 10 K, 1 HR.

Can he please do that again in Game 5 on Friday?

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I do have to temper my expectations though. I remember walking out of the Stadium in 2005 after the Yankees’ comeback win in Game 4 to save their season in the ALDS against the Angels only to lose Game 5 the following night in Anaheim. I remember thinking they would win it all after routing the Tigers in Detroit in Game 4 of the 2011 ALDS in a game started by A.J. Burnett, only to lose because of an inability to hit with runners in scoring position in Game 5 two nights later. The Yankees have the advantage, but nothing is guaranteed, even with Cole pitching. (Though that’s about as close to a guarantee as you can get.)

There is officially at least one more day of Yankees baseball this season. With Cole on the mound in Game 5 on Friday, there should be at least another four days of Yankees baseball next week.

Four down, nine to go.

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***

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