There are two available spots on the Yankees’ roster. One is the last bench spot and the other is the last bullpen spot.
There are two available spots on the Yankees’ roster. One is the last man on the bench and the other is the last man in the bullpen. Mike Tauchman, Miguel Andujar, Derek Dietrich and Jay Bruce are competing for the last spot on the bench, and Albert Abreu, Nick Nelson and Michael King are competing for the last spot in the bullpen.
It’s been a clean week of health for the Yankees in spring training. That’s all I care about this month. No injuries. Performance is meaningless. Not losing anyone to injury is all that matters.
It’s been a clean week of health for the Yankees in spring training. That’s all I care about this month. No injuries. Performance is meaningless. Not losing anyone to injury is all that matters.
1. Jameson Taillon and Corey Kluber have both pitched and both looked good and both came out injury-free. The results don’t matter in March, but the health certainly does, and the Yankees’ 2021 championship aspirations rest on the elbow of Taillon and the shoulder of Kluber. It’s not exactly what you want for a team built to win now, but it’s what the Yankees have built. Each day of March in which you don’t hear the words “soreness” or “discomfort” or the phrases “being evaluated” or “shut down” is a good day. There has only been one of those days so far (Clarke Schmidt’s injury). Let’s keep it that way.
2. Aaron Boone has said he’s going to bat Aaron Hicks third this season. I’m not surprised because I was expecting this. He batted him third in the past and in the postseason, so why wouldn’t he bat him third in 2021? It’s the same reason why I think he will have Kyle Higashioka unnecessarily serve as Gerrit Cole’s personal catcher and why he won’t hesitate to play Brett Gardner over Clint Frazier. Hicks is not a 3-hitter. He’s just not. If DJ LeMahieu leads off and Aaron Judge bats second, there is still the option of batting Giancarlo Stanton, Luke Voit, Gleyber Torres or Frazier third. (I would even bat Sanchez third like it’s 2017 over Hicks, but I know that’s not realistic right now.) The idea the right-handed hitters have to be separated in the Yankees’ lineup makes no sense because if Frazier really is going to be the everyday left fielder over Gardner, then there will be eight right-handed bats in the Yankees’ lineup “every” day. That means no matter where Hicks bats, there’s going to be eight consecutive right-handed batters. Over the course of the season, Hicks shouldn’t be getting more at-bats than Stanton, Voit, Torres or Frazier, or Sanchez (if he’s right this season).
3. Sanchez looks right in spring training. Two home runs already and one that nearly left Tampa. I know it’s March and these games don’t count, but having two home runs is better than having none, and if Sanchez had none right now or was 0-for-spring training, he would be hearing about it. I think he will bat no higher than seventh to begin the season, and I can see him batting eighth ahead of Gio Urshela or even ninth behind Urshela. If 2016-17, the Yankees will have the best 8- or 9-hitter in history. If that Sanchez returns, there will be a lot of Yankees fans who owe Sanchez an apology, and I want handwritten apologies, not social media apologies.
4. Opening Day is four weeks from today. Four weeks! This is what I would do on Opening Day against the Blue Jays’ left-handed Hyun Jin Ryu:
DJ LeMahieu, 2B Aaron Judge, RF Giancarlo Stanton, DH Luke Voit, 1B Gleyber Torres, SS Clint Frazier, LF Gary Sanchez, C Aaron Hicks, CF Gio Urshela, 3B
(I know that’s not what’s going to happen.)
5. I think this is what we will see on Opening Day:
DJ LeMahieu, 2B Aaron Judge, RF Aaron Hicks, CF Giancarlo Stanton, DH Luke Voit, 1B Gleyber Torres, SS Clint Frazier, LF Gary Sanchez, C Gio Urshela, 3B
6. No one from the fifth starter “competition” has pitched yet, so the “competition” has yet to actually start. However, I don’t think there’s a competition anyway. It’s Domingo German’s job. As I wrote on Monday, the Yankees didn’t keep scumbag German through his suspension and through all the negative attention, publicity and backlash to not have him pitch. They didn’t purposely insert a cancer into their clubhouse and then try to tip toe around his presence by not having him address his teammates until the team’s veteran bullpen leader spoke out against him to send him to the minors. German is still a Yankee because the Yankees think he can help them win and think his disgusting act will be forgotten if he helps them do so.
7. Miguel Andujar, Mike Tauchman, Derek Dietrich and Jay Bruce seem to be competing for one roster spot. If the Yankees are going to have four bench spots, one goes to Higashioka, one to Gardner, one to Tyler Wade and one to one of those four. As a left-handed outfielder, Tauchman is redundant with Gardner, so I don’t see how he’s on the 26-man roster. Andujar can play third base and I guess outfielder and first base? The Yankees will want Andujar to get everyday at-bats, and he’s yet another right-handed hitter on a team full of them, so I don’t see him being on the Opening Day roster.
8. That leaves one spot for Dietrich and Bruce. Dietrich can play first, second, third and outfield, and Bruce can play first, second and outfield. Right now, I think Dietrich holds an edge on Bruce. He’s younger, more versatile and a much better on-base option. I would pick Dietrich for the final bench spot.
9. There’s also one spot available in the bullpen, if the Yankees have 13 pitchers. Yes, they can have 14 relievers to begin the season and then send someone down for the fifth starter when they eventually need a fifth starter for the first time, which could be April 6 or 7 depending on if they go in full rotation or go back to Cole after four days of rest. If they go with 13 pitchers and go with five starters, and then you count Aroldis Chapman, Zack Britton, Chad Green, Darren O’Day, Justin Wilson, Jonathan Loaisiga and Luis Cessa, that leaves one spot. If they hold off on the fifth starter, there’s two spots.
10. Albert Abreu is out of options, so he might be the front-runner if there’s only one spot. If there are two spots, Michael King and Nick Nelson would then seem to be competing for the last spot. No one should care about the last man in the bullpen because they should only be pitching in lopsided games, but when it comes to the Yankees, you can never count out seeing the last man in the bullpen in a high-leverage situation they don’t belong in. Every bullpen spot matters on this team.
The Yankees need their best catcher to play the most games possible. They don’t need to be assigning personal catchers.
I already know when the first time Aaron Boone will affect my life during the 2021 season. I have it narrowed down to two possibilities.
One possibility is in Game 3 of the season, on Easter Sunday (April 4). The Yankees will have played the day before, so it will be their first time playing on consecutive days in the season, and with three games in three days following, Boone will inexplicably give guys a scheduled day off in the third game of the season after having played 67 games in the previous 17-plus months.
The other possibility is even before the third game of the season. It’s on Opening Day. With Gerrit Cole scheduled to start the first game of the season, there’s a good chance Boone will pair him with Kyle Higashioka and bench Gary Sanchez on Opening Day, a decision that will have severe consequences in Game 1 of 162.
On Monday, Sanchez caught Cole’s first spring training start, and Cole said he thought the two “worked well today” and that they did “a nice job together” and called it “a good day.”
Last season, Sanchez was pulled from catching Cole starts, and Higashioka was inserted as a personal catcher for the right-hander. It wasn’t promising for the Yankees’ ace to need a personal catcher a month into what will be nearly a decade with the team. The Yankees cited the smallest of sample sizes for their decision and as a backup, they used a high school relationship with the two being teammates more than a decade ago as a reason for the pairing. Higashioka had very little to do with Cole’s success, if he anything to do with it all. There’s a reason Cole is arguably the best pitcher in the world, and it’s not because of a career backup catcher with 72 career games to his name.
Either Cole went to Boone and asked to have Higashioka catch him, or the Yankees made the decision and he didn’t argue it. Either way, Cole allowed Higashioka to become his personal catcher, and he allowed an inferior player to start two playoff games, and Boone, on his own, had Higashioka start another three.
Boone has said Sanchez would have caught Cole’s next start in the ALCS if the Yankees had won Game of the 5 ALDS, but I believe that as much as I believed Boone when he said he didn’t pull Judge from a game last season due to injury and then the right fielder missed half the season.
Boone has very little idea what he’s doing as Yankees manager. His in-game managing is detrimental to the team’s success that he is at times more of an opponent for the Yankees than their actual opponent. His communication skills, which were praised upon his hiring, haven’t been what they were hyped up to be. Under his watch, his 2018 ALDS Game 3 starting pitcher didn’t know what time the game started in what resulted in the Yankees’ worst home postseason loss in history; he has been as wrong as you can be about injury updates and return timetables; he blatantly lied about the health of Aaron Judge in the 2020 regular season; he benched the team’s best catcher in the 2020 postseason without an explanation; most recently, he admittedly didn’t “gauge the temperature” of his team when bringing a scumbag, who committed domestic abuse in front of his teammates, back into the clubhouse. Boone’s best quality as a manager is that he appears to be a nice guy, and that’s not nearly enough for someone whose job it is to manage a Major League Baseball team. I know a lot of nice guys. I don’t want them in charge of the Yankees, allowed to pull Deivi Garcia after the first inning of a playoff game for J.A. Happ as part of a preconceived strategy.
Brian Cashman, in his end-of-the-season press conference, said Boone makes all lineup decisions (clearly not wanting his name attached to the disastrous ALDS Game 2 pitching strategy).
“In terms of the lineup and in-game strategies, those are the manager’s,” Cashman said in October. “It always has been and as long as I’m the general manager, it never will be different.”
The decision to play Higashioka over Sanchez was Boone’s. Just like it was his decision to pull Garcia for Happ, play Brett Gardner over Clint Frazier and use mike Ford as a pinch hitter instead of Sanchez or Frazier with the season on the line.
“I know there’s that narrative about the manager being a puppet and none of that’s true,” Cashman also said. “I’ve never ordered a manager to do anything specifically and Aaron would be able to testify to that as well as Joe Girardi and Joe Torre. They’ve never been directed at any time by me or our front office to do something they didn’t want to do.
It will take very little for Boone to pair Higashioka with Cole again this season and to start the season. I mean very little. If he was willing to play Higashioka over Sanchez in October, whether or not Cole was pitching, he will gladly play Higashioka over Sanchez in April. Or it might not take anything at all. Boone already knows if he’s going to have Higashioka be Cole’s personal catcher, andif he’s going to bench Sanchez on Opening Day. It won’t be a surprise, it will just be the latest idiotic decision on the long list of idiotic decisions Boone has made. A decision that will have severe consequences in the first game of 162.
If you ask the Yankees, they will tell you there is a competition for the fifth spot in the rotation. In actuality, there isn’t.
If you ask the Yankees, they will tell you there is a competition for the fifth spot in the rotation between Deivi Garcia, Domingo German, Michael King and Jhoulys Chacin. In actuality, the spot is going to go to German.
Deivi Garcia is the right choice to be the Yankees’ fifth starter. Even if he performs brilliantly this spring, I don’t see how he’s anywhere other than in Triple-A to start the season.
There are very few spring training competitions for the Yankees, as there are every year. There’s a bench spot and a bullpen spot. That’s it. There’s supposedly a battle for the fifth spot in the rotation, but we all know it’s a competition that’s already been decided. More than likely, all three “competitions” have already been decided.
Deivi Garcia is the right choice to be the Yankees’ fifth starter. Even if he performs brilliantly this spring, I don’t see how he’s anywhere other than in Triple-A to start the season, and if he pitches poorly, the Yankees will have an easy out to get what they want. Whether good or bad, spring training performance is used at the team’s convenience. If Aaron Judge bats .150, well, it’s spring training and it doesn’t matter. If Gary Sanchez bats .350, well, it’s spring training and let’s see him do it in the regular season. If Gerrit Cole pitches to a 5.20 ERA, well, it’s spring training and he was working on stuff. If Garcia pitches to a 1.20 ERA, well, it’s spring training and he wasn’t facing real lineups. Spring training numbers only mean something to some, and for Garcia, they don’t mean anything.
The Yankees didn’t keep scumbag Domingo German through his suspension and through all the negative attention, publicity and backlash to not have him pitch. They didn’t purposely insert a cancer into their clubhouse and then try to tip toe around his presence by not having him address his teammates until the team’s veteran bullpen leader spoke out against him to send him to the minors. German is still a Yankee because the Yankees think he can help them win and think his disgusting act will be forgotten if he helps them do so.
Because of this, Garcia will end up in Triple-A and be the first starter recalled when the Yankees inevitably need another starter. In the event Garcia is phenomenal this spring and German isn’t, the Yankees already have a variety of built-in excuses at their disposal for their decision ranging from Garcia needing some more work in the minors after a minors-less 2020 season, the Yankees wanting to bring him along slowly or the Yankees wanting to control his workload. The Yankees will easily use any or all of these reasons as to why the 21-year-old won’t open the season in the majors.
There’s nothing more the Yankees love than the idea they are going to unearth how to successfully keep pitchers healthy. Whether it’s innings limits like they have unsuccessfully placed on so many pitchers over the years, skipped starts like they did most recently with Michael Pineda or absurd innings-to-days off rules like they implemented for Joba Chamberlain, the Yankees will stop at nothing to find the answer. I know the answer to the age-old question they are searching for: don’t pitch. That’s it. It’s that simple. If you don’t want a pitcher to get injured, don’t let him pitch. That’s the only way a pitcher will avoid an injury. No pitch count, or innings limit, or skipped starts or Joba Rules is going to prevent injury. Not pitching is the only thing that can.
The idea the Yankees should stash Garcia in Triple-A as insurance and to protect his workload would be counterproductive. Pitchers get injured. That’s what they do. And if the Yankees think Garcia is a big part of their future, he should be a big part of their present. Why waste pitches in Triple-A? They won’t be fake pitches. They will be real, all-out, high-intensity pitches because Garcia will be competing and trying to prove a spot needs to be made for him in the Yankees’ rotation.
I’m fully prepared for German to begin the season as the Yankees’ fifth starter and for Garcia to go to Triple-A and be on-call for a call that will eventually come. The Yankees aren’t going to get through an entire season without using Garcia at some point. That point should be the first time they need a fifth starter.
