If you can supposedly never have enough starting pitching, the Yankees have decided to not really have any at all.
If you can supposedly never have enough starting pitching, the Yankees have decided to not really have any at all. After not having anything close to resembling a rotation when this past October rolled around, the Yankees’ current “rotation” can’t even be considered one.
A year ago, the Yankees’ on-paper rotation was Cole, Severino, Paxton, Tanaka and Happ/Montgomery. It was arguably the best rotation in baseball, and it never got to be anything more than a rotation on paper and in theory. A year later, and one of those names has made six starts since the end of 2018 and three of those names are free agents. That leaves Cole and Montgomery.
With only about six weeks until spring training (if the season starts on time). The Yankees’ current “rotation” is Cole, Montgomery, Deivi Garcia and Clarke Schmidt. I’m not even sure who would be the fifth starter if the season started today? The choice would be between a scumbag or an opener. They could go with Michael King, who allowed 23 earned runs in 26 2/3 innings for the 2020 Yankees, including four opening opportunities. Or they did re-sign Nestor Cortes this offseason, who posted a a 5.67 ERA in 66 2/3 innings for the 2019 Yankees, remarkably being included on the major league roster in every month except April despite his ineffectiveness. (Cortes was let go by the historically-bad 2018 Orioles with a 7.71 ERA and then posted 15.26 ERA this past season with the Mariners.) Maybe they can go back to using Cortes to piggyback an opener. Nothing says Yankees baseball like having the highest payroll in the league and trying to piece together nine innings every fifth day.
After Cole, Montgomery becomes the No. 2 because of … seniority? That’s about the only reason for the promotion from the back end of the rotation to the front end since his career stats suggest otherwise. He has one real, full season to his name and missed basically all of 2019 after Tommy John surgery. His 2020 season was so up and down the Yankees desperately tried to avoid using him in the postseason until they were forced to, and he extended the season for an extra day.
For as good as Garcia was at times in his six career regular-season starts in 2020, the Yankees didn’t trust him enough to start a postseason game. Well, they trusted him to “start” it and pitch one inning before giving the ball to Happ to ruin the season in the worst constructed plan by the organization since deciding to give Jacoby Ellsbury $153 million seven-plus years ago.
Then there’s Schmidt, the Yankees’ top pitching prospect, who they called up and used as a reliever, a role he had little to no experience performing in his baseball career, and then finally gave him a start in the final game of the 60-game season. In a season in which every game was equal to 2.7 games in a regular 162-game season, and there needed to be urgency throughout the entire season, the Yankees used Happ for nine starts, King for four “starts” and Loaisiga for “three” starts before finally giving their top pitching prospect his first career start. Garcia and Schmidt weren’t good enough to be completely utilized by the team during the team’s most recent games, though I guess an offseason makes them now capable of being full-time rotation options.
Outside of the Padres’ determination to overtake the Dodgers in the NL West and capitalize on their current window, nearly the entire league has been inactive in building their 2021 rosters. That doesn’t make it acceptable for the Yankees to be inactive and not build for 2021. Just because your friends are smoking cigarettes in junior high school doesn’t mean you should too. Let those idiots ruin themselves.
I understand Montgomery’s ERA (5.11) was inflated in 2020 (3.87 FIP) and it was essentially one inning in each start which ruined his top-line numbers, and I believe in him as part of the rotation. I believe in Garcia and Schmidt as well and want both to get a chance to be part of the rotation. That still leaves the question of who is the other member of the staff, and it leaves the Yankees with absolutely no depth in a department which requires some level of depth. Given the Yankees’ inability to properly diagnose and handle injuries over the last two seasons, the current organizational depth chart leaves zero room for injury or error for an organization needing a lot of room for error to operate.
Right now, the Yankees’ plan appears to be to get Luis Severino back midseason. If Severino were to return and immediately be his dominant self, that would certainly length the rotation and give the Yankees the best 1-2 punch in a postseason series in the American League. That’s a BIG “if” requiring no setbacks in his rehab from surgery and needing him to not have to endure the adjustment period nearly every pitcher coming back from Tommy John surgery needs to return to form.
The championship window has already started to close and close much faster than initially anticipated as the team wasted at least two years of the window (if you’re under the impression the window started in 2019 as originally expected) or as many as three years (if you believe the window began in 2018). No matter which year you personally define as the beginning of the current championship window, these Yankees have failed to win to date, and failed to win during the “cheap” seasons of their young core. Now their young core isn’t so young anymore (Severino will be 27 next month, Aaron Judge will be 29 in April, Gary Sanchez just turned 28), isn’t as good (Sanchez) or as healthy (Severino and Judge) as it used to be, and several of the pieces added to the core (Cole, Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Hicks, Luke Voit) are now on the wrong side of 30 or will be by Opening Day.
The AL East is still the Yankees to lose (even if they didn’t win it in the shortened 2020 season). The Rays just traded their best starting pitcher, the Blue Jays still aren’t ready, and the Red Sox and Orioles are as close to being factors in the division as Aaron Boone is to being unanimously accepted as Yankees manager. It could be that the Yankees’ offseason strategy isn’t to get better by adding to or enhancing their roster, but to get better by the rest of the division getting worse.
It’s not how I envisioned this championship window going, but that’s how it’s going.
My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!
The Yankees need to add to what they were last season, not subtract from it, and certainly not subtract their leadoff hitter, their one true contact hitter and the most versatile defensive player on their roster.
The Yankees weren’t good enough to win the World Series in 2020. They weren’t good enough to get out of the division series. They weren’t even good enough to win the division. They weren’t good enough to simply play .500 baseball against the Astros for six games in the 2019 ALCS after winning Game 1. They haven’t been good enough to win a championship for 11 straight seasons. They haven’t even been good enough to even get to the World Series for 11 straight seasons.
I’m not sure how removing the team’s best player over the last two seasons makes them better for 2021. It doesn’t. The Yankees need to add to what they were in 2020, not subtract from it, and certainly not subtract their leadoff hitter, their one true contact hitter and the most versatile defensive player on their roster.
It’s been 10 weeks since I wrote What if Yankees Don’t Sign DJ LeMahieu It’s also been 10 weeks of the Yankees wanting him back, and 10 weeks of reports of the Mets being interested in LeMahieu and the Nationals and the Dodgers. The more this drags on, the worse I feel about LeMahieu returning to the Yankees.
A few weeks ago, on YES, Brian Cashman spoke about the negotiations with LeMahieu.
“We’re going to try to keep him here,” Cashman said. “He loves playing in New York, loves playing for the New York Yankees and our fan base, and he clearly loves his teammates. There’s a lot of things in our favor, but ultimately, it comes down to the financial opportunity that we provide, as measured to the financial opportunities that others are providing.”
I don’t know why Cashman can never just simplify his words, always speaking like a high school student trying to make sentences more wordy to meet the requirements of a six-page paper. The Yankees don’t need “to try to keep him,” they can just keep him. They can do this by offering him more money than any other team.
“We have good intentions when it comes to DJ LeMahieu and trying to re-sign him, and I think he has the same on his end,” Cashman said. “Free agency is very complicated and tricky. It’s a competition. The dance and the conversations will continue. We certainly hope for a positive outcome, but it’s also possible that there isn’t one, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Cashman and the Yankees control the potential “outcome” with LeMahieu. They don’t need to hope for a “positive outcome,” they can make it a “positive outcome!” There’s no lottery or drawing to decide which teams signs him. The Yankees don’t have to wait and see. They can get it done whenever they want.
Since 2014, LeMahieu has earned $41,238,500 (according to Baseball Reference). That’s a lot of money! It’s nowhere near what he should have earned given his production, but it’s a lot, and it doesn’t count whatever he signed for as a second-round pick in 2009 and what he earned through 2013 (when he had 227 major league games to his name). LeMahieu was grossly underpaid the last two seasons, as he made just $2 million more than Brett Gardner, $23.3 million less than Jacoby Ellsbury and $28 million less than Giancarlo Stanton, and as a 32-year-old, coming off the best two seasons of his careers, this is his last chance to cash in. While LeMahieu has made somewhere just shy of $50 million, this is likely his last multi-year contract. I’m sure he does love playing for the Yankees like Cashman says, but I’m sure he would love playing for whichever team offers him the most money.
A cool fact about the Yankees is that they make more money than any other team in the league. This fact is often forgotten, largely because Hal Steinbrenner tries to cry poor at any opportunity he can. He did so immediately after the 2020 season, saying on The Michael Kay Show the Yankees lost more money than any other team in the 60-game, fan-less 2020 season. He left out the part about the Yankees making more money than any other team in every other non-60-game, non-fan-less season, which has been every other season of Major League Baseball.
Ultimately (to use Cashman and Aaron Boone’s favorite word), it comes to down if the Yankees offer LeMahieu more than other teams offer him. If the Yankees truly want LeMahieu to be a Yankee in 2021, he will be. They can and will outbid any team for a player they want, and if LeMahieu ends up anywhere other than with the Yankees, we will know that all along the Yankees were OK with letting their best player walk. They would be OK entering 2021 without the team’s best player over the last two seasons. They would be OK with once again not doing everything they could to field the best possible team.
The longer LeMahieu is a free agent, the worse I feel about his chances of remaining a Yankee, and the worse I will feel about the Yankees’ chances in 2021 of doing what they haven’t done in more than a decade.
My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!
It’s been nearly three months since the Yankees’ season ended and they have done nothing to improve their roster since then.
It’s been nearly three months since the Yankees’ season ended and they have done nothing to improve their roster in that time. They haven’t done anything to their roster at all, other than have impending free agents become free agents and release the ineffective Jonathan Holder. Spring training is a little more than a month away (if the season starts on time) and the Yankees are much worse today than they were when they were eliminated.
I’m doubling down on my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions for 2021, all of which revolve around Aaron Boone. I can’t control the decisions of the Yankees manager, though I can control how I react to them.
Sometimes I wish I were a casual Yankees fan. The kind of fan who will maybe attend a game or two in a season because it’s something to do. The kind of fan who is surprised to find a mid-week afternoon game on TV and will stop and take in an inning or two before moving on to watch another channel. The kind of fan who knows the names of two or three players on the roster and still asks, “Hey, where is (player’s name)?” five-plus years after they played their final game for the Yankees. The kind of fan who doesn’t let the results of Major League Baseball games affect and impact their mood, emotions, health, happiness and general well-being.
Life would be so much easier if I were one of those fans. It really would. I think about the idea of being a casual fan at the end of any season that ends in failure, and over the last 11 years, every season has ended that way with the exception of 2017, only because that season at least represented a bright and glorious future, like a recently bought, but yet-to-be-developed piece of waterfront property. That piece of undeveloped waterfront property is still sitting there undeveloped and is now home to idle heavy machinery used to build on the land even though the signs and permits on the temporary fence still read: COMING SPRING 2018. That bright and glorious future has led to a four-game, first-round exit, including the worst home postseason loss in franchise history to the team’s hated rival, losing four out of the last five in the ALCS for the team’s fourth ALCS loss in as many tries over 10 years, and another first-round exit, this time to the team with the second-to-last payroll in the league.
This past postseason really bothered me. It still bothers me. Today is 12 weeks since the Yankees were eliminated in Game 5 of the ALDS and there hasn’t been a day in these last 12 weeks when I didn’t spend some part of it reflecting on Game 2 and the pre-planned decision to pull Deivi Garcia after one inning for J.A. Happ. There have been times over these three months when my wife will ask me what’s wrong and I try to play it off as nothing or respond that there isn’t anything bothering me. But something is wrong. I’m thinking about hearing “Happ is warming up in the bullpen” as Garcia delivers his first pitch of Game 2.
We now know the final decision to follow through on that idiotic decision belonged to Aaron Boone. How Boone was allowed to single-handedly ruin the season and how Brian Cashman and his front office staff of baseball lifers and Ivy League graduates sat back and allowed it to happen is something I will never understand. Boone and Cashman’s end-of-the-season press conference defense of the decision made even less sense than their same press conferences two years prior when they had to try to BS their way through questions about how what happened in Games 3 and 4 of the ALDS. They somehow survived with runaround answers as to why Luis Severino didn’t know the start time of Game 3, why he was left in to the load the bases with no outs in the third inning of the game, why Boone turned to the last relief option in the bullpen to get out of the bases-loaded jam, why Boone let CC Sabathia pitch for as long as he did in Game 4, and why the Yankees manager lacked simple baseball comprehension and bullpen deployment skills.
A year ago, I decided it would be better for my overall health if I didn’t get so worked up about Boone and his daily disasters, not all of which are even related to in-game moments. Boone has lied to the media about everything from player availability to player injuries only to be outed as a liar within minutes or hours after his lies. He has made irresponsible bullpen decisions and inexcusable lineup choices in three years, and each season when I complain about his managerial ability, I’m told by fellow Yankees fans not to worry because he would never manage the way he does in the regular season in the postseason, and each season, he’s even worse in the postseason, like a managerial Nick Swisher.
This year, I’m doubling down on my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions, all of which revolve around Boone. I can’t control the decisions of the Yankees manager, though I can control how I react to them. They’re not going to be easy to keep up, but in order to prevent me from tossing and turning in the early hours of the morning more than I already do with a three-month-old in the house, I think I have to at least try once again to keep them.
Resolution 1: Don’t Get Upset Over the Lineup After three full seasons of Boone as manager, we have enough data to know he has no idea how to build the best possible lineup. We now know thanks to Cashman’s end-of-the-season press conference that Boone has full authority and final say on the lineup card delivered to the home plate umpire. We now know it was his decision to play Brett Gardner over Clint Frazier in the postseason and Kyle Higashioka over Gary Sanchez, and it was his decision to twice use Mike Ford as a pinch hitter in October after deeming him not good enough to be a Yankee for all of September.
I need to take a deep breath when I see Gardner (who’s not yet a Yankee for 2021 but will most certainly be) or Aaron Hicks batting in the middle of the order as Boone forces a left-handed bat to separate the team’s right-handed hitters. Boone has been Yankees manager for 384 regular-season games and managed the Yankees for 324 regular-season games and 21 postseason games and I shouldn’t expect him to suddenly create lineups that make sense.
Resolution 2: Don’t Get Upset About Scheduled Off Days The 2019 Yankees played their last game on October 19. Opening Day 2020 was on July 25. The 2020 regular season was only 60 games. Despite playing no games for nearly nine months and then only playing 60 games in nearly a full calendar year, that didn’t stop Boone from implement his load management nonsense.
After setting the all-time record for most players placed on the injured list in a single season in 2019, the Yankees continued to manage their roster and lineup in 2020 as if they had somehow solved injury prevention. The Yankees’ scheduled days off and extra and unnecessary rest for their position players is out of control, and unfortunately, it’s not going to change. If anything, it’s only going to get worse.
The Yankees aren’t going to go out of their way to win the division or home-field advantage in the postseason. They believe just getting into the postseason is enough and they don’t care about giving away games as long as they just get in. It’s been working well for them for the last 11 seasons.
Resolution 3: Don’t Get Upset About Bullpen Usage This will be the hardest of them all. I can deal with the lineup decisions (to a degree) and the scheduled off days (to a lesser degree). The bullpen decisions though? This resolution has less of a chance of happening than Giancarlo Stanton does of a playing an injury-free season.
By the final game of the season, the Yankees’ bullpen had three trustworthy arms. The problem was they only had one starter capable of going six innings. In 2021, they will likely enter the season with three trustworthy relivers, and one of those three, the highest-paid reliever in the league has allowed a season-ending home run in both of the last two seasons. The only reason I’m even considering this resolution is because the bullpen might be so fragile that it won’t be Boone’s fault when the lesser arms blow leads and ruin games.
I understand these resolutions are rather meaningless since I can easily see myself breaking at least one or possibly all three within the first week of the season. I’m really going to try to achieve them, but I know Boone will make it impossible.
My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!
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!
