Yankees – Page 167 – Keefe To The City

Nov 1, 2018

The Good and Bad of Bringing Brett Gardner Back

I have been torn on whether or not the Yankees should bring Brett Gardner back for a while. I have always been a Gardner fan, despite his streakiness, but it sure looked like he was done for most of the season.

Brett Gardner will be a Yankee in 2019. The Yankees decided to buy him out of his $12.5 million option for next season for $2 million and give him a $7.5 million one-year deal, saving $3 million and giving themselves outfield depth, which they desperately lacked in the second half of the season.

The return of Gardner has been a touchy subject as the longest-tenured Yankee is viewed as the unofficial captain of the team, and it’s been hard for Gardner fans to accept his decline. Generally, all Yankees fans like Gardner and appreciate the career he has had and what he has meant and produced for the team for over a decade now. But was it the right move to bring back the 35-year-old outfielder, who will turn 36 during the upcoming season?

I have been torn on this decision for a while. I have always been a Gardner fan, despite his streakiness, but it sure looked like he was done for most of the season. To determine whether or not Gardner should have been re-signed, let’s look at the good and bad of his return, starting with the bad since everyone always asks for the bad first.

THE BAD
Gardner batted .236/.322/.368 this season. That’s the worst batting average and on-base percentage and second-worst slugging percentage of his career. His .690 OPS was also the worst of his career. It’s never good when a 35-year-old puts up the worst numbers of his career in the final year of his contract and then the team brings him back for another season.

Gardner started the season the same way he has for the past several seasons: batting leadoff. But eventually his on-base percentage got too low to justify giving him the most potential at-bats over the course of a game and season, and starting Sept. 1 he was no longer batting first most of the time. (Tip of the hat to Aaron Boone who was willing to pencil in Gardner as his leadoff hitter for the majority of the first 135 games of the season despite his drastic decline in production. Just another example of “A’s across the board” for the manager.) For the last month of the season, Gardner was the Yankees’ No. 9 hitter … when he played.

The trade for Andrew McCutchen resulted in Gardner no longer being an everyday player for the final month of the regular season and into the postseason. It took an Aaron Hicks injury in Game 1 of the ALDS for Gardner to play the next two games of the series, and it took McCutchen being a complete non-factor at the plate for Gardner to remain in the lineup. After struggling to find and maintain any level of offensive production during the regular season, Gardner went hitless in the playoffs (0-for-8 with three walks) and looked completely overmatched at the plate.

On top of Gardner’s decline from leadoff hitter to No. 9 hitter to fourth outfielder is Clint Frazier waiting for his shot at being an everyday major leaguer. Let’s say Frazier is healthy in 2019 and moving forward. Where is he going to play? Aaron Judge is in right field. Hicks is in center. Gardner is in left. Giancarlo Stanton can rotate in the outfield to give those three days off. The return of Gardner not only means the Yankees are going to give a lineup spot to a 35-year-old coming off the worst season of his career, but that there is nowhere for Frazier to play, barring an injury to one of those four. (I’m not even going to get into asking where Jacoby Ellsbury is going to play because who cares? He should never wear a Yankees uniform in a real game again.)

The Yankees weren’t good enough to reach the World Series in 2017. They weren’t good enough to get out of the first round in 2018. I’m not sure that continuing to bring the same exact team back once again is going to get them over the hump. While Gardner might be very, very, very low on the list of reasons why the Yankees were eliminated short of their goal the last two seasons, his situation was a fixable one with the $2 million buyout.

THE GOOD
Gardner has been everything you want from a Yankee over a decade. He was a good, solid fourth outfielder/role player turned everyday center fielder turned everyday left fielder (thanks, Brian Cashman for signing Ellsbury!). He is the longest-tenured Yankee and though Judge is certainly the face of the franchise, it’s Gardner who is always there for a quote or state of the team when the media comes calling. From everything you hear and read, he’s an excellent leader and great clubhouse presence, and those things do matter.

Even with his ugly offensive season, Gardner still plays incredible defense, as shown by his Gold Glove finalist nomination. He plays left field at Yankee Stadium better than anyone, and the difference between having him in left or Stanton or anyone really is night and day.

For all of his flaws in the batter’s box in 2018, Gardner did bat .264/.350/.428 with a .778 OPS and a career-high 21 home runs in 2017. So he’s only one year removed from the best power showing of his career. Maybe there was an unknown injury or underlying reason why he fell off this past season. Maybe this past season wasn’t the beginning of the end, but rather an anomaly. Maybe after an offseason of rest, 2017 Gardner will be the Gardner the Yankees are getting in 2019.

Gardner might not have the stereotypical power that comes with left field and left field in the American League, but he won’t give away at-bats, will make every pitcher work to get him out and when he’s going right, he will get on base. Sure, he’s streaky, and there’s a reason why I have called him “The Streak” for a long time now, but the idea is that his hot streaks will outlast his cold streaks in 2019. If they don’t, well, the Yankees are still getting Gold Glove defense and a leader for $7.5 million, and if it doesn’t work out, he can return to the bench where he finished last season.

***

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

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.

Podcasts • Yankees

Oct 24, 2018

Podcast: Andrew Rotondi

Andrew Rotondi joined me for one last venting session about the 2018 and the disappointing ending to their season.

The Yankees season has been over for a few weeks, but that doesn’t mean the time to complain about what went on in the ALDS is over. Especially with the Red Sox now closer to winning yet another World Series, this time over the Dodgers

Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes joined me for one last venting session about the 2018 Yankees, Aaron Boone’s fireable offenses in the ALDS, what happened in New York in the last two games, what moves the team has to make this offseason and what the future holds for these Yankees after a disappointing end to the season.

***

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

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge, Greg Bird and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.

Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Offseason

Oct 15, 2018

Didi Gregorius Replacement Options

The Didi Gregorius injury changes how the Yankees planned to operate this offseason and it hurts his own personal value since he will become a free agent after missing part of the season due to elbow surgery.

Have you ever sat down for a test and had to bullshit your way through the essay questions, so you ramble on and on about nothing just to fill space, giving no actual answer? That’s how Aaron Boone handled his end-of-the-season press conference.

The Yankees manager said nothing insightful and somehow still believes he made the right decisions with his bullpen in the playoffs. The only good thing to come from Boone having absolutely no clue what he was doing in the ALDS is that a lot of Boone supporters, both fans and media, now wonder if he is actually the right person for the job. It only took them nearly the entire season from what Boone displayed that first weekend in Toronto to realize the manager of the Yankees should probably have some managerial or coaching experience prior at any level before being handed a win-now team.

After 15 minutes of nothing from Boone, he took the final question of his press conference, and then Yankees public relations man Jason Zillo said the following:

“We’re going to have Cash in here in a few minutes, but in fairness to you guys (at this point Boone turns to Zillo like he remembers something and points at Zillo), there’s not a great point to drop this in, but I want Aaron to be able to respond to it. Didi had an MRI yesterday. He will undergo Tommy John surgery at a yet to be determined time …”

Boone spoke about nothing for 15 minutes and forgot to mention that the team’s starting shortstop and only left-handed, non-switch-hitting bat in their lineup played in the ALDS with a torn throwing elbow and is going to miss a large portion of 2019 following surgery on that elbow. How is it even possible Boone nearly let this slide without talking about it during his part of the press conference? Was he just going to leave if not for Zillo bringing it up? Judging by Boone’s reaction Zillo bringing it up, it sure seemed like Boone was going to walk out without having mentioned this incredibly significant news.

Boone said Didi Gregorius hurt his arm on a throw when he played a ball off the Green Monster in Game 2 of the ALDS. How did a shortstop play a ball off the left-field wall? Well, in the seventh inning, Ian Kinsler hit a ball off the wall that Andrew McCutchen played as if he had no basic knowledge or understanding of geometry. The ball bounced past McCutchen and to Gregorius, who threw it back in. (The image at the top is Gregorius getting ready to make the throw that tore his elbow.)

Boone is an idiot, but we already knew that. The real news is that the Yankees are going to be without Gregorius for some amount of time in 2019 and possibly the majority of 2019. And here I was thinking the 2019 Yankees would be better than the 2018 Yankees. The 2019 Yankees can still be better than the 2018 Yankees, but it just got that much harder to make that possible.

The Yankees have a few options with how they can handle this.

Option 1
The Yankees could keep Gleyber Torres at second base, if that’s where they feel he will play moving forward in his career, and use someone like Adeiny Hechavarria or someone with his defense-first skillset to play shortstop and bat ninth (unless Boone goes into 2019 thinking Torres should continue to bat ninth no matter what). I certainly don’t want the Yankees to play any part of next season with a near-automatic out like Hechavarria in the lineup, let alone possibly the majority of next season, so this would be the worst-case scenario for me.

Option 2
The Yankees could sign Manny Machado. This would mean while Gregorius is out, Machado could play short, Torres second and Miguel Andujar third. Or Machado third, Torres short and Andujar first or outfield. The first step to this process would be to sign Machado and then determine where Andujar’s future is. Gregorius is going to be a free agent at the end of this season, so maybe Machado plays third for 2019 and then shortstop in the years to follow, or maybe the Yankees also sign Gregorius, and Machado plays third and Gregorius plays short for the foreseeable future. That would mean Andujar becomes an outfielder or a first baseman. I wouldn’t hate this scenario, but it’s not my favorite.

Option 3
If the Yankees are going to sign either Machado or Bryce Harper, I would rather they sign Harper. The Yankees desperately need a middle-of-the-order left-handed bat and I would rather have Harper for the next decade than Machado. Signing Harper would mean Option 1 above would be less of an issue since having either a defense-first player at either short or second (whichever Torres isn’t at) would be negated in the lineup by the addition of Harper’s bat. If Harper isn’t an option for the Yankees because of the regrettable decision to add Giancarlo Stanton for 10 years then Option 2 becomes my favorite option because I do want either Machado or Harper (or both!).

Option 4
The unknown. The Yankees could do something not listed here. (This will likely be what happens since no one is expecting it.)

This Yankees offseason is so unpredictable and there are so many avenues they can take to set themselves up for the next decade that it actually hurts my head to think about. The Gregorius injury comes at a terrible time because it changes the course of how the Yankees planned to operate this offseason and it hurts his own personal value since he will become a free agent after missing part of the season due to elbow surgery.

The Yankees have an opportunity this winter to build on what began at the 2016 trade deadline and to put themselves in position to sustain success for a long period of time. The construction of their infield without Gregorius is now their first major decision of the offseason. They can’t get it wrong.

***

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

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.

Oct 11, 2018

The Yankees Weren’t Good Enough Once Again

The Yankees’ World Series drought is now at nine years after the team’s disappointing performance in the postseason.

There have been a lot of times in the Brian Cashman era where I thought the Yankees were the best team in the league and they still didn’t win the World Series. In some of those seasons, they didn’t even make it out of the ALDS. This season, though, the Yankees weren’t the best team. They had the most talent. They just weren’t the best team.

The best team doesn’t have a manager who single-handedly swings a series for the worst or starting pitching that gets outpitched or a lineup that gets shut down by mediocre pitching. The Yankees had all these things and it’s why their real postseason lasted four games and why they had to play a game before the real postseason.

Top to bottom, one through 25 on the roster, I still believe the Yankees had the most talent, and on paper, should have won the division and should have represented the American League in the World Series. Underachievement, injuries and poor decisions forced them into the wild-card game, and those three negative traits eliminated them in four games against the Red Sox.

Just like that, the season is over. The grind that began in Tampa back in February and became official in Toronto is March is over, and for the ninth straight season, the Yankees’ season will end without a championship. The last nine seasons haven’t even provided a World Series appearance. The eight-year championship drought from 2001-08 has now been surpassed.

The final week or so of the regular season coupled with their impressive win over the A’s in the wild-card game and their effort in Boston in Games 1 and 2 of the ALDS served as a facade for the team’s real problems. The lineup was too right-handed heavy and was then shut down by two right-handed pitchers in Nathan Eovaldi and Rick Porcello. Their starting pitching was untrustworthy as seen by the disastrous starts of J.A. Happ, Luis Severino and CC Sabathia. And their manager’s lack of any managerial or coaching experience at any level was exposed on the postseason stage. When the Yankees failed to hit home runs, they failed to score, which put pressure on their rotation and forced their clueless manager to make meaningful decisions. When the Yankees failed to hit home runs, they failed to win. That’s not to say relying on home runs is wrong. It’s just that having home runs as your only source of offense is. And outside of Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez’s power display in Boston, the Yankees couldn’t score.

The Yankees supposedly arrived ahead of schedule in 2017. They were picked to finish close to or last in the AL East and they wound up winning the first wild card, winning the wild-card game, coming back down 2-0 against the Indians in the ALDS and coming within a win of the World Series. Their unexpected postseason run made them the AL favorite for 2019 and they fell short of those expectations. Well short. They blew their division chances in August, barely hung on to the first wild-card spot, and then after winning home-field advantage from the Red Sox in ALDS, they suffered the most embarrassing postseason loss in the team’s history as they would lose both home games in the series.

This season was a step back for a team whose natural progression should have been at least a second straight ALCS appearance, if not a World Series appearance. Yes, the MLB postseason is a crapshoot, and just reaching the ALDS should be enough, but not when you’re built like the Yankees. Not when you reach the ALCS, come within a game of the World Series and then add the NL MVP and swap out Starlin Castro and Chase Headley for Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar. That should have been enough to close the one-win gap the Yankees weren’t able to close when they went to Houston for Games 6 and 7 up 3-2 in the series. Instead, the gap is now even bigger than a year ago.

In the nine years since their last championship, the Yankees have three ALCS losses, two ALDS losses, a wild-card loss and three postseason-less seasons. Where do they go from here? I really don’t know. The team has many paths it can take this offseason, so that a year from now they are still playing games and not holding exit interviews and end-of-the-season press conferences. They have decisions to make on CC Sabathia and Brett Gardner. They have rotation spots to fill from within or outside the organization. They have to figure out who will be their first baseman and how they can add left-handed balance to the lineup. And on top of all that, they have to make the right choices when it comes to the best free-agent class in history. If you believe that the Yankees did arrive early in 2017 and that these last two seasons were just experience-building years then 2019 is truly the first year of this current team’s window of opportunity, and it can’t be wasted.

Success can be fleeting in baseball and nothing is guaranteed. On paper, the Yankees should be as good, if not better in 2019 than they were in 2018. But on paper, the 2018 Yankees should have been the best team in baseball, and their season ended short of their goal once again.

***

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

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge, Greg Bird and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.

Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Postseason

Oct 9, 2018

Yankees-Red Sox ALDS Game 3: Embarrassment

Every aspect of the Yankees from the starting pitching to the bullpen to the offense to the defense to the manager was an embarrassment, and now as a result, the Yankees are facing elimination.

Embarrassment. That’s all there really is to say about this game. Every aspect of the Yankees from the starting pitching to the bullpen to the offense to the defense to the manager was an embarrassment, and now as a result, the Yankees are facing elimination.

Not even a week ago, I gave Aaron Boone a clean slate for the previous six-plus months after his team reached the real playoffs: the ALDS. But that clean slate didn’t last long.

Luis Severino didn’t have it on Monday night and it was obvious from the first pitch of the game. Mookie Betts jumped on a first-pitch fastball and sent it to the warning track in center field, and off the bat, I thought it was gone. Severino was able to pitch around a two-out walk in the inning, but two of three outs ended up on the warning track.

In the second inning, Severino lost a seven-pitch battle to Rafael Devers that resulted in a line drive to right field, which somehow wasn’t a double, for the third hard-hit ball put in play out of the four batters who put the ball in play. After a steal, a groundout and a defensive miscue by Severino, the Red Sox had a 1-0 lead.

A 1-0 lead in Yankee Stadium against Nathan Eovaldi and the Red Sox bullpen with eight at-bats left isn’t a big deal, and when Giancarlo Stanton led off the bottom of the second with a single, I thought they might get the run right back. But Didi Gregorius decided to bunt for a hit rather than try to hit the ball in the gap or over the wall, and he was thrown out. The inning would end with nothing.

Severino had thrown 44 pitches in the first two innings, and Boone was going back to him in the third inning with the top of the order due up. At the time, it wasn’t necessarily the wrong move, but given how hard Severino had been hit in the first two, there was certainly reason to think it was time to go to the bullpen.

Betts and Andrew Benintendi led off the third with back-to-back line-drive singles and J.D. Martinez hit another ball to wall in left-center that looked like it had a chance. If you didn’t think Severino should be out of the game to start the inning, he should have certainly been relieved now with the Yankees down 2-0. Xander Bogaerts singled and a Devers groundout made it 3-0 before Steve Pearce hit a deep fly ball to center field for the third out of the inning.

The one-run deficit had turned to three and it was obvious Severino had nothing. Nearly every out had been a line drive right at a fielder and the fact the score was only 3-0 and not worse was a miracle. There was no way he could go back in the game for the fourth. Except the Yankees manager is Aaron Boone.

Boone sent Severino back out for the fourth, trailing 3-0, and No. 7 hitter Brock Holt and No. 8 Christian Vazquez hit back-to-back singles on the first two pitches of the inning, and no one was warming up in the Yankees bullpen. Then No. 9 hitter Jackie Bradley Jr. walked. Bases loaded and no one out. Boone’s decision had put the game from within reach to possibly getting out of hand in the fourth inning. Why did he bring Severino back out for the fourth?

“Just hoping he could get something started to get through the bottom of the lineup there, and then we were going to have Lynn ready for Betts no matter what. And then once the first two guys got on there, thinking Bradley’s in a bunting situation, so we’re going to take an out and then go to the pen there. But it just snowballed on him, and then Lance had a little bit of trouble obviously coming in there. So it just turned into a really bad inning for us.”

So Boone thought Severino would magically find his game in the fourth inning after struggling through the first three and being fortunate to have many of his line drives hit at fielders. Then he had already determined he wanted the last pitcher on the postseason roster to face the AL MVP. Then he assumed Bradley was going to bunt, despite not having sacrifice bunted since the 2015 season. And finally, he thought Lynn “had a little bit of trouble”. To me, walking in a run on the first batter you face and then allowing a bases-clearing double on the second batter you face is more than “a little bit of trouble”.

But even after Boone let Severino load the bases, the game still could have been saved with a couple of big strikeouts by either Dellin Betances, David Robertson or Chad Green. Instead, Boone went to the last pitcher on the postseason roster. Why didn’t he go to one of his elite relievers with the game on the line?

“Well, because with Dellin we only had for an inning we figured tonight. In hindsight, we certainly could have started the fourth inning with Robbie or something, but we really felt like Sevy could at least get us a couple outs in that fourth inning before turning it over to Lynn and then we could roll out our guys. But we just couldn’t stop the bleeding at all. That was the thinking behind it.”

Apparently, the Yankees determined before a postseason game that their best pitcher would only be available for one inning. If that’s not nonsensical enough, the Yankees had an off day the day before, and on top of that, Betances had pitched twice in the last nine days, throwing 53 pitches. But he was going to be limited to one inning in Game 3 of the ALDS? And how about Boone using “in hindsight” there as if these moves are only now being second-guessed and as if not everyone in the world thought they were awful decisions at the time. Boone would go on to use “in hindsight” again in his postgame press conference. But nothing might be worse than the idea that he was going to try to steal a few more outs with a laboring Severino and only start to “roll out” the elite relievers after Lynn pitched. Good thing Betances and Robertson are rested now with the Yankees facing elimination.

Lynn walked in a run and then allowed a bases-clearing double, and the game was over. Now trailing 7-0, Lynn would end up recording one out before Boone decided to go to Green, the same way he had decided to go with Jonathan Holder over Green in the first game between these two teams in August that led to the division race unraveling. By the end of the inning, the Red Sox led 10-0, and not even Eovaldi and the Red Sox bullpen would blow the game.

The Yankees would go on to lose 16-1 and pitch Austin Romine in the ninth inning because the first eight innings hadn’t been embarrassing enough. Severino didn’t show up, Boone continued to prove he has no business being a major league manager, Lynn turned back into the Lynn that was available at the trade deadline, Green couldn’t stop the bleeding and the offense didn’t show up before the game got out of hand.

The Yankees now have to win Game 4, and the only way I can see them doing that is to score enough runs that Boone’s decision-making won’t impact the game. Put the game out of reach and don’t allow him to potentially make costly pitching decisions.

After winning a game in Boston and returning home with Severino against Eovaldi, the Red Sox feeling the pressure and the Stadium crowd behind them, I said it would be a disaster if the Yankees now blew this series. And if they lose one more game, it will be a disaster.

***

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

The book details my life as a Yankees fan, growing up watching Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams through my childhood and early adulthood and the shift to now watching Gary Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Judge, Greg Bird and others become the latest generation of Yankees baseball. It’s a journey through the 2017 postseason with flashbacks to games and moments from the Brian Cashman era.

Click here to purchase the book through Amazon as an ebook. You can read it on any Apple device by downloading the free Kindle app.