Yankees’ recent trade only creates more questions about the state and direction of the roster.
A day later I still feel the same way about the Yankees’ trade for Josh Donaldson and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, which has only created more questions about the state and direction of the roster.
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“Neil, are you awake? Neil? Are you awake?“ “I am now,” I responded to my wife. “The Yankees traded Gary Sanchez.” “Yeah, right.” “No, really. To the Twins.” That’s how my Monday began, shortly after
“Neil, are you awake? Neil? Are you awake?“
“I am now,” I responded to my wife.
“The Yankees traded Gary Sanchez.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, really. To the Twins.”
That’s how my Monday began, shortly after 2 a.m.
Beginning at 7 p.m. on Friday night I began updating every possible news outlet by the minute. That was the official start time to the 2022 MLB season and that was when the supposed madness would take place, especially for the Yankees, who would be in search of a shortstop, first baseman, starting pitcher and possible outfielder. I spent the weekend attached to social media in between Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Cocomelon episodes only to be disappointed when the Yankees’ lone move was bringing back Tim Locastro on a major-league deal to give them outfield depth.
I passed out shortly before 10 p.m. on Sunday night in the middle of scouring social media for any inkling of positive Yankees news or potential acquisitions. The moment I fell asleep, Brian Cashman and Co. swooped in as if they were waiting for me to let my guard down, sending Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela to the Twins.
My Sanchez fandom is well known. As one of the few surviving members of the Gary Sanchez Fan Club, of course I’m disappointed he’s no longer a Yankee. When right, he presented the biggest position advantage the Yankees had over any opponent. The problem is he hadn’t been right often over the last few years and I spent an inordinate amount of time defending him to Kyle Higashioka believers, who have nonsensically looked past the 32-year-old backup’s career .183/.234/.385 batting line and bottom-of-the-barrel arm, while at the same time being fed up with Sanchez, who in a down year in 2021 hit three more home runs than Higashioka has hit in his career. In the end, Aaron Boone and Higashioka Fan Club won out and now the Yankees boast the worst catching tandem in Major League Baseball. Congratulations!
As for Urshela, I wrote at the end of last season that he was the easiest piece of the roster to move to give the appearance of a new-look roster, and so the Yankees moved him. He was a good Yankee. A product of the 2019 super baseball, but a good Yankee nonetheless.
The Yankees moving on from Sanchez and Urshela isn’t surprising. The return for Sanchez and Urshela is what kept me up from 2 a.m. until 5 a.m. this morning, tossing and turning, trying to go back to sleep, but wondering, ‘Why this trade?’
Prior to the 2019 season, the Yankees had the chance to sign Bryce Harper and/or Manny Machado. They courted Machado enough to sell it to the fanbase that they “tried” to sign the 26-year-old left-side-of-the-infield superstar. They didn’t even meet with Harper, the 26-year-old, left-handed-hitting outfielder with already one MVP to his name.
Why weren’t they even remotely interested in the generational talent Harper? Because they already had Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Hicks, and had Clint Frazier waiting for an everyday role. Since not signing Harper, the Yankees haven’t extended Judge, they don’t let Stanton play the outfield, Hicks has missed 239 of a possible 384 regular-season games (62 percent) and Frazier was released this offseason for nothing. Harper has gone on to hit .281/.402/.556 for the Phillies, averaging 38 home runs and 105 RBIs per 162 games, while winning the 2021 NL MVP and playing in 356 of a possible 384 regular-season games.
All Harper would have cost the Yankees money. Their greatest resource and the thing they make more of than every other team. He ended up getting an average annual salary of $25.3 million, which would cover his age 26-38 seasons.
In Sunday night’s trade, the Yankees acquired Josh Donaldson … and the $48 million owed to him. An average annual salary of $24 million for a 36-year-old third baseman who has played two “full” seasons in the last five years and in one of those “full” seasons (last year), he missed 27 games.
Once upon a time, acquiring Donaldson and paying him that much money would have made sense. That time was five years ago. And while it’s not my money, the idea the Yankees are willing to pay essentially the same average annual salary for the age 36 and 37 seasons of an oft-injured former superstar, while choosing on multiple occasions to not pay for the age 36 and 37 seasons of other current superstars when they would also be getting their prime years is beyond puzzling. The Yankees are choosing that same path at shortstop.
Prior to the lockout, the Yankees had their choice at shortstop: Corey Seager, Carlos Correa or Trevor Story. Seager signed with the Rangers, leaving them with the 27-year-old Correa or the 29-year-old Story. The Yankees chose instead to trade for Isiah Kiner-Falefa.
They chose to do this because their No. 1 and No. 3 prospects are both shortstops excelling in the minors. So in win-now mode with the majority of their “core” approaching or on the other side of 30, rather than commit their future on an already-proven major-league shortstop in their prime, the Yankees are choosing to commit to either a 20-year-old who has never played above High-A or a 21-year-old who has only played 87 games above High-A. Only one of them can be the shortstop of the future, and it’s likely the Yankees choose Volpe, meaning the New Jersey-born native will basically have to become the other New Jersey-born former Yankees shortstop. The Yankees are banking on Volpe being Derek Jeter 2.0. A very reasonable expectation. Kiner-Falefa is a decent player, but the Rangers also signed Seager and Marcus Semien rather than commit to Kiner-Falefa. The Rangers. The same team that released Rougned Odor, who the Yankees happily traded an actual person to acquire, rostered him all season and even let him get two at-bats in the one-game playoff against the Red Sox. Only one person can bat ninth and the Yankees now have multiple candidates for that spot.
There’s this idea the Yankees aren’t done yet, but I don’t know how anyone could truly believe that. That trade could very well be it. They could go into the season praying for a miracle that Hicks (who has missed 44 percent of regular-season games since 2018), Stanton (33 percent), Donaldson (27 percent) and Judge (23 percent) all stay healthy and productive for six-plus months. They could think an infield combination of Donaldson, Kiner-Falefa, DJ LeMahieu, Gleyber Torres and Luke Voit is good enough to get them back to the World Series for the first time in 13 years. They could very well think the duo of Higashioka and Ben Rorvedt isn’t the worst catching tandem in the league. (Sorry, it is.)
In mid-October, Cashman said:
“I’m going to be looking to upgrade. There are some areas of weakness that have popped up in a lot of categories.
“Here’s the biggest key: Go to the marketplace, whether it’s the free-agent marketplace, or go to the trade market and see how we can solve that with what’s available in the marketplace. And obviously there will be some legitimate choices to reconfigure in certain categories.”
The roster that needed upgrades still hasn’t gotten them. It still hasn’t added any one of the “legitimate choices” Cashman mentioned. If this is it for the Yankees’ offseason, it’s going to be a long 2022 season, and likely a wasted one at that. On Monday morning, the Yankees’ roster is worse than it was on Sunday afternoon, and it was pretty awful then.
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As long as Brett Gardner is a Yankee, he will play, and he will play nearly every day. If injuries don’t force him into the lineup, Aaron Boone will.
I didn’t want Brett Gardner back for the 2019 season. I had seen enough from the then-35-year-old outfielder and his career-worst season to want the Yankees to go in a different direction. Entering the first true season of this group’s championship window of opportunity, I wanted a younger and better left field, with the assumption Giancarlo Stanton would be primarily used as the designated hitter. I wanted the Yankees to sign Michael Brantley.
I’m not sure if the Yankees ever even gave a thought to signing someone other than Gardner because in the first minutes of free agency, they brought him back on a one-year, $7.5 million deal, believing his career-low .690 OPS in 2018 wasn’t indicative of who he was at what’s now considered to be an advanced age in baseball.
Gardner was said to be the team’s “fourth outfielder” entering 2019, a position which might have gone to Clint Frazier if not for a lost season due to unfortunate injuries. As a reserve player with extra rest, the logic was that Gardner would be more productive than he had been in the career-worst 2017.
In 2019, Gardner went from being the supposed fourth outfielder to being an everyday player. The same thing happened in 2020 and again in 2021. Gardner played the third-most games on the team in 2019, the fifth-most in 2020 and the third-most in 2021.
On Monday, Gardner’s agent Joe Bick said Gardner intended to play in 2022 and prefers to play for the Yankees.
With Aaron Judge, Joey Gallo and (unfortunately) Aaron Hicks under contract, along with Giancarlo Stanton, who the Yankees are cautious to ever let play the outfield (despite his increased production when he does), Gardner would at best be the team’s fifth outfielder. But fifth is still too high on the depth chart. As long as Gardner is on the roster, he will find his way into the lineup with regularity. Injuries will make sure of it.
Before Opening Day in 2019, Gardner went from fourth outfielder to starting center fielder as Hicks started the season on the injured list (after injuring his back on a 35-minute bus ride in spring training) and Stanton joined Hicks on the IL before April 1. On April 20, Aaron Judge joined them both. In what was supposed to be a season in which Gardner would transition from an everyday player to a role player, he played in 141 games.
In 2020, Gardner was back again as the fourth outfielder. Prior to the pandemic ruining and shortening the season, Hicks was set to miss half the season recovering from Tommy John surgery, Judge was going to miss about half the season after the Yankees were unable to diagnose his fractured rib and punctured lung and Stanton was also going to miss half the season with a calf injury. If the 2020 season started on time, some combination of Gardner, Clint Frazier, Mike Tauchman and Miguel Andujar was going to be the everyday outfield.
Spring training in 2021 started without Gardner, but a week into it, he was re-signed. Despite Aaron Boone opening spring training by saying Frazier was now the team’s starting left fielder, in the third game of the season Gardner was starting in left field and would go on to play 140 games during the regular season with only Judge and DJ LeMahieu playing more.
In 2019, the Yankees needed nine outfielders to get through the season. In only 60 games in 2020, they needed seven. In 2021, they used Gardner, Judge, Stanton, Gallo and Hicks, along with Frazier, Tauchman, Andujar, Tyler Wade, Greg Allen, Estevan Florial, Ryan LaMarre, Tim Locastro, Jonathan Davis, Trey Amburgey and Hoy Park.
Last season, the Yankees got a miraculous 287 combined games played from Judge (148) and Stanton (139), and if you’re counting on that type of health in 2022, well, there was a guy in New York who recently won the lottery for the second time in three years. Hicks has missed 251 of the Yankees’ last 401 regular-season and postseason games. He’s now 32 and the most games he has played in a season was 137 back in 2018, which was a hamstring injury, significant back injury and a surgically-repaired elbow and wrist ago. Thankfully, Gallo has been exceptionally healthy in his career.
Gardner can’t be even the Yankees’ fifth outfielder in 2022 because he can never just be a bench option used a couple of days a week. No fourth or fifth outfielder on the Yankees ever remains that.
But if injuries aren’t the reason Gardner becomes an everyday player for the Yankees again in 2022, his manager will be.
Under Boone, Gardner lost his job to Andrew McCutchen after the 2018 trade deadline. Gardner wasn’t in the lineup for the 2018 wild-card game against the A’s and wasn’t in the lineup for Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS against the Red Sox. But when Hicks went down with a hamstring injury in that Game 1, Gardner came off the bench to play the rest of that game, as well as Games 2 and 3. When Hicks was healthy enough to play in Game 4 with the Yankees facing elimination, Boone benched McCutchen in favor of Gardner.
In 2019, Gardner was supposed to be the team’s fourth outfielder for the second consecutive year. But in a season that became about replacement players and “the next man up,” Gardner found himself playing in 87 percent of the team’s games, batting in the Top 4 spots in the lineup 46 times in 141 games, and when the postseason started, Boone penciled him in as the team’s 3-hitter. He would bat third in all three games in the ALDS, and then again in the pivotal Game 3 of the ALCS against Gerrit Cole, in which his first-inning at-bat swung the game (and the series) in the eventual Yankees loss.
Gardner was awful for six of the eight weeks of the 2020 regular season, but the two weeks he was productive happened to come at the end of September and right before the expanded postseason. So when it came time to fill out the lineup card for Game 1 of the postseason, Gardner’s name was on it and Frazier’s wasn’t after Frazier carried the Yankees’ offense along with LeMahieu and Luke Voit through two forgettable months.
Spring training in 2021 started without Gardner, but a week into it, he was re-signed. Despite Aaron Boone opening spring training by saying Frazier was now the team’s starting left fielder, in the third game of the season Gardner was starting in left field and would go on to play 140 games during the regular season with only Judge and DJ LeMahieu playing more.
Boone loves his veterans and he loves Gardner. When the going gets tough, Boone goes to Gardner. When the Yankees’ backs are against the wall and their season is on the line facing elimination, Boone has gone with Gardner every time and every time the Yankees have been eliminated. Boone will continue to go with Gardner every time. He’s one of his guys, and being one of Boone’s guys is in no way tied to ability or performance.
As long as Gardner is a Yankee, he will play, and he will play nearly every day. If injuries don’t force him into the lineup, Boone will. It’s time to move on. It’s been time to move on.
Aaron Boone uttered the words that should make every Yankees fan question whether or not they want to invest more of their time into this team.
Way back in mid-October, the Yankees decided the status quo of being knocked out of the postseason as early as possible was something they wanted to continue to do as an organization and so they gave Aaron Boone a new contract. A month after that, Boone went on CC Sabathia’s podcast to speak about the 2021 season. Aside from saying the obvious, “As you might imagine, I don’t look at my mentions on my Twitter,” Boone said a lot on the podcast.
Last week, I broke down Boone’s statements of “I make the lineup” and “We’re gonna need a shortstop.” Today, I want to look at Boone uttering the words that should make every Yankees fan question whether or not they want to invest more of their time into this team.
“Do we look largely similar to what we’ve looked like last year?”
That was a real thought the manager of the Yankees had and he had the audacity to actually say in a public forum. That’s not an original or personal thought either. Boone said exactly what the organization is likely considering and has most certainly talked about internally.
It doesn’t matter that Boone followed that question by asking, “Or is there a blockbuster trade or signing that all of a sudden moves this guy out, trades this guy and then that starts affecting everything else?” All that matters is his admission that the 2022 Yankees looking like the 2021 Yankees is a possibility being discussed within Yankee Stadium this offseason.
It’s not a thought any person associated with the Yankees should have. How could any Yankees employee, whether you’re signing checks, making deals, filling out the lineup card, batting third, watering the infield or cold calling prospective ticket buyers think having a nearly identical roster to 2021, which was nearly identical to 2020, which was nearly identical to 2019, and which was nearly identical to 2018 should be an option for 2022?
The 2021 Yankees were the heavy the odds-on favorite to win the American League, and they finished third in their division and fifth in the AL with their postseason lasting nine innings. The 2020 Yankees barely reached the postseason with an eight-team AL field, and were ousted in the ALDS. The 2019 Yankees lost to the Astros in six games after DJ LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres proved you can’t win a seven-game series with two productive postseason hitters. The 2018 Yankees were historically embarrassed and humiliated in four games against the Red Sox, suffering the worst home postseason loss in the history of the franchise.
Boone isn’t the first one to think the Yankees could or should look in 2022 like they did in 2021. Brett Gardner, the last remaining member of the 2009 World Series team and the only Yankee to have ever won anything (even if it was so long ago he likely doesn’t remember what it’s like to win), said nearly the same thing after the team’s wild-card loss to the Red Sox. Wearing his uniform for an extended period of time after what could be his final game as if he were Wayne Gretzky, Gardner used the phrase “run it back,” hoping the Yankees would return the same core and roster in 2022 that has never gotten the job done.
“Running it back” can’t be an option. It can’t be. “Running it back” means an everyday infield of Luke Voit, Gleyber Torres, DJ LeMahieu and Gio Urshela. It means trusting Aaron Hicks to play the first full season of his career at age 32, and knowingly going into another year with Gardner eventually getting everyday at-bats. It means more nonsensical and unnecessary drama on who the starting catcher should be and treating each individual Gary Sanchez at-bat like an audition for his job. It means not having enough starting pitching yet again and it means relying on your bullpen to protect a one-run lead nearly every night.
The Yankees aren’t getting to the World Series and losing because they’re short a starter or adding a big bat to the current roster away from getting over “the hump” Boone likes to refer to. They’re not one player away. They’re a-lot-of-the-roster away. No matter what Boone idiotically says about “how the league has closed the gap on the Yankees” or how “the margin is slim” within the AL, there has always been a gap for his Yankees and the margin isn’t slim.
The problem is while it shouldn’t be an option or a thought, “running it back” is most likely what the Yankees will do. There’s only so much that can change on the roster due to contracts and value, and the easiest route to a 26-man roster in 2022 is staying relatively the same as it was in 2021.
The status quo is the easiest and cheapest route for the Yankees to take and for a team that had the same payroll in 2022 as it did 17 years prior despite exponential growth in their revenue streams, theres’ nothing Hal Steinbrenner likes more than his Yankees looking largely similar to what they looked like the year before.
There’s no Yankees baseball because there’s no baseball right now. The lockout is now more than 10 weeks old and there’s no end in sight or optimism that the season will begin on time. But
There’s no Yankees baseball because there’s no baseball right now. The lockout is now more than 10 weeks old and there’s no end in sight or optimism that the season will begin on time. But there’s going to be baseball at some point (I think), and when there is, the Yankees have a lot of work to do to their roster.
Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes joined me to talk about the offseason and lockout, what the Yankees’ plan should be once there is baseball again and who should play shortstop in 2022.