Former Yankee and three-time World Series champion Shane Spencer talks about September 1998 and Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes talks about which starting pitcher the Yankees should trade for.
Andrew Rotondi of Bronx Pinstripes joined me to talk about the Yankees clinching the division before the All-Star break, what the Yankees’ postseason rotation would be right now, which starting pitcher the Yankees should trade for this month, grading Aaron Boone’s first half, why Clint Frazier is still in the minors and being realists as Yankees fans.
At the 50:16 mark, former Yankee and three-time World Series champion Shane Spencer joined me to talk about growing up a Padres fan in San Diego and getting drafted by the Yankees, his memorable September 1998, his approach at the plate, winning the World Series against his hometown Padres, the 2001 World Series, his success against Curt Schilling, the breakdown of the Flip Play, his relationship with Paul O’Neill, coming up through the minors with the Core Four and how the team changed in 2002.
The Yankees need to stop playing the long game which cost them the last two seasons and focus on the season at hand. Madison Bumgarner is the best option, and his price tag shouldn’t detract the Yankees.
The last time Madison Bumgarner made a full season worth of starts was three years ago in 2016. That season, he threw 226 2/3 innings and led the league with 912 batters faced before pitching a complete-game shutout of the Mets in the National League Wild-Card Game. After adding to his historic postseason resume, the eventual champion Cubs beat him up for three runs and eight baserunners over five innings in the NLDS.
“Three years ago” is a long time in baseball. When you think about the Yankees, three years ago today, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira were still on the team, the Yankees had given opportunities for playing time to Dustin Ackley and Ike Davis, Michael Pineda, Nathan Eovaldi and Ivan Nova were in the rotation and Gary Sanchez and Aaron Judge had yet to be called up for good. A lot changes over the course of three calendar years in baseball.
Bumgarner is no longer the pitcher he once was, and the pitcher who made four straight All-Star Games from 2013-16, making 31-plus starts per season, pitching to a 2.86 ERA, striking out 9.4 batters and allowing 7.3 hits per nine innings. He’s still good, even very good, and at times dominant, though it’s not a given every time he takes the mound the way it was. But 1,750 career regular-season innings and 102 1/3 career postseason innings will do that to an arm, especially one that reaches the majors at the age of 19.
I believe Bumgarner is better than he’s pitched on the awful, crappy, losing Giants teams he’s been a part of since 2017. Since 2017, the Giants have lost 98 games, 89 games and are on pace to lose 87 games this season. Progress! They are buried in the NL East where they are 17 1/2 games back, and while they are only 5 1/2 games back of the second wild card in the NL, there are seven teams ahead of them and the only teams behind them are the Mets and Marlins. The Giants aren’t going anywhere this season, and in a division with the Dodgers, competitive Diamondbacks and Rockies, and on-the-rise Padres, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Bumgarner is an impending free agent and has been the face of the Giants and a member of three championship teams. If I were a Giants fan, I wouldn’t want the team to trade him, and because of what he’s meant to the organization, he belongs in a Giants uniform for his entire career. But I’m not a Giants fan. I’m a Yankees fan. And I don’t care what Bumgarner has done for the Giants and it won’t bother me if he loses the only uniform he has ever known for the pinstripes.
I don’t care about money owed or years of control remaining. The Yankees haven’t won the World Series in going on 10 years and haven’t even been to it in that amount of time either. They have had several opportunities since their last championship to return to the World Series, and each time they failed to make the move to put them over the top.
The Yankees held on to Eduardo Nunez when they could have had Cliff Lee in 2010, only to release Nunez at the end of spring training four seasons later, and Lee proved to be the difference in the ALCS, shutting the Yankees down in Game 3. In 2017, they chose not to take on Justin Verlander’s contract in a straight salary dump from the Tigers and he went to Houston and beat the Yankees in Games 2 and 6 of the ALCS, single-handedly winning the series for the Astros. In 2018, a year after coming within one win of the World Series, the organization cut payroll by $50 million, only to then not go on the expected free-agent spending spree everyone had been anticipating they would for at least three years.
Nothing is guaranteed in this game. No one thought the Yankees would be without Luis Severino and Dellin Betances all season, lose Miguel Andujar for the year, get only nine games from Giancarlo Stanton in the first half, have Aaron Hicks miss the first two months, lose Aaron Judge for two months, be without Didi Gregorius for the first third of the season, and watch Gary Sanchez, Luke Voit, James Paxton, CC Sabathia, Domingo German and Clint Frazier all spend time on the injured list at some point. No one thought the Yankees could compete with a replacement lineup for the first six weeks and with players like Mike Tauchman, Mike Ford, Cameron Maybin and Kendrys Morales getting regular at-bats. Somehow, the Yankees have overcome every bit of adversity they have been faced with, including poor lineup and in-game decisions from their own manager (come on, I had to throw that in there), and have built a comfortable lead in the division, one in which it would take a catastrophic collapse to blow. But that doesn’t mean the Yankees would have the same season next season if this many injuries cropped up and it doesn’t mean they will have the same season next season if not a single player landed on the injured list all year. This level of success can’t be counted on from season to season.
The Yankees could win the World Series with their current roster the same way they could have won the World Series with their rosters in 2017 and 2018. But they didn’t in those seasons, and right now, there’s nothing separating them from the rest of the contenders. Unless Severino returns this season and is his usual self, there’s no potential postseason series in which the Yankees will have the better starting pitching. And if Severino doesn’t return, who’s going to start in the postseason? Sure, I trust Masahiro Tanaka more than anyone in October, but James Paxton in his first postseason after what’s been a disappointing first half? J.A. Happ after what he’s done since Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS? Domingo German, who will probably be shut down way before the playoffs because of his innings limit? CC Sabathia on the last legs of his 19-year career? An opener? No, no, no, no and no.
The Yankees need a starting pitcher and they’re going to add one, but it needs to be Bumgarner. Marcus Stroman is hurt, Zack Wheeler has impressive metrics but his actual performance has been anything but, and the idea of having to trust Matt Boyd in a short series doesn’t sit well with me. That leaves us with Bumgarner, the only one of the group who has actually has a resume worth trading for.
I realize the Yankees aren’t getting the unhittable World Series hero, who helped the Giants to three championships in five seasons. That’s not to say he won’t see a bump in production and some sort of career rejuvenation with the Yankees, pitching for a first-place team down the stretch and in October. There’s no way to measure how playing for a losing and last-place team for three straight years after having World Series aspirations for the previous seven impacts performance, but it must. It certainly did for Verlander. There’s no sure-thing in the trade market this season, unless Brian Cashman is able to pull off a deal for a pitcher whose name has yet to be mentioned by anyone.
I worry about this Yankees core and this current championship window frequently, fearful that 2017 might have been their best chance to win it all with this group, and they didn’t because they let the Astros take on Verlander’s salary. I pray my worrying is nothing more than me worrying about the Yankees like I always do and that one day I will look back and laugh at how ridiculous I was for thinking a championship might evade this group.
The Yankees need to stop playing the long game which cost them the last two seasons and focus on the season at hand, one in which they are the best team in baseball. Given the available names out there, Bumgarner is the best and most experienced option, and his price tag shouldn’t detract the Yankees.
Over the last decade, the Yankees have cost themselves trips to the World Series and potential championships by overvaluing their prospects and being unwilling to take on salary in July. They can’t do either this July or it could be a third straight missed opportunity at a championship and another year wasted with these Yankees.
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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is available!
Major League Baseball has its All-Star teams and I have my All-Animosity Team. This season’s roster features a new generation of players to dislike.
It’s been a while since I put out the All-Animosity Team and because of it, this year’s team is full of new names.
I’ll always remember the teams which featured David Wright, Josh Beckett, Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz, Adrian Gonzalez, Chone Figgins, Kevin Youkilis, Robert Andino, Carl Crawford, Manny Ramirez, Matt Wieters, Delmon Young, B.J. Upton (when he went by B.J.), Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Jose Bautista, Magglio Ordonez and many others. But I also like having a new generation of players to have animosity for.
The standards to be considered for the team are simple and only one of the following three requirements needs to be met:
1. The player crushes the Yankees.
2. The player plays for the Red Sox or Mets.
3. I don’t like the person. (When I say, “I don’t like the person” or if I say, “I hate someone” I mean I don’t like the person who wears a uniform and plays or manages for a Major League Baseball team and not the actual person away from the game. I’m sure some of the people on this list are nice people. I’m glad we got that out of the way since I can already see Player X’s fan base in an uproar about me hating someone who does so much for the community.)
Here is the 2019 All-Animosity Team.
C: Brian McCann After having Jorge Posada and Russell Martin for 14 years, sitting through a second straight season of Chris Stewart (.211/.293/.272), Austin Romine (.207/.255/.296) and John Ryan Murphy (.154/.185/.192) wasn’t going to happen again. Francisco Cervelli had been good for the Yankees in 2013 (.269/.377/.500), but once again, injuries ruined his season and he played in just 17 games. The Yankees couldn’t sit around and wait for the 27-year-old to prove he could stay healthy and be a starting catcher in the league, and I didn’t blame them. So the Yankees went out and gave Brian McCann a five-year, $85 million deal.
There wasn’t a Yankees fan who was against the signing of McCann, including me. Sure, the Yankees were essentially handing out a five-year, $85 million deal to a position they had the strongest organizational depth at, but after the catching woes of 2013, every Yankees fan wanted the All-Star as their catcher. I didn’t want to sit through another season of the team playing with no power and an automatic out at the position.
Unfortunately, McCann’s tenure with the Yankees didn’t go as planned. In three seasons, he averaged 23 home runs, but he also batted .235/.313/.418, becoming yet another Yankees left-handed hitter who couldn’t beat the shift. The emergence of Gary Sanchez in the final months of the 2016 season relegated McCann to the bench, and for as popular as the decision was to sign McCann, the decisions to bench him for Sanchez and trade him were even more popular. The Yankees traded McCann to the Astros after the season for a pair of minor-league pitchers. They also agreed to cover $5.5 million of his salary in 2017 and again in 2018, paying McCann $11 million to not play for them.
Sure enough, the Yankees faced McCann in the 2017 ALCS, paying him to play against them for a trip to the World Series. And sure enough, in Game 6, McCann delivered a huge RBI double against Luis Severino after going 0-for-10 with four strikeouts to begin the series.
1B: Steve Pearce Steve Pearce had one of the shortest and worst stints as a Yankee when he played for the team seven years ago. Once Pearce left the Yankees, he played for every other AL East team and shoved it right up the Yankees’ ass.
Pearce was an awful Yankee. Yes, his time with the Yankees was a very small sample size of 12 games and 30 plate appearances, but in those plate appearances, he hit .160/.300/.280 with one home run and four RBIs. That was back in 2012 when the Yankees were trying to win the division and avoid the first year of the wild-card format, so his at-bats were coming at a crucial time. Since then, Pearce has gone on to play for the Orioles, Rays, Blue Jays and Red Sox moving around the AL East and destroying the Yankees at every opportunity. Here is how he has done against the Yankees since they removed him from the team.
Aside from 2015, Pearce has essentially been David Ortiz 2.0 against the Yankees.
It didn’t surprise me at all when Pearce single-handedly put the Yankees away in the division race back in August and it was business as usual when he went 4-for-12 against the Yankees in the ALDS. It was just the icing on the cake when he hit three home runs and drove in eight in five games in the World Series en route to being named World Series MVP.
2B: Jose Altuve Jose Altuve is my favorite non-Yankees player and there aren’t many of those. But when he plays against the Yankees, he’s a .291 hitter and that’s enough to put him on this team.
Altuve went 8-for-25 (.320) with two home runs, four walks and a stolen base in the 2017 ALCS with all of his hits coming at home and both of his home runs coming in Games 6 and 7. In Games 3, 4 and 5 at Yankee Stadium, Altuve went 0-for-10 with three walks as the Astros couldn’t solve playing in New York, and if the two teams meet again in the 2019 ALCS, the Yankees are going to want to have home-field advantage.
It’s weird to have a player I actually like, enjoy watching and admire on this team. I thought about replacing him with someone else at second base and then I remembered his four home runs in the Astros’ three-game sweep of the Yankees in April and decided his production against the Yankees has been too much to leave him off.
3B: Rafael Devers The moment Rafael Devers hit that two-strike, opposite-field home run off Aroldis Chapman in 2017, I knew I had a problem. I also knew the All-Animosity Team had a third baseman for the next decade.
After his impressive 58-game rookie season, Devers looked lost last season batting .240/.298/.433 in 121 games and I got ahead of myself thinking the 21-year-old might be a bust. This season, he has a .923 OPS and is on pace for 30 home runs and 47 doubles.
I don’t get scared when Devers is at the plate the way I do when Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi or J.D. Martinez, but we’re getting there, and within two years, there’s a good chance he will be the scariest of them all.
SS: Eduardo Nunez I don’t know if I will ever hate a player more than Nunez. Well, it’s not so much him I hate because it’s not his fault he’s not very good, it’s Brian Cashman and the Yankees’ fault for thinking he was going to be the heir to Derek Jeter at shortstop. Instead, Nunez couldn’t play shortstop, couldn’t play any infield position really, and was eventually moved to the outfield before being let go by the Yankees for absolutely nothing. In 2014, the Yankees were willing to give Nunez’s job to Yangervis Solarte, who at the time had never played in the majors, rather than go through another season with Nunez.
It was Cashman’s awful evaluation of Nunez that cost the Yankees back-to-back World Series appearances and possibly back-to-back championships. Had Cashman been willing to part with Nunez, Cliff Lee would have been a Yankee. If Lee is a Yankee, he isn’t a Ranger and doesn’t beat the Yankees in Game 3 of the ALCS, and the Yankees don’t lose the pennant in six games. Cashman kept hanging on to the bad-ball hitter waiting for him to figure how to field a ground ball or show any semblance of discipline at the plate, and it never happened.
Sure enough, it was Nunez coming up like a Gold Glove winner in the ALDS, and sure enough, it was Nunez connecting with a ball at his laces to hit for a three-run home run in Game 1 of the World Series. As hard as it is to accept the Red Sox winning another World Series, it’s even harder to know Nunez was a part of it. “Eduardo Nunez is a champion” is something I never thought I would write.
LF: Trey Mancini Trey Mancini is the last actual major leaguer playing for the Orioles, and for some reason when the Yankees play the Orioles, they still let him beat them. Mancini is batting .271/.321/.521 with three home runs and six extra-base hits against the Yankees this season. The numbers aren’t at a Steve Pearce level, but they are built around timely hits in unfortunate situations.
I hope the Orioles finish the selloff they have been conducting since last season and send Mancini to the National League at the trade deadline. It will be one less bat to worry about in the division and will leave the Orioles with no bats to worry about for the foreseeable future.
CF: Kevin Kiemaier I was at my parents’ house over the holiday weekend, watching the Yankees-Rays series with my dad when Kevin Kiemaier came up. My dad commented how Kiemaier always plays well against the Yankees and I agreed by explaining how he sucks, yet he seems to always hit against them. On the very next pitch, Kiermaier hit a line-drive single with two strikes, winning the left-on-left matchup against CC Sabathia,
The thing about Kiermaier is that he isn’t good offensively. He’s a career .254/.311/.423 hitter who plays Gold Glove defense in center field. Against the Yankees, he’s even worse than his career numbers, batting .237/.289/.385, but for some reason there’s this perception he crushes the Yankees even if it couldn’t be less true. Maybe it’s because 14 percent of his 64 career home runs have come against the Yankees or maybe all those bloop singles of his have come in big moments. I know my dad and I aren’t alone in thinking this and we’re going to be thinking it through at least 2022 when his contract ends or 2023 if his team option is picked up.
RF: Randal Grichuk How did Randal Grichuk end up on this team full of All-Stars, award-winning players and ex-Yankees? Well, in six games this season, Grichuk is batting .400/.444/.800 with a double, three home runs and 5 RBIs against the Yankees. Add in the five home runs he hit against the Yankees in 16 games last season and you know why he’s on this team.
Grichuk is barely a major leaguer when he plays against the 28 other teams not named the Yankees and he’s a Hall of Famer against the Yankees. He essentially hits against the Yankees the way Ortiz, Evan Longoria, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Manny Machado used to.
DH: Pete Alonso Pete Alonso is good for baseball, but he’s also good for the Mets, and that’s why he’s on the team.
I’m upset Alonso is serving as a bright spot in another lost and disastrous Mets season, I’m disappointed Alonso beat Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in the Home Run Derby and I’m worried he might beat Aaron Judge’s rookie home run record of 52. With Michael Conforto turning out to be nothing special, I thought it might be a while until the Mets had a new face of the franchise from a position player standpoint and then Alonso had to come along and be one of the game’s elite power hitters. I have a feeling Alonso is going to be on this team for a long, long time.
SP: Justin Verlander I haven’t liked Justin Verlander since Game 2 of the 2006 ALDS. The Yankees’ decision to not trade for his enormous contract at the 2017 August deadline, letting him go to the Astros and single-handedly decide the ALCS, made me like him less (though it made me like the Yankees’ financial decisions even less).
It pains me that Verlander was finally able to get over the championship hump in 2017 after years of losing in the ALCS and World Series and it pains me even more that his championship came after he won both Games 2 and 6 of the ALCS against the Yankees. Unfortunately, Verlander’s championship can never be taken away from him, and the only thing that will make it hurt less is if the Yankees beat the outspoken right-hander in the ALCS en route to their own championship. The way things are going for both teams, the Yankees could have a chance to do that this season.
RP: Nathan Eovaldi Nathan Eovaldi isn’t a relief pitcher … yet. He’s supposedly going to pitch out of the bullpen when he returns to the Red Sox, and that’s enough to make him eligibile to be teh relief pitcher on this team.
Never trust a pitcher who throws triple-digit fastballs and can’t strike anyone out and that’s exactly what Eovaldi is. The Dodgers gave up on him and the Marlins gave up on him despite him being 24 years old with incredible velocity because he didn’t have an out pitch and he didn’t know where the ball was going. So the Yankees gave up Martin Prado and David Phelps because of the glamour of Eovaldi’s fastball, thinking they would be the ones who could fix him. They weren’t.
Eovaldi pitched to a 14-3 record in 2015, so every idiot who relies on wins and losses to determine a pitcher’s success thought he had a great season. It didn’t matter that he received 5.75 runs of support per game or that he routinely struggled to get through five innings and qualify for a win because he needs 20-plus pitches per inning. In 2016, it was more of the same. Eovaldi pitched to a 4.76 ERA over 21 starts and 24 games before being shut down for another Tommy John surgery, ending his time with the Yankees as they let him leave at the end of the season.
When Eovaldi returned to baseball last season and pitched well with the Rays, many Yankees fans started to think about a reunion, having not learned their lesson from the last time Eovaldi was a Yankee. When he was traded to the Red Sox, I laughed with excitement, envisioning him destroying the Red Sox’ chances at winning the division. Instead, he shut out the Yankees in the all-important August series (even if faced a JV lineup) and then shut them out against in September. I never thought he would be able to beat the Yankees in October in the Bronx, but he did, after getting more run support than any other pitcher against the Yankees in the team’s history.
Eovaldi beat the Yankees and the Astros in the playoffs, mixed in a few relief appearances and then became a hero for his bullpen work in Game 3 of the World Series, even though he took the loss after giving up a walk-off home run. (Only in Boston could a losing pitcher become a “hero”.) Now Eovaldi is a World Series champion and I’ll never get over it.
Manager: Dave Roberts If Dave Roberts is unsuccessful in his attempt to steal second base in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, the Yankees win that series and most likely the World Series, and who knows, maybe the Red Sox still haven’t won a championship since 1918. Without that steal, Roberts isn’t a household name in the baseball world and he most likely isn’t the manager of the Dodgers.
It was Roberts’s bullpen decisions in the 2018 World Series which led to another Red Sox championship as he continually gave the ball to Ryan Madson, forgetting it was 2019 and not 2009. The right-handed reliever somehow appeared in four of the five games in the series despite allowing all seven of his inherited runners to score. It was also Roberts who decided not to start Cody Bellinger in Games 1, 2 and 5 and Max Muncy in Games 1 and 2, choosing to not have arguably his best two hitters in the lineup for the entire game. Roberts is now responsible for two Red Sox championships.
I dream about the Yankees playing the Dodgers in the 2019 World Series and the Yankees handing Roberts his third straight World Series loss. But if the Yankees and Dodgers do play in the World Series, I won’t have to dream about the Yankees winning, Roberts’s managing will take care of it for me.
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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is available!
The first half of the season is over and the Yankees have already clinched the division. I forgot what it felt like to win the division so early in the season and it feels even better than I remember it feeling.
The first half of the season is over and the Yankees have already clinched the division. I forgot what it felt like to win the division so early in the season and it feels even better than I remember it feeling.
The Yankees are off until Friday when they will begin the second half. They have 74 games remaining and will play their next 38 games with only two off days in between. Thankfully, they won’t be chasing any team for the rest of the season.
Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees on this off day as usual.
1. The first “half” is over and the Yankees are 57-31. Last year, through 88 games, they were 58-30, so they are one game worse than they were last year. But because the Red Sox aren’t having the most improbable, fluky season in the history of baseball, the Yankees aren’t 2 1/2 games back in the division like they were in 2018. Instead, they have an eight-game lead over the Rays in the loss column and a 10-game lead over the Red Sox in the loss column.
Despite losing their last two games of the first half to the Rays, the Yankees did what I wanted them to do: win at least two games in Tampa. If the Yankees play .500 baseball against the Rays and Red Sox the rest of the way, they won’t lose any ground and will take a huge portion of games off the schedule.
However, it would be nice if the Yankees didn’t play like they have already won the division. Yes, I believe they already have, but that doesn’t mean they should be giving as many players days off as possible in the first week in July. This isn’t the last week of September. The lineup Sunday at the Trop was ridiculous. The Yankees had three days off surrounding the London trip and have four days off this week. Yet, they still gave their All-Star position players Sunday off because they will play a few innings on Tuesday. Sure enough, the Yankees lost by one run. The unnecessary rest will never end.
2. Masahiro Tanaka said he was surprised to be an All-Star and there can’t be a baseball fan who wasn’t surprised. Tanaka has a 3.86 ERA, 7.7 strikeouts per nine and 2.1 walks per nine. There’s nothing he’s doing that’s All-Star caliber, unless you count having one disastrous inning per start, which he’s been the best at. This is the second-worst season of Tanaka’s six-year career and somehow he’s an All-Star. I love that he’s part of the game, whether he pitches or not, because it means more Yankees are on the American League roster, I just have no idea how or why he was picked.
3. I had two friends text me on Saturday night when Aaron Hicks hit a game-tying home run in the ninth inning asking me if he would receive “Ladies and gentlemen” immunity for the home run. The answer was no. The immunity standards haven’t fallen like the All-Star selection standards have. With such a big lead in the division race, Hicks is going to have to do something in the postseason to be immunity-worthy and given his history against teams like the Astros, Indians, Red Sox and the postseason as a whole, it would be nice if he did anything in the postseason.
I don’t know what it’s going to take for Hicks to removed from the top or middle of the order, but I have no idea how for a second straight season he continues to bat ahead of better and more established bats. How is Gary Sanchez batting behind him and how is Gleyber Torres hitting four and five spots behind him? Like I said last week, everything between now and Game 162 is to get ready for the postseason or not, and even without Luke Voit and Giancarlo Stanton in the lineup, it’s time for Hicks to find a home at the bottom of the order because that’s what where he better be hitting come Game 1 of the ALDS.
4. What’s left to say about Luis Cessa that I haven’t already said in nearly every Off Day Dreaming blog this season? I don’t care that he’s the last man in the bullpen or the 25th man on the roster. His most recent appearance, on July 4, led to him nearly blowing a five-run lead in the 10th inning. All he had to do was get three outs before giving up five runs and he came dangerously close to not doing so after he allowed two hits and two walks in the inning. If Cessa can’t be trusted to get three outs before giving up five runs, there’s no place for him on this team, or any major league team for that matter. We are way past the time to give someone else a chance to be the last man in the bullpen, I’m just not sure if it will ever happen. Considering he has a 5.93 ERA since April 30, there might be nothing he can do to pitch himself off the roster and out of the organization.
5. Every time I watch Charlie Morton pitch, I can’t help but think that the Yankees could have and should have had signed him. The Rays gave Morton a two-year, $30 million deal. The Yankees gave J.A. Happ $4 million more and a vesting option for 2021. Morton is 10-2 with a 2.32 ERA and 142 strikeouts in 112 2/3 innings. Happ is lucky if he gets through five innings each start.
Morton is the kind of power pitch the Yankees always go after and with the way he pitched in Houston and pitched against the Yankees in Houston, his 35 years of age shouldn’t have mattered to the Yankees in free agency since Happ’s 36 years of age clearly didn’t.
Morton beat the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS and I have a bad feeling they could be seeing him in Game 1 of the 2019 ALDS, and then again in Game 5, if the series were to go that far.
6. Dallas Keuchel has now made four starts for the Braves after two mediocre starts, he’s pitched seven innings and and 7 1/3 innings in back-to-back starts, allowing two earned runs in both. The Yankees could have had him for only money and now they will instead have to further dismantle their farm system to acquire starting pitching this month.
7. We are just under three weeks until the trade deadline and I have been under the impression all along the Yankees will trade for either Marcus Stroman or Madison Bumgarner. The Blue Jays showed last year at the deadline they could care less about trading with the Yankees and within the division with the Happ deal, so I don’t see there being an issue with Stroman, except that he’s currently injured. Prior to the injury, I thought Stroman was the unanimous choice for the Yankees to land, but now it seems and feels like Bumgarner. If both were healthy, I would prefer Bumgarner, not because I think he’s still the same pitcher he was five years ago like some do, but because I think a postseason run with the Yankees could revitalize his career the same way it did for Justin Verlander in 2017. Bumgarner hasn’t pitched in a postseason game since 2016, is on a last-place team this season, was on a 73-win team last season and a 64-win team in 2017. It’s impossible to know if that’s contributed to his career downswing after four straight All-Star Game appearance from 2013-16, but how could it not? Reaching the majors at 19, throwing 1,750 regular-season innings and another 102 1/3 postseason innings is what’s mainly responsible for diminished numbers, as it would be with any pitcher, though pitching in meaningless games for three straight seasons has to be part of it as well.
The Yankees won’t be getting 2016 Stroman or 2016 Bumgarner if they trade for them, but both 2019 versions are still better than most of the starting options they have now.
8. I did some math and the least amount of games the Yankees will win this season is 96, and that’s a very low number. The Yankees would have to go 39-35 in the second half to win 96 games, and that’s with a lot of games remaining against the Orioles and Blue Jays.
If the Yankees were to win 96 games and play only .527 baseball for the rest of the season, the Rays would have to go 44-27 and the Red Sox would have to go 47-25 just to tie them. So despite everyone getting upset with me last week for calling the division over after the London games, the division is over.
9. Aside from the Yankees’ already big division lead and their rather easy August schedule, the 10 games remaining between the Rays and Red Sox might be the Yankees’ greatest advantage to winning the AL East. At the same time the Rays and Red Sox play a four-game series at the end of September, the Yankees will be playing the Blue Jays, who are on pace to lose more than 100 games and will be a week away from the offseason and vacation.
10. My expected record for the Yankees for July is 13-12, and they are off to a 3-3 start, so they are right on pace. Again, that might not seem like a good record given the way the team has played through the first 88 games, but August is when they can get fat again with 13 games against the Orioles, Blue Jays and Mariners.
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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is available!
Zack Britton is going to receive special treatment for his name and he’s going to pitch in high-leverage spots three months from now when the Yankees can’t afford to have him walking the park and failing to miss bats.
The Yankees are going to win the AL East. Actually, they already have. They are going to the playoffs and that means everything between now and the last game of the regular season is to get ready for the postseason.
I have two legitimate fears when it comes to the 2019 Yankees and their chances at winning the World Series this October. The first is the lineup will get shutdown against elite pitching in a short series, the way they were last season and the way they were in Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 of the ALCS the year before. The second is Aaron Boone will ruin and destroy the season the same way he did in Games 3 and 4 of the ALDS last season.
We know Boone has little to no actual power as manager of the Yankees. He’s essentially the Queen of England, a figurehead for the organization, who acts as if he’s important when talking with the media. There’s no way Boone truly owns the lineup card, there’s no way the front office and analytics team lets him decide where batters hit in the order and when players get a scheduled day off and I highly doubt he has any real input on who’s on the 25-man roster each day. But the bullpen is a completely different story.
Most likely, Boone has a guide or map on how to manage his bullpen, provided to him by the analytics team. Bring Reliever A into Situation B, and if Situation X happens, bring in Reliever Y. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in the Yankees dugout, Boone has a card similar to a multiplication table or a blackjack cheat sheet to help him navigate his own bullpen. The issue here is that once the game starts, Boone is free to do whatever he wants. Sure, he might hear about it later from Brian Cashman, but in the actual moment, he has all the power and can easily disregard the guide or cheat sheet and determine which reliever to bring in and when.
I believe this is what happened in Game 3 of the 2018 ALDS when Boone let Luis Severino go out for the fourth inning when every ball in play to that point had been a hard line drive and Severino clearly didn’t have it. Boone let Severino load the bases in the fourth with no outs before finally removing him, and needing a strikeout more than ever, Boone brought in Lance Lynn, the last man on the postseason roster. The Red Sox immediately immediately cleared the bases and put the game out of reach.
I believe this is what happened in Game 4 of the 2018 ALDS when Boone let CC Sabathia go through the Red Sox’ order a second time, later using the excuse he liked the matchup of Sabathia vs. Jackie Bradley, the Red Sox’ 9-hitter. Boone liked the matchup so much, he let Sabathia lose the game by going through the first eight hitters in the lineup.
Boone is in over his head as an actual in-game manager. We know this because he’s proven it for 250 games as manager of the Yankees. Cashman stood by Boone’s side after the season, giving his manager “A’s across the board” when asked about his his first season. Boone had been Cashman’s choice and there was no way he was going to turn on Boone after he had recently appointed him as manager to lead a team in a championship window. There’s no way Cashman thought Boone’s bullpen decisions in Game 3 and 4 of the ALDS were the right moves that just didn’t happen to work out.
If you think Boone has learned from his mistakes in the 2018 regular season and 2018 postseason, you haven’t watched him this season. The Yankees aren’t in first place because he suddenly figured out how to manage. They’re in first place because DJ LeMahieu is the AL MVP, Gary Sanchez has returned to his pre-2018 self, Luke Voit is a combination of power and discipline, Gleyber Torres is on his way to superstardom, the bullpen has been mostly good, the Replacement Yankees got timely hits and the Yankees have taken care of business by beating up on the bad teams in the league, which there are a lot of once again. Boone isn’t responsible for any of those things. He doesn’t have some magic touch to give LeMahieu a hit nearly every time he’s up and he didn’t fix Sanchez at the plate. He didn’t find the diamond in the rough that is Voit and didn’t instill the amazing baseball talent in Torres the middle infielder has had his whole life. He didn’t make the elite relievers elite since they all came from other organizations and were already elite. He didn’t tell most of the teams in Major League Baseball to cut payroll and not be competitive. The only thing Boone could be given credit for is keeping the clubhouse and plane rides and road trips loose and fun, and there’s no way of knowing if he’s done that, and even if he has, there’s no way of measuring it.
The only thing we can measure when it comes to Boone is his in-game bullpen decisions, when he clearly tosses aside his cheat sheet and starts managing on his own. He has made the same egregious mistakes over and over, failing to follow his guide. I say he’s failing to follow it since there’s no way anyone with an Ivy league degree who’s part of the Yankees analytics team suggests or recommends the moves Boone makes with his bullpen or agrees with them.
At times, it’s hard to get on Boone for his bullpen decisions. When you build a super bullpen like the Yankees have, fans are more inclined to blame the reliever than the manager for a poor result. When you have so many big-name relievers on one team, nearly every pitcher Boone brings in is on the Yankees because of an elite resume, established with another organization. No one more than Zack Britton.
The Yankees were able to acquire Britton from the Orioles at a discounted rate last season since the left-handed closer was still on his way back from an Achilles injury, was nowhere near the pitcher he had once been, was an impending free agent and wasn’t going to re-sign with the Orioles. His walks were up and his strikeouts were down, but the Yankees felt the more removed from his Achilles injury he was, the better he would be.
Britton pitched in 25 games for the 2018 Yankees and rarely ever pitched like you would expect Zack Britton to pitch like. If his name had been anything else, he would have been viewed as a good to very good reliever, not someone who at times was the most dominant reliever in the world. Britton was good but not great in the 25 regular-season games, and no Yankees fan trusted him to put up a zero or get out of a game-threatening jam. So it came as no surprise when he gave up an opposite-field solo home run to the light-hitting Christian Vazquez in Game 4 of the ALDS, which would be the difference in the 2018 Yankees’ elimination.
The Yankees decided to bring Britton back for 2019 and 2020 and 2021 with a three-year deal, and after a four-appearance scoreless streak against the lowly Orioles and Tigers to open the season, Britton has been a disaster ever since.
The first-pitch, go-ahead double in the eighth inning allowed by Britton to Michael Conforto on Tuesday night wasn’t a shock, it was expected. There was a time when Britton would have gotten out of the inning without a problem, especially facing a left-handed batter, but that was a long, long time ago.
I wrote this on Monday and it took one appearance for Britton to come through on it:
Don’t let Britton’s 2.55 ERA fool you. He has walked 20 and struck out 26 in 35 1/3 innings this season. Since May 20, he has walked 12 and struck out four in 15 innings. I don’t know what’s worse, the four strikeouts or the 12 walks. But I do know a pitcher with those kind of numbers can’t be trusted to pitch the eighth inning in close games and can’t be viewed as an elite option. It’s only a matter of time until Britton’s high walk rate and low strikeout rate translate into earned runs. He can’t pitch like this and escape damage forever and he better figure it out before it gets to that point.
Britton has now appeared in 38 games for the Yankees this season and has failed to record a strikeout in 16 of them, which seems impossible given his stuff and history. But since May 31, Britton has faced 50 batters and struck out two of them. To make matters worse, he’s walked 11 of those 50 and this season he has only struck out 26 and walked 20 in 36 innings. I was more worried about him walking in a run when facing Conforto on Tuesday night due to his command and control issues, and likely fearing the same thing, he grooved a middle-middle pitch to Conforto to lose the game. No, Britton didn’t put the runners on base, Adam Ottavino did, Britton hasn’t been good with clean starts to innings, let alone with runners on base as 40 percent of his inherited runners this season have scored.
Britton is going to receive special treatment for his name and not his performance and he’s going to pitch in the eighth inning or other high-leverage spots three months from now when the Yankees can’t afford to have him walking the park and failing to miss bats. If Dellin Betances doesn’t pitch this season, Boone is going to keep giving the ball to Britton in crucial spots because of his career resume, not his season resume.
Yes, the Yankees have a seven-game loss column lead over the Rays and an 11-game loss column lead over the Red Sox, but this isn’t a problem which can simply be shrugged aside by saying, “The Yankees are in first place, stop complaining.” The Yankees aren’t in first place because of Britton, and the goal of the season isn’t to be satisfied with finishing in first place or winning 100-plus games. The goal is to win the World Series, something the Yankees haven’t done in going on a decade.
Everything the Yankees do between now and the end of the regular season is to prepare to win 11 games in October and that includes getting Britton right. He will never be the pitcher he was four and five years ago, but there’s no reason he should be this bad either. Britton has 79 games to figure it out because Boone is going to use him in the postseason whether he deserves to pitch or not, and once Britton’s in the game, it’s on him to perform, whether he’s been put in the best position to succeed or not.
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