The YES Network gave out a fascinating stat during yesterday’s broadcast. Coming into yesterday’s game with the Rays, the New York Yankees had a record of 1-32 this season when they allow five or more runs. True to form, the Yanks promptly lost 6-3 and dropped below .500 to 41-42. They have lost their last five games and nine of their last eleven, and sport a run differential (runs scored minus runs allowed) of -37.
The main culprit in the struggle of the Bronx Bombers has been because, well, they haven’t been the Bombers at the plate. The Yankees as a group are hitting .251/.316/.381 as a group, with a 92 wRC+ (100 is league average). The biggest problem is that their two biggest offensive offseason acquisitions, Carlos Beltran and Brian McCann, have been simply atrocious. Beltran has missed time after tumbling over a wall at Tropicana Field and nursing bone spurs in his elbow. Before the injuries reared their ugly heads, Beltran had been struggling. Apparently trying to play through bone spurs in your elbow is a bad idea, who knew?
McCann unfortunately (fortunately?) doesn’t have that kind of crutch to fall back on. He’s just been underperforming, plain and simple. In nearly 300 plate appearances, McCann has posted a .224/.285/.373 line. Yikes. Part of that can be chalked up to the ever-increasing usage of defensive shifts, which McCann has seen pretty much every time he’s come up to bat. As the below spray chart from BrooksBaseball shows, McCann is highly susceptible to pulling grounders to the first base side of the infield. The shift gobbles those up, and if you were an opposing manager why wouldn’t you shift on McCann? As a curious side note, McCann’s ground ball percentage is actually down from his career rate. What is up his infield fly ball percentage. A 9.8% clip in 2013 has turned into an ugly 13.7%, which is going right into the shift. McCann is also walking three points below his career average. This points to a lot of hacking at bad pitches and producing weak contact. All of that leads to an awful 80 wRC+.
(via BrooksBaseball)
2013 holdover Alfonso Soriano is also absent at the dish. Soriano is sitting at .225/.248/.374 (an abysmal 64 wRC+) after lighting the world on fire in the second half of last season upon his trade to New York. Soriano’s problem is relatively simple, in that he’s striking out nearly 30% of the time while only walking 2.6% of the time. That will put anyone in trouble. But it gets worse. Soriano is only hitting .209 off of right-handers, and a barely serviceable .250 off lefties. That’s about as bad a platoon bat as exists in the majors. With runners in scoring position he actually gets worse, with a .185 batting average. He’s also a total disaster in the field with -6 defensive runs saved to his name, and a -4.1 UZR.
Those are only the three main culprits. Kelly Johnson, Yangervis Solarte (despite a scorching start), Francisco Cervelli (in limited time) and Brian Roberts all have been utter failures on offense. Derek Jeter and Ichiro Suzuki have failed to be more than glorified singles hitters, with Jeter losing 20 points off his batting average when men are on base (he hits second behind OBP machine Brett Gardner).
Indeed, Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury and Mark Teixeira have been the only trustworthy hitters that the Yankees have sent out all season. Ellsbury and Teixeira are being their normal selves, but Gardner is quietly having the best season of his life. Batting leadoff and sitting on a .288/.359/.434 line (121 wRC+), he’s hit eight homers. That matches his total for all of last year. He also regularly forces pitchers to throw a mountain of pitches to him by fouling off pitch after pitch. This not only displays the pitcher’s repertoire to the bench, but also wears out the pitcher both mentally and physically. His value to the team is immense and it’s troubling to think where the Yankees would be without both his bat and outstanding glove work.
The question the Yankees have to face themselves with is a philosophical one. Do they plod on with this lineup and reinforce the pitching rotation, which has been wracked with unfortunate injuries? Do they bolster the offense and pray C.C. Sabathia can return to ace form when he returns from the Disabled List? Or do they resign themselves to a lost season and trade off pieces to bolster the farm system (one that just got a massive shot in the arm with a surplus of international prospect spending)? Do they fire hitting coach Kevin Long?
Calls for Long’s head have surfaced recently, and they’re not entirely without reason. Long’s philosophy seems to have been one of power and lots of it. The classic example of his tutelage would be Curtis Granderson. Upon his arrival in the Bronx, Granderson morphed into an all-or-nothing type of hitter and saw both his strikeouts and home run total shoot through the roof. While that’s a very tempting prospect for lefty hitters who play half their games listening to the call of the short porch in right field at Yankee Stadium, is it a truly productive way to hit? By shooting his OBP in the foot for the sake of home runs, Granderson forsook his excellent baserunning and stolen base potential.
It’s possible the Kevin Long effect is now sinking its fangs into Brian McCann. All the hubbub upon McCann’s signing in the offseason was about his 30-homer potential because of the short porch. Did Long exacerbate those expectations with McCann? I’m not in the Yankee clubhouse, so I can’t say for sure. But it wouldn’t be the most surprising thing in the world.
It’s also not surprising to see that Beltran came back to play through the bone spurs rather than take a two-month furlough and get surgery to repair the issue. Nobody on the outside knows whether that was his decision or the team’s. But would anyone be surprised if it was encouraged by Yankee brass? After spending so much money on players like Beltran, McCann, Ellsbury and Masahiro Tanaka, there’s an expectation of a World Series win in the New York fan base (and more importantly, the New York media). There’s also the matter of making that money back. The Yankees are the Yankees, and will never have to worry about not turning a profit. Yet more and more, with every bad at-bat Beltran has, it’s becoming more and more apparent that the New York front office cares more about the names on the back of t-shirts and jerseys than the product on the field. If the Yankees are serious about making a run at the division title, Beltran should have been carted off for surgery on his elbow a long time ago.
Clearly, the “play through the pain” experiment has been a dismal failure. Brian Cashman seems to be waiting for some magical wave of a wand that will fix his offensive core’s problems, and it just simply isn’t going to happen by itself. Could McCann actually make adjustments at the plate to not be so pull-happy? Sure. But Soriano has clearly gone over the hill, and bone spurs don’t get wished away. The team has too many holes and too few good prospects to fix everything with trade deadline maneuvering, so Cashman has to focus on rebuilding offense from within while fixing pitching externally.
The pieces to partially alleviate the Yankee offense may exist in-system already. The first step may have already happened, as rumors are circulating Zelous Wheeler got the call late last night. A career minor-leaguer, Wheeler has torn up Triple-A pitching and plays roughly the same defensive positions as the beleaguered Solarte. Also stashed at Triple-A are Jose Pirela, an All-Star this year, and the rapidly ascending Rob Refsnyder. Those two may be vast improvements over Soriano and Roberts, respectively. Yet those three cannot do all the work themselves, and the odds of all three hitting effectively at the Major League level are slim. Beltran has to be healed, McCann needs to wake himself up and realize that pulling the ball every time won’t work in 2014.
Until that happens, the Yankees may as well pack it in right now. Even in a terrible Al East, the Yanks are going nowhere fast with the current group of batters. Recently asked by a reporter about how he plans to switch up the struggling offense, Girardi responded by telling the reporter there really isn’t anyone on the roster to switch it up with. It’s a sad truth that the Yankees have taken far too long to notice and respond to. This is the latest in the season the Bombers have been under .500 since 2007. That team finished with more than 90 wins, but that team also had strong hitters like the MVP-winning Alex Rodriguez. It’s hard to see this team having that kind of turnaround anytime soon.
For more on sports injuries, check out our friends at Sports Injury Alert.
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