It has now been two years since the New York Yankees have made the playoffs. When you really think about it they haven’t been a real significant player in MLB since they last won the World Series in 2007. Their once mighty specter of invincibility is gone. The games they pull losses out of the fire and turn them into wins are gone. The games when getting those last three outs seemed to be an impossible feat are no more.
Their legendary “Core Four” are all retired. The general for so many years, “The Boss” George Steinbrenner, is no longer with us. Is it time to break down this team and rebuild it? More importantly can it even be done? Will the legions of old and new Yankee fans accept this, even if it is long overdue?
Just look at the current roster coupled with the payroll and the myriad of problems they are facing. Despite what they say or how they rank their own minor league players, no other ranking group is high on the Yankees top prospects. The roster is old and has little to no flexibility. Several key players are breaking down, and the pariah known as Alex Rodriguez is returning from a one year suspension.
Mark Teixeira was on track to be, at worst, a border line hall of fame player. He was a 30-plus home run and a well over 100 RBI player from his second full season in the major leagues right up until his ninth season. That is when the injuries started to set in and now he is just another player. His A-plus defensive skills are still on display but offensively he is just not the same player. Injuries have derailed this very promising career. Can he stay healthy this year?
Robinson Cano was allowed to leave via free agency after the 2013 season. He is nearly impossible to replace. The fact that the Yankees let him go is puzzling. Following that decision the Yankees spent a lot of money to replace those numbers which hasn’t worked out yet. Not having even a decent replacement for Cano crippled the team’s offense last season. Stephen Drew, who is a career short stop, is now the favorite to start this season at second base. There isn’t another second basemen in baseball who can produce like Cano does offensively. Drew is not the answer. Even his best years are not on the level of Cano. The Yankees really need a career year out of the soon to be 32-year-old Drew. It used to be the norm for the Yankees that they can plug any offensive player into their lineup and they would produce more than what their career numbers dictate, but those days are over.
Derek Jeter has retired. Replacing the captain was never going to be easy, despite the limitations he had the last few years of his career. Brendan Ryan is a great defensive short stop, but he can’t hit. Yankee fans will tell you that Didi Gregorius is an emerging player. The short right field porch is going to add 5-10 home runs to his total raising it to double figures. Replacing legendary players are never easy but to Yankee fans who have been so over protective of Jeter’s legacy this is a double edged sword. Gregorius will say the right things, as he must know that it would be foolish to compare himself to Jeter. But for a fan base that is used to seeing competitive teams, if Gregorius gets off to a slow start the fans who will always love and adore Jeter will make life difficult for him.
No one knows more than Rodriguez about challenging Jeter. While he never really challenged him he could never get in the fans good graces despite being a far superior player, performing enhancing drugs or not. But this is the elephant in the room. Rodriguez returns after a year long suspension and no one knows what to expect from the player and the person. He is trying to mend fences so maybe he finally is growing up or at least starting to be accountable for his actions. No one cares about that. He is who he is.
Rodriguez has three years and more than $60 million remaining on his contract, and that does not even include the milestone home run clauses built into that contract. He has every incentive to kiss and make up. Facts are facts, though, and for a player who is 40 years old and who has eight times hit over 40 home runs in a season to only hit a combined 41 Home runs in his last three seasons is an alarming number. He has not been healthy and he was using some kind of performance enhancing drugs. What can we expect from him at his age and now that he is supposedly clean? We know Rodriguez will give everything he has but will it be enough.
Chase Headley was acquired in a trade with the Padres during the 2014 season. Headley is a puzzling player as well. His career is basically measured across three months during the 2012 season. That year he finished with 31 home runs and 115 runs batted in. Headley has been living off that season. While he has potential and is regarded as a fine defensive player his offense has not been the same as that 2012 season. The Yankees, who need a third basemen basically because of the questions surrounding Rodriguez, re-signed Headley for a whopping $52 million over four years. The signing was met with curiousity around the league. If the team is wrong in their evaluation, Headley will become an expensive player whom they won’t be able to get rid of.
Part of the 2014 spending spree was a huge contract signed by Brian McCann. He didn’t have the kind of season the Yankees expected, given the the five-year $85 million contract he signed. Most baseball analysts feel this will be a bad contract on the back end with McCann a catcher. The problem with the Yankees is that they have too many players who need to see time at DH making it hard for McCann to get a rest from behind the plate while keeping his bat in the lineup. It is always risky giving big money to a catcher and McCann was already dealing with injuries during his time with the Atlanta Braves. A lot more will be expected from him this year, that what he did last season.
In the outfield we have three players making big money contracts in Brett Gardner, Carlos Beltran and the grossly overpaid Jacoby Ellsbury. Beltran has had a fine career which most likely borders on the Hall Of Fame. He will turn 38 in April and is notorious for having a brittle body and not able to fight through pain to keep himself in the lineup. In his time with the Mets, he would often be the target of the fans arrows. Beltran could never figure out how to deal with that. Last season, with the Yankees there were so many other issues to deal with plus Jeter’s farewell tour taking the attention last season, that Beltran’s struggles were able to fly under the radar. This year, Jeter is gone, and the fans may be have a lot less patience for players who underperform. Beltran was hot with the bat early in the season but got hurt crashing into the wall and was never the same. He is getting older and these kinds of injuries take their toll. That said, with so many other question marks, the Yankees don’t have the luxury of being able to endure another injury plagued season from Beltran.
Gardner is a poor man’s Ellsbury. Basically he can do a lot of what Ellsbury can do at half the cost. The Yankees paid Ellsbury like he is a superstar player with a contract no other Major League general manager was offering, including the Red Sox who had just come off a World Series with him in the lineup. The Ellsbury signing coupled with the Beltran signing felt like the Yankees reaction to losing Cano to Seattle in 2014. Neither move was necessary. Throughout his career, Ellsbury has been injury prone. While he was healthy in 2014, his numbers did not justify his contract. With the question marks throughout the lineup, Ellsbury needs to perform at a higher level, given the contract he signed.
The Yankees starting rotation was a complete train wreck in 2014 with all five projected starting pitchers getting placed on the injured reserve at some point of the year. The seasons and many innings pitched finally took their toll on C.C. Sabathia. The last few seasons have been injury plagued and he is under contract through 2016. Sabathia has been a horse during his career. Without a doubt, his big frame contributed to his physical decline. The Yankees got their monies worth out of him in the early years of his contract, but that does not help the team now. Perhaps Sabathia knowing his career is coming to a close might just let it go this year.
Masahiro Tanaka signed a massive seven-year contract with the Yankees before the 2014 season started. The Japanese work horse was as advertised – dominant. But he also never had to pitch in Japan as often as major league starting pitchers do and developed elbow problems and was shut down for two months. He elected not to have Tommy John surgery, instead rehabbing his elbow. Nobody knows if that elbow will hold up for a whole season, but the Yankees need him to stay healthy if they have any hope of competing this year.
After trading away a highly rated prospect for Michael Pineda in 2012, he finally made his way on the mound last season. After two injury filled seasons, he showed that he could pitch but was not without his own issues. There was the pine tar incident which saw him suspended, but more importantly another long term-injury kept him out of the lineup for a big chunk of the season. All in all, Pineda was only able to make 13 starts last year. When he did pitch, he was a six inning pitcher at best. The Yankees need to stretch his innings more in his outings.
The bullpen was a bright spot. David Robertson was in the unenviable position of replacing the greatest closer of all time in Mariano Rivera. He showed he could get the job done, but the emergence of Dellin Betances in the setup role brought back memories of when Rivera was flawless in that role back in 1996.
Robertson was not re-signed by the Yankees who instead opted to sign lefty specialist Andrew Miller. Betances is moving up to the closer role, while Miller becomes the set-up guy. No one should expect Miller to do what Betances did last season in that role. It is a mystery why Robertson wasn’t kept with Miller and Betances. The Yankees starting pitching still holds huge question marks. The league is very much a copy-cat league and on the heels of what the Royals did with their bullpen, shortening the game to six innings, the Yankees were in prime position to duplicate that. This was one in series of a lot of questionable moves made by Brian Cashman.
Traded away are Shane Greene, David Phelps and Shawn Kelley. These are young pitchers who can start and also pitch in middle relief. For a team to trade away such valuable assets when their own starting rotation has so many question marks is a very curious decision. Also traded away was Martin Prado. Prado is an extremely undervalued everyday player. He can play second base, third base and the outfield. He would have been the Yankees everyday second basemen. He was traded for Nathan Eovaldi who is expected to be in the Yankees rotation and Garrett Jones who is a marginal player at best. Jones is insurance in case Teixeria gets hurt again. He can also pay some outfield. But was he really necessary? Eovaldi has a young live arm but has not been able to put it together fully. He has shown flashes of brilliance, but has yet to put together for a full season of consistently strong starts.
Cashman has a really tough job to do. Everything about the Yankees is about winning. Spending whatever amount of money they needed to do was the way of “The Boss”, which given the latest CBA and the luxury tax penalties, isn’t exactly how his sons have decided to run the club. The Yankees thrived by trading prospects for top players whose team could not afford them or for players about to hit free agency. In the off-season they would sign the best players by throwing the most money at them. Baseball has changed. Teams are locking up their top players before they are close to free agency and signing them through their prime years. Once they get into their 30’s they are considered on the down side of their careers, and building this way is no longer a successful strategy.
A full scale rebuilding effort can’t really happen with the Yankees, like the cross-town Mets were able to do. The Yankees have several players that are not tradeable because of the size of their contracts. How do they go about making the team younger and re-stocking the farm system. Cashman feels by doing it the way he is right now.
In the next few years several big contracts will be coming off the books in Sabathia, Beltran, Teixeira and Rodriguez. It is a near certainty that none will be re-signed. Will there be players available for the Yankees to buy? Will they have prospects ready to take their spots in the lineup? These are the questions they face.
Main Photo: NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 05: Masahiro Tanaka #19 of the New York Yankees in action during the first inning against the Oakland Athletics at Yankee Stadium on June 5, 2014 in the Bronx borough of New York City. The Yankees defeated the Athletics 2-1. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)
