Last month, an angry Redsock fan verbally cole-cocked me, claiming that whatever the Yankees do this year - like winning a world series - wouldn't count, because of the "short-season asterisk." It was sad, embarrassing, to see how this poor fellow had deteriorated: He practically winnowed, Nya-nya-nyaaah. I generously ignored him, because the Yanks were leading the AL East and - hey - like all New York Tough fans, I am smart, united, disciplined and loving. To prove this, I even wished Mookie Betts well.
But his foul, mean-spirited toxicity still stung, and the question of 2020 remains:
Is it real, or is it Memorex?
In two weeks, the regular season ends, and both Yankee and Redsock fans will likely join together in shouting, "Good riddance."
Is any of this legit?
Honestly, I dunno.
Last night, we watched our veteran lug nuts, Adam Ottavino and Chad Green, explode like downtown Beirut. Each faces the worst season of his career. Would another 100 games provide time to rectify things? Maybe. But this year is dog meat. And should we have seen this coming?
Last year, Green's ERA shot up from 2.50 to 4.17. (The previous season, it was a microscopic 1.83.) At age 29, he's well known to the league, and - let's face it - his game is steadily deteriorating. For bullpen innings-eaters, four years is a career.
Ottavino, 34, fell apart last fall, though he still had a great season (1.90 ERA.) This year, he's struggled, and last night - well - hello, Kenosha! His ERA is above 7.00, and he won't get enough innings in 2020 to restore it to decency.
Zack Britton is 32 and four years past peak foliage. Aroldis Chapman is 32 and sweating like 40. Jonathan Holder is an old 27, Luis Cessa, an ancient 28. The wave of young fireballers we touted last spring never materialized. Other teams bring in no-names, up from wherever, and our bats go to sleep. Then our high-priced vets - maybe not awakened from winter hibernation? - get shelled.
Make no mistake: This Yankee collapse is due to the bullpen, our hyped strength of spring.
(Note: No recap of the malaise is complete without mention of the pitiful Gary Sanchez, who has been far worse than Eric Kratz or Kyle Higashioka, or whatever fodder remains stashed in Scranton. Just saying.)
The Washington Nats - last year's champs - sit 10 games below .500, last in the NL East. The cheating Astros, whom they beat last October, rest one game above .500. The Marlins, Mariners and Orioles - last year's definition of awful - are chasing us for the final playoff slot. So... is this a short-season illusion? Or are the Yankees really this bad?
Honestly, I dunno. But last year's famous "Next Man Up" resurgence - great performances from middling players - now looks like the anomaly. We wrongly thought it would last. And last year's wave of injuries - a statistical fluke of nature - was the new reality. We wrongly thought it would end.
Whatever happens over this next two weeks, alarms should be sounding across the Yankiverse. This collapse is no asterisk. The 2020 Yankees are a dull, slow, sad, fragile, over-the-hill team. It's too late save this wretched mini-season. But this winter, we will need a tear-down.
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The thing about a full-on tear down is, toward what outcome are we building? Will there even be a 2021 season?
I'm guessing that at some level of his consciousness, Prince Hal is lamenting paying Gerrit Cole all that money for 60 games ... and middling results. If 2021 is a repeat of 2020 due to Covid, will Poor Prince Hal ever see a return on his investment in Cole?
Don't get me wrong, there is no doubt we need massive changes from the very top to the bottom of the organization. I'm not questioning that. I'm just questioning when these changes should be made. If we clean house starting in November 2020 -- and spend some serious cash to rebuild -- all those personnel replacements might end up sitting again ... and losing another prime year of their careers due to forces beyond anyone's control.
So, I'm wondering if we don't write off 2021 now, stick with what we more or less have in the clubhouse, and start looking toward 2022. If we do it right, what we have will suck and we'll get some decent draft choices. Hal won't have parted with another load of shekels so he'll feel smart and perhaps ready to loosen his purse strings for the next season.
Or maybe I'm 100% wrong. All I know is I feel like a schmuck for buying MLB.tv this year. These games are unwatchable.
Complete rebuild necessary, Begin with Cashman who has taken on the appearance and smell of a Loudon Wainwright song; hope that Hal pulls a CBS auction for new buyers; get a major league manager and a major league pitching coach; hire a drill sarge instead of the therapists they currently employ, trade everything that anyone is interested in (at least put no one off limits), lower prices so actual fans will attend; stop acting like 1998 is recent vintage, allow this season to continue to take on the image of Slaughterhouse Five for a top 3 or 4 pick. Also, remember that rich and spoiled is no way to go through life, so anyone with several cars worth like 90k apiece should never be signed to long term K.
I HAVE SPOKEN The Archangel
Our plight has been reduced to that of a mid-1990s Mets fan. Only false hopes on the horizon, while true redemption awaits a now inconceivable ownership change.
-MelquÃades
At least we have some actual hitters showing up. DJ, AnDUjar, Voit, Frazier is a good half-lineup.
Our bullpen is beyond awful. Green and Ottavino were unbelievably terrible yesterday. Just so bad as to be truly not believable.
And you have to love the way we bounced right back and answered the Jays' 10-spot with one run in the ninth. *cough*
One thing which won't happen but should--dump the injury-prone "elite" players so we can fill their roster spots with contact hitters who rarely visit the IL. I hear they do exist.
Let's see what King and Garcia can develop into as starters. That will give us a rotation of Cole, Garcia, King, Monty, and a slagheap acquisition over the winter. Not a recipe for great success, but might be fun to watch.
Judge, Stanton, Sanchez, Hicks...all worth paying other teams to take. Sad to say it, but it's true.
The problem with relying on analytics is that while they are empirically correct over the course of a season they ignore the individual. Yes all ballplayers need x amount of rest but specific ball players will need less and specific players will need more.
This is why you can't run a team this way. DJ wanted to play the other day. Pitchers can go thru the batting order more than twice if they've got it going on.
Things will not change because it is a philosophical problem.
Doug K.
Which is why the whole thing has to be torn down from the top. Cashman's got to go. Get experienced professional baseball people in here, not a pencil pusher. This team is so bad, there is no need to go out and spend more money. We need to rebuild. A lot of guys have to be traded this winter. Free agents should be told to walk. Some guys who are "untradeable" need to be bought out or released.
The Hammer of God
Gary Sanchez is a joke. A stupid hitter that has no clue and refuses to make any adjustment. Probably a dumb ass intellectually as well. Bring up Anthony Seigler the switch throwing (and switch hitting) catcher. He can strike with a bat in both hands at the same time. Why not with all the new rules in baseball now?
And we've got Giancarlo, non si pue de Parlo for another 7 years at 30 million per? Ahahahah what a joke. Talk about albatrosses. He makes A-Rod look like a bargain.Perhaps the Yankees could book a cruise for him and hope he falls off the boat since his legs are always wobbly. They can grease the deck surreptitiously.
I'm not as down on the Yankee's regular relievers as many are here. It's just that relatively few starters can even manage 5 innings so the relievers are overworked. Especially in this year's compressed "double-header three times a week" schedule. And their highly touted (or over-hyped) young pitchers are either not as advertised or not ready to pitch (in relief, at least). And these other castoffs they rotate in and out are putrid.
Well, let's look at the flame throwing arson squad one by one:
Chapman: has been losing effectiveness steadily over the past few years. Fastball, very wild. David Cone said this guy just throws as hard as he can, doesn't know where it's going. I think he is a mediocre closer at best, at this point in his career. Started the year on the coronavirus recovery list. Last few years, he has developed a penchant for blowing games on big home runs. He can still look great sometimes, but those times are fewer and farther between. He used to be one of the best closers, but there was always a chance that he'd come in and be unable to throw strikes and totally implode.
Britton: former closer, also losing effectiveness steadily. Clearly, his best days are behind him. Has been hit around more this year. Injuries have been hampering him also.
Ottavino: had a good stretch his first year with the Yankees, but ran into trouble after getting overworked. Has looked terrible this year. Giving up the long ball on hanging sliders.
Green: looked good to start the year, but now giving up gopher balls faster than we can blink. He had a good run where he was the best reliever on this team, but that was a few years ago. Since then, he's had some terrible streaks where they had to send him down and then use him as an opener to get his confidence back.
Kahnle: Was expecting a good year out of him, but got hurt and is out for the year.
Loiasiga: Has good stuff, but obviously still learning how to pitch in the majors. Out with a mystery illness right now.
Cessa: Has good stuff, but consistency has been a problem at times. Just checked his stats, only been in 12 games this year. Maybe getting underutilized on a team with an arson squad for a bullpen.
A few more lugnuts, like Jonathan Holder. Some okay, some terrible, mostly terrible. Bottom line: Green and Ottavino have been the weak links. They've looked awful much of the time. Combined with Boone pushing the wrong buttons at the wrong time, it's been an arson squad. They are approaching the collossal scale of ineptness on full display with the Mets. I would keep Loiasiga and Cessa, but everyone else is expendable.
The Hammer of God
The prevailing myth of this blog is that the Yankees over-rely on analytics. The OPPOSITE is true: Cashman was slow to embrace analytics, and doesn't have the native intelligence to apply sabremetrics rigorously to team-building. The analytics crowd established long ago that lavish long-term free agent contracts are deadly, but Cashman has freighted the franchise with TWO of the worst just in the last couple of years: Stanton and Cole. Analytics also discourages the repeated re-signing of older players: so Cashman re-ups Gardner at an age when a sharp decline was an overwhelming probability, even though he had stockpiled outfielders up the ass and didn't really need him. Moreover, analytics stresses the need to nurture and develop YOUNG talent: yet Cashman continually stumbles at this task, over-relying on his dumpster-diving mediocrities like Urshela and Tauchman. Analytics prescribes the rapid advancement of young players while Cashman nudges young players along at a snail's pace in the team's minor league system. The problem isn't with analytics, but the lack of any really intelligent, systematic application of it throughout the Yankees baseball operations. The reason? Cashman is a dumb guy, a nepotism hire (his father was a personal friend of Steinbrenner's) who has never built a durable winning team on his own and in the past twenty years has managed only one world championship--which he bought for a quarter billion dollars of free agent signings in one year that later were a millstone on the franchise--despite having access to the most lavish resources in the game. But there's one more step here--Hal Steinbrenner is Cashman's equal in mental deficiency, which explains why a dull-witted nonentity like Cashman remains on the job. The Yankees are not a professionally run franchise--they're a mafia clubhouse of inept rich deadheads.
Anon....I like to call them The Bloated Front Office.
Yes, Cashman's dad worked at the track in Tampa where George owned a horse farm and tried to ingratiate himself with Steinbrenner by giving him a winning horse to bet on. The rest is history.
Cashman's MO has always been to choose "experience" over young talent. Then he jerks around the talented young players that he stores away in the minors. What is considered a desired youthful exuberance in most organizations (and there are a few of them currently on the team we are playing tonight) is looked at as an arrogant disrespect.They sap all the fun and confidence from these players and most don't thrive until they're traded away from the Yankees.
I'm torn on this, because I can see where the intelligent application of analytics could give a team an advantage...but at the same time, the problems with this team seem to me to be that:
1) Young, promising players have a better chance of retaining their skills or improving.
2) Older players tend to eventually decline.
3) Players who seem surprisingly good over a season or two (after having shown little in past performance to indicate the improvement could be expected) tend to slide downhill.
I don't see why, having watched baseball for decades ans seen these things repeat themselves, it would take any advanced stats to convince anyone of the problems here. Extended contracts; diamonds in the rough reverting; promising young guys pushed aside. All happening here.
All of which makes me think that as boneheaded as Cash and his band of idiots seem to me, they must be even stupider than I can imagine. That seems impossible but surely feels true.
Mike
Carl and Mike--dead-on, perceptive comments. Thanks.
AND, even "Cashman's" 2009 championship team still needed Stick's-Watson's-Buck's Core of Four to win.
Anon, I agree with you about most of that.
Ol' Cooperstown continually FAILS, as you say, to build a reliably good farm system and nurture terrific young players. That's when he turns to the big money. It worked in 2009. It failed disastrously with CC's re-up, Ellsbury, McCan't, etc. And it's failing now...
...However, the problem isn't that Coops and Hal are dumb or inept. It's more that they are interested mostly interest in things BESIDES building a great ballteam.
This is not unusual in today's America, where very few of the ruling class are interested in doing things like building something great, taking over a continent, etc. They are just narrowly focused on the bottom line.
Brain and Hal have been—and always will be—most interested in winning corporate power and aggrandizing themselves in the press.
Hal expertly outmaneuvered brother, Hank—all right, not exactly something you had to be a Medici to accomplish—and Coops has been in brilliant—in clearing the Yankees' front office of any rivals, and securing a completely unfounded reputation amongst most of New York's rapidly diminishing press corps.
This is what worries me.
If they were just dumb, they'd get pushed out. Being smart and evil—oh, all right, BASEBALL evil—they are likely to stick around, ruining more teams for a long, long time. And nothing gets better until they go.
As for the relief pitchers...what I hated most was how damned feeble and scared they were.
Hell, every now and then you get lit up. Even The Great One would, occasionally, let up a monster home run that would leave us all in a theological torment.
Hey, it happens: you throw your best up there, and one of the Sunday Beer League buffoons on the Blue Jays hits it across Lake Erie.
What killed me was watching all that frightened nibbling, with NO ONE—not the catcher, the manager, or the pitching coach—ready to go out there and at least verbally kick these scared little mollies in the ass, and remind them of who they are and who they're playing for.
This bodes no well!
Strange how all the "high end" talent in the lower minors have, with few exceptions have remained there. For the past twenty years! Aaron Judge, who didn't come with much hype has easily been the exception (too many of you guys want to throw in the towel on him, amazingly). So what is the root cause? The scouts? The farm system? The Dodgers, Cardinals, Red Sox among others have managed to field very good teams while consistently churning out top talent. I don't want to hear the loser, safe arguments about blowing seasons so that we get no-brainer high draft picks. That's horsesht thinking which rarely plays out for teams. My best guess is that ownership skimps out on paying their scouts. It's the one black hole (which like the real thing can only be discerned by watching the movement of nearby objects) that isn't open for press commentary, or fans. So, it's reasonable to believe that this is the design flaw in the Death Star.
@ Anon (9/8 5:43 PM) So we all agree that Cashman is doing everything wrong, but about your analytics point, that there's a persistant myth on this blog that Cashman is metrics crazy, but that it's really the opposite, that he doesn't know what the hell he is doing and doesn't use metrics enough. While I certainly agree with you that: lavish long term contracts are deadly; resigning older players is dumb; we need to keep developing young talent; we need to rapidly advance young talent to the majors, aren't these just common sense rules for GMs? I mean, do we really need sabermetrics to tell us these things? Let's not try to re-invent the wheel. Intelligent GMs have been following these rules for decades.
And do you mean to say that Cashman is not metrics driven when: he makes his manager rest players on schedules; pitch counts determine when starting pitchers get removed from games; he makes no distinction between left handed and right handed hitters; the best hitter always has to hit second in the lineup; batting averages don't mean anything; strikeouts don't mean anything; "walk and hit a home run" is the main offensive strategy; bunting, stealing, hitting the other way, making contact, hitting in holes are all frowned upon?
Obviously, there is a huge difference between the way Tampa does metrics and Cashman's Yankees do it. Obviously, Tampa does it right and Cashman has screwed it all up. But I don't think it's a myth that Cashman over-relies on analytics. He does rely too much on metrics. He forces everyone else to go along with his thinking on these issues. Instead of just making personnel decisions, his shadow is all over every aspect of the team, the way it plays baseball. The manager is Cashman's puppet. In some ways, the whole team is Cashman's puppet show, and it's all driven by metrics.
The Hammer of God
Horace Clarke 55 -- I don't understand your post at all. Just because someone is deft at office power politics doesn't mean he has the talents or smarts to build a winning baseball team--these skills are not cross-transferable and are often mutually exclusive. Hal and Randy are concerned mainly with short-term marketing considerations, which they often impose on the GM at the expense of sound roster formation. Cashman is a heavy-lidded, droning dolt--just thirty seconds of his monotonic doublespeak reveals a mind devoid of spark or originality or depth or vision--a drudge. If it's important to you as a Yankee fan to believe that the team is led by smart people, so be it. But it's clearly not the case.
Hammer of God--Cashman has belatedly begun to employ a number of analytics-inspired lineup and managerial strategies. But your notion that it's just "commonsense" that you avoid long-term contracts and don't sign older players is preposterous--teams have been pursuing these ridiculous strategies for decades until the influence of sabremetrics discredited them almost everywhere but at the Yankees, where Cashman is still stuck in these same old paradigms. It's not enough to apply sabremetrics mechanically a the micro level but then, at the macro level of major personnel decisions, keep signing forever megadeals with players like Stanton and Cole who are just at or past their peak performance age, promising ten years of disminishing returns and crippling budgetary constraints for the team. That's why really smart GM's avoid this kind of shit, and Cashman is all in on it every other year or so--as a desperate band-aid to cover his notorious incompetence in player development. Oh--and dumpster diving and promoting mediocrities like Urshela, Tauchman, Estrada, etc., is another symptom of desperation and a substitute for real player development, the key GM skill at which Cashman has always been a bust.
Hoss: I agree completely. Cash and the crew are NOT stupid in the context of what they are doing. I totally get that winning is not their focus. The potential of winning, maybe. Winning? Nope. If it happens, ...I wanted to say "great" there but I think I might be wrong. Winning gets expensive. Luckily it doesn't happen often. Not the big winning I'm talking about.
There is nothing about the management or performance of this team that compels me to give the slightest hint of a fuck about its future. I can't think of a time after I turned eight when I would ever have felt this way. I feel this way now.
Mike
Winning is not expensive if people know what they're doing. How do you think Tampa Bay, for instance, stays competitive with one of the lowest payrolls in the game? Because they have some of the smartest people running the franchise. Check their backgrounds and credentials and compare them to Cashman's.
Cashman and crew are not stupid in the context of what they are doing? What are they doing? Wasting more money with fewer results than any other franchise in baseball?Why is it so important for Yankee fans to believe that Cashman is brilliant? Is that all you've got left to hold on to as a disappointed fan? We suck, but at least our sucky leadership is really way smart? That's rather pathetic.
Anon. has proven something I've been thinking and dreading for a while: spirited discussions and arguments about the Yanks don't seem worth the slightest bit of trouble.
What's the point in worrying about anything these gathered guys do?
Thank you, Anon.!
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@ Anon, you distinguish between metrics at the "macro" level and the "micro" level. Okay, I'll buy that. We aren't on the inside to see exactly what they're doing, but we do know that what the Yankees are doing is bullshit. Tampa doesn't seem to have any problem hitting the other way, hitting through holes, making contact, etc., at least against us. So whatever the hell it is that Cashman does, he's doing it all back-ass-wards, that we certainly agree on.
Whether Cashman is a brilliant devil or a dumbass rich dude really makes no difference to us fans. Bottom line is that he has survived more than two decades while generally doing a piss poor job. Unfortunately, I think he's going to survive at least until the end of 2021, by using the Coronavirus as an excuse. It's going to take a miracle to get him out of here.
The Hammer of God
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