Still, you wonder: Could the Yankees actually go another year without an impact rookie? Come August, will the sum of our farm system be trade chips for garage sale items?
But the Top 10 Yankee prospects - as chosen by MLB.com - show three thriving. Here's where everything stands:
1. Anthony Volpe -Somerset (AA): 5 for 37, .156 with 1 HR.
2. Oswald Peraza - Scranton (AAA) : 7 for 33, .219 with 1 HR.
3. Jasson "The Martian" Dominguez - Tampa (A-): 9 for 36, .250, no HR.
4. Austin Wells -Hudson Valley (A+): 7 for 31, .226, no HR.
5. Trey Sweeney - Hudson Valley (A+): 8 for 32, .250, 2 HRs.
6. Ken Waldichuk - Somerset (AA): 10 innings, 0.00 ERA, 16 strikeouts.
7. Clarke Schmidt - Yankees: 9.1 innings, 3.86 ERA, 11 strikeouts.
8. Hayden Wesneski - Scranton (AAA): 8 innings, 0.00 ERA, 8 strikeouts,
9. Yoendrys Gomez - hasn't thrown a pitch.
10. Luis Gil - Scranton (AAA): 5.1 innings, 13.500 ERA, 8 strikeouts.
I should note that there are a couple breakouts in the Top 20:
Everson Pereira, 21, is hitting .394 at Hudson Valley.
Josh Breaux, 24, a catcher, has 4 HRs at Somerset.
They'll rise and fall. No matter what happens, we'll always have a top 10. But if they're simply going to be traded in August, one of the great fan enjoyments - watching the farms - goes poof.
One last off-night note: Lately, an avalanche of bullshit stats - like this - claim to show Joey Gallo is just unlucky, that he's actually crushing balls, and we should look beyond his .160 average this spring (and his lifetime .206.) He's just hitting balls at people, that's all.
What crapola! Yeah, I've seen a couple drives go directly at outfielders - all four of them - because defenses have figured the guy out. He's hitting into the over-shifts, and he's getting nowhere. It's not bad luck. It's refusing to adjust to defenses which have adjusted to him. Last time I felt this depressed about a Yankee acquisition, it was Omar Moreno. That spawned a three-year barf, between 1983-85.
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12 comments:
You missed Deivi "Arnaz" Garcia & Luis "Funky Cold" Medina
They didn't make the top 10 list. And judging by their problems thus far, they won't be on it again soon.
I thought that Deivi was cured?
Our prospects reflect the incompetence of our front office. Just another product of the Cashbrenner regime.
Way too early for any fearless proclamations, but it is disconcerting to see so many of our minor league hitters struggling. Note: Don’t believe the hype! Anyway, the die have been cast, nothing to do now except wait for them to stop tumbling and read the final outcome.
Re Gallo, ever notice how pissed off the analytics truthers get when you challenge their absurd inventions with real world experience and actual outcomes? Yes, Gallo will rebound off his current lows (which will set them squealing “See? We told you so!”), but he is what his old-fashioned basic stat lines say he is, and he will not exceed those. The real world answer is that we have a whole team full of this type of player, making Gallo a poor fit. Cashman is to blame for his shoddy roster construct.
Tying these two items together, the unhappy outcome is that there are no minor league prospects in our system to replace the likes of Gallo with, so we will keep running him out there, with the tiresome Boone post-game gaslighting session adding to the ennui.
Two baseball certainties;
1) Never trust any minor league stats, pitchers great or hitters poor, when viewing teams in the Northeast in April,
2) Gallo sucks by any traditional metric used in the first 120 years of baseball hitting, except possibly HRS .
3) The Red Sox suck
(Just had to add that for old time sake.)
You could count on one hand, how many prospects have developed in The Genius Cashman ERA.
Seriously…. Grading prospects? They aren’t worth anything until they are worth something in the bigs. I would trade them all except Volpe and Dominguez for big league tested players. It’s panning for gold …
A few takeaways from this:
1. Aside from teaching hard throwing pitchers how to throw a slider, Yankees can't develop anyone to do more than launch a ball into the seats or increase spin rates on pitches.
2. Since their focus is on launch angles and spin rates, Yankees only know how to break ballplayers and regularly set records for most injured players.
3. A team where statisticians tell everyone how to train, develop and play baseball players, will have more injuries, because a body is not a spreadsheet and breaks at a certain point.
4.It's hard for me to blame the ballplayers when the fault lies with management.
Amen, Dr. T.
I saw some interview back in 2017 with Montgomery where he was expressing his amazement that the Yanks had added 5-10 mph to his fastball.
Soon thereafter, it was two years in Tommy John land.
Bingo, Horace! Hyper-focus on isolated skills like launch angles, spin rates, bat or pitching speed and no attention paid to how to field your position, base running or - god forbid - situational awareness or baseball smarts.
And of course, since this is all driven by mathematics, nobody considers the limits of the human body to torque one's arm, twist one's wrist or the problem of pumping iron before your at-bat. Good for hitting it further, but then you pull your hammy running to first.
But players are just 'pieces' to Spreadsheet Hal and the Intern and since insurance covers the breakage, spin that ball til your arm falls and pump that iron until you need to swing the bat with one hand kids.
The highlight reel means more to the bottom line than a championship anyway........
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