Another All Star break in the books. Move on, people, there's no game tonight, nothing to see, nothing to do, shoe, shoe, shoe...
Apparently, some of you stayed to watch the game future of baseball - an explosion of young stars who will overturn the MLB power structure. Hell, even Miami and Cincinnati might rise.
For position all stars under age 26, consider...
Ronald Acuna Jr, Braves (25)
Wander Franco, Rays (22)
Julio Rodriguez, Mariners (22)
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Jays (24)
Adley Rutschman, Orioles (25)
Juan Soto, Padres (24)
Luis Robert Jr, White Sox (25)
Bo Bichette, Jays (25)
Corbin Carroll, Diamondbacks (22)
You might add 21-year-old Elly de la Cruz, the Reds 3B, who came too late to make the festivities. And the Marlins Luis Arraez, age 26, who spent June flirting with .400. Look around, folks. The game is bursting with ascending stars, all of whom have one thing in common.
They don't play for the New York Yankees.
Okay, yeah, I hear you: At this point, we must mention Anthony Volpe. At 22, in half of a rookie season, he's already endured 10 years worth of anxiety. You don't need me to revisit it. We can run charts and graphs until the laptops explode, but he's still hitting .216. Two-sixteen. Maybe next July, Volpe will be atop the list of ascending all stars. But for now, he's battling to keep his job.
And if we're looking for great Yankee talent under 25 - well - after Volpe, you need a deep dive into the system. And here's the skinny: Nobody is busting out.
At Double A Somerset, the guy we most hoped for - Jasson Dominguez, aka "The Martian" - is hitting a putrid .204 with 10 HRs. He's only 20, young for his level. It's too soon to give up. But he's fanned 98 times in 345 at bats. Wanna know how bad that is? YOU do the math. After a great spring training, we longed to see him shoot through the system, maybe hit Scranton by now. Not gonna happen. In fact, Dominguez looks like a prime candidate to be traded by Aug. 1, probably for a salary dump, some veteran who can solve one of our many problems.
Trouble is, we are where we are because of trades for former stars.
I should note another kid whose name has surfaced in trade rumors lately: Roderick Arias - Rod-A, for nickname fans. He's an 18-year-old switch hitting SS who signed for $4 million, the most money bestowed upon any 16-year-old in the 2021 international class, (which, as far as I'm concerned, should be held each year on the late Jeffrey Epstein's island.) Arias missed most of his first pro season with a bum wrist. This year, in the Florida dirt league, he's hitting .277 with 6 HRs in 84 ABs.
There are others. There are always others - I mean, everybody's a prospect, right? Cooperstown Cashman could solve a lot of immediate problems simply by bundling Dominguez and Arias into a trade for some guy who was an ascending star back in 2016.
The Death Barge keeps inching forward, and we don't seem to be getting anywhere. Wait! Is that a sprig of mistletoe over Mandy's shoulder? Ho, ho, ho, merrrrry Christmas, everybody! Break out the Tito's!
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24 comments:
Screw the Tito's. Everyone who's qualified should break out a sideboob. Woo Hoo!
Death Barge?
Isn’t that just another name for Judge’s baseball shoe?
You know . . . the one that enshrouds THE TOE,
Come to think of it - that’s one heck of an endorsed product idea.
The Aaron Judge Death Barge - from Thom McAn
LBJerk, I quality. But ,then again, I'm a 69-yo guy.
I heard that "The Good Feet Store" will pay to have a patch on Judge's other sleeve.
ArchAngel, it seems I was hasty. Perhaps we'll need the Tito's as well.
LBJ.
In the end it all becomes more of a slide boob
The Arias kid will traded for Lance Lynn or some guy batting .200 with 15 bombs and 115k
The thing with prospects is you just never know. We were told JD is a can’t miss prospects, and the hype train rolled over us like a steamroller. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, he’s had a bad year and it’s getting worse. Like a bad student, he will have to repeat AA next year. Will he be traded? Should he be traded? It’s hard to trust the team’s evaluations and player development abilities.
You just never know.
Taking a crapshoot on a 16 year-old kid in the Carib, when God knows what substance that they take, is well, a crapshoot.
btr
I agree that we don't know when it comes to prospects but, every year they draft guys, sign international prospects, and trade for other team's minor leaguers. So 30+ new faces? Every year.
Across a five year stretch that's 150+ ballplayers. They can't find one or two that make an impact? While other teams, Atl. Tampa LA seem to have an endless supply.
Notice I'm only picking successful teams who draft near the Yankees. Not the Baltimores of the world although, even with them, the advantage is in the first round only. Any star they have that wasn't picked in the first round could have been had by the Yankees.
The whole organization stinks!
Plenty of younf budding stars. None are Yankees with The Genius at the helm!
It might not all be that the Yankees are bad at picking youngsters to draft.
You have to throw in the organizations incredible ability to ruin prospects and trade away the ones the fail to ruin quickly.
rufus -
Yes, that too.
Maybe the Dillon Lawson methodology for hitting has been propagated all the way down to Single-A. If that's the case, the new Casey at the Bat methodology needs to be migrated throughout the system.
Rumor has it that the first lesson is how to hit from a batting tee...
@ Rufus, There is no doubt that they're ruining the few position prospects that they have. All we have to do is look at what happened up here with the big club. Dillon Lawson was pressuring everyone to take a home run swing in every at bat, practically every pitch. "Hit strikes hard", maximize exit velocity, optimize launch angle. This is basically a 2-0, 3-0, 3-1 count approach that was being preached to everyone, in every at bat, every pitch, every count. That's why everyone (not named Aaron Judge) is hitting at least 40 or 50 points below what they should be hitting.
Aaron Judge is a special case. He can hit fly ball home runs. Most of the others here cannot. Even Judge decided to get hitting instruction elsewhere because he wasn't getting the right advice. And look at the results last year (and so far this year too)!
I shudder to think of what they are teaching Jasson Dominguez in the minors. How many other Dillon Lawsons are there in this organization? When a kid with a great swing is hitting like a blind man, that doesn't speak well of the instruction that he's getting. And this kid is a switch hitter, too. That makes all the strikeouts and the .200 batting average even more unbelievable.
Bad coaching can be ignored by experienced players. But it's a lot harder for a greenhorn. Now that we've got a new coach who says he won't be forcing everyone into a square peg hole, it might actually be good for Jasson Dominguez if they brought him up soon. Let him develop up here. Ditto with Austin Wells. We've got nothing to lose.
98K in 385 AB isn't that bad these days. If he hit, esp for power, not much of a problem.
345 AB...worse, but not panic inducing.
I also heard that Casey at the Bat is going back in time...
"This is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball." -From Bull Durham
I hear he's working on the you hit the ball thing...
Let's hope he doesn't turn into Casey Jones on that locomotive. Watch that speed!
Whatever, this season is shot to hell. How much worse could it get? They're only a game out of last place.
Second half prediction: I think the bats might come alive a bit. They'll score more runs and look like they have a pulse. But, unfortunately, the pitching will fall off a cliff, led by the bullpen. That will offset any offensive surge. They'll battle the Red Sox to the bitter end for that coveted spot in the A.L. East crypt.
Hammer -- on what evidence do you base your prediction of revived "bats"? Your Magic 8 ball? A new batting coach is simply la PR move--he can't make good hitters out of guys who have been flailing their entire careers; this new version of Casey at the bat will have the same ending as the old one. All the old guys and three-peat failures and nonprospect prospects who clutter this lineup are who they are. They're not getting any younger or better. This team is a smoking ruin, and any frenzy of panicked trades--and you can be sure they're coming--will only make things worse.
For all you guys who endlessly gripe that Hal is cheap and doesn't spend enough money: the Yankees are among the top three payrolls in bsaeball, and all three of these teams--the Yankees, the Mets, and the Padres--are. at the All-Star break, out of playoff contention. So perhaps this is good time for the bloggers here to shed the obligatory "Food Stamps Hal" trope: he spends a lot, but like other owners who preside over mismanaged teams, it gets him nowhere. Perhaps it's time to consider that it's not dollars but analytic baseball smarts--as in the kind practiced most rigorously by the Rays--that win the day. There is no evidence, despite the other blog cliche about Cashman's "alogrithms," that the Yankees are steeped in analytics or that they implement that mode of analysis with any consistency or efficacy. There is, however, plenty of evidence to the contrary. But that empirical reality will not deter the usual suspects from their ritual thrashing "algorithms" (as if any of the critics even know what that means), mistakenly using the failed Yankees as their analytics whipping boy instead of acknowledging that the successful Rays are the real case study in analytics. Then they would have to acknowledge that analytics, consistently and rigorously applied, actually work. Then the critics might actually be spurred to read a book on the subject that they reflexively criticize but don't understand.
This comes courtesy of MLBTradeRumors.com I wonder if this is a prelude for moving Donaldson in a trade, or a dump. Not that Lamb is a starter, but he would be depth who hits left-handed. It also shows how that players can do well in AAA, but MLB AINT AAA. Small sample size is acknowledged, but he has tried for ten years with 434 plate appearances.
The Yankees signed first baseman/corner outfielder Jake Lamb to a minor league deal this afternoon. He was assigned to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, where he’s making his organizational debut tonight.
He struggled over 19 games, putting up a .216/.259/.353 line before being optioned. Lamb found his stride in Triple-A, putting together a .317/.453/.498 slash over 150 plate appearances. He walked at a huge 17.3% clip against a manageable 20% strikeout rate.
Lamb has now appeared at the highest level in 10 consecutive seasons. An everyday player early in his career with the Diamondbacks, he has bounced around over the past few years. Going back to the start of the 2020 campaign, Lamb has a .203/.297/.368 batting line in 434 MLB plate appearances split between seven different clubs.
Considering the total lack of production from the "farm" (almost a quarter century now), I propose that the Yankees do their best scouting, then trade drafted players for quality major leaguers within two-three years. Yeah they will look like boobs once in awhile, but at least they get SOMETHING out of the drafts.....
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