Last week, Tarpley was ditched from the Yankiverse - a roster cut to make room for the signing of Brett Gardner. Thus, Cooperstown Cashman had one Five-Day Deodorant Pad to trade Tarpley for something, anything. That he found a trade partner speaks to the depth of the Yankee roster, a good omen for 2020.
As you know, I'm not one to gush. Nothing positive ever comes from optimism. It's better to assume that Tarpley will win the Cy Young Award someday, making this a dark moment in Yankee history. But the fact is, when you've got a deadline to your head, any deal is better than no deal. And the Yankees now have found trading partners for all three of their roster casualties - Chance Adams, Nelson Cortes Jr. and Tarpley. Not only that, but the kid they couldn't protect - RH pitcher Rony Garcia - was the first player selected, by Detroit, in the December Rule 5 draft. By all indications, our 40-man brims with of talent.
(Note: When the Yankees banished Greg Bird in November, he became a free agent. He still is, with the Giants and Orioles rumored to be interested. Here is a recent update on Bird, Cortes and a bunch of former Yankees playing winter ball.)
That the Yankees can can a player and still get something in a deal is a good omen. This winter has brought a bunch, and I'm not even mentioning Adele's weight loss.
1. The sign-stealing debacles for Houston and Boston, our greatest rivals. (And yes, the Mets are suffering slowly.) Could we have picked out more delicious villains to suffer? Lately, it's like the last reel of The Godfather, where all the bad guys get blown away. Who's running this show, Mario Puzo?
2. The signing of Gerrit Cole, and the delirious unveiling of that sign declaring him a Yankee fan forever. Seriously, not since Jason Giambi invoked the memory of his dad - he took number 25 to signify the two numbers that equal "7," his father's favorite Yankee - has the otherwise cynical fan base seen such emotions swirl around a free agent. Cole's love for the Yankees is on a special boyhood plane; it's the kind of love a moose has for his flying squirrel. What a wonderful event!
3. The changeover among the training staff. Okay, this one smacks of scapegoating, but why kid ourselves? After last season, changes had to be made. Three players - Luis Severino, Dellin Betances and Giancarlo Stanton - kept injuring themselves during rehab. (And we're not even counting Jacoby Ellsbury.) That's unacceptable. Change had to come.
4. Wait. Did somebody say Jacoby Ellsbury? We dumped him. Finally. Nothing against the guy personally: It sucks to be injured. But we finally came to grips with the fact that he's not coming back, not for us anyway. I'm not sure how to view the front office attempts to cut his pay. That could haunt us someday, if players come to believe the Yankees don't honor contracts. But Ellsbury is gone. A weight is lifted.
5. CC Sabathia is staying. He'll advise Cashman, and he might join the YES broadcast crew. Supposedly, he's not a fan of Michael Kay. (Who is?) My guess is they'll do just fine, and that CC will become one of the most popular play-by-play voices through eternity. (A prediction: John and Suzyn will retire after the Yankees win one more championship. That will leave two openings in the radio network, and Sabathia will become the new Suzyn.)
6. Cashman has signed a bunch of lug nuts - two catchers, two outfielders, a utility man and a few arms - to minor league contracts. It's obvious what he's doing. He's searching for another Voit, another Urshela, another Tauchman, another Maybin. Good for him. If we learned anything from 2019, it's that there is a vast underground reservoir of talent in Triple A. This is an area the Yankees can financially exploit, and I believe Cashman intends to do just that. I say, go for it.
7. We haven't done anything disastrous - yet. Listen: We all feared a snap trade of J.A. Happ/Miguel Andujar/Clint Frazier for Vidal Nino III, and it still can happen. But it hasn't. The closer we get to spring, the more likely the Yankees will get their own exclusive chances to assess Andujar's glove, Frazier's bat and Happ's aging fastball. Who knows? We might like what we see, and avoid doing something terrible. No news is good news.
Good signs, the kind the Astros can't steal.
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12 comments:
One thing that you didn't mention is that the lefty specialist has gone the way of the dodo bird. Tarpley can't pitch to three batters...in fact, it doesn't matter if you steal the signs when he's pitching for that matter...in second fact, you could probably hit off of him...
I'm convinced the main reason it took 40 days to make the Gardner signing official is that Cashman was trying to trade Tarpley/someone on the 40 man for more but everyone realized he was trying to avoid the roster crunch and that he had no leverage.
He didn't find a trade partner overnight. This was the best offer he found after 40 days of trying and said "fine, let me just announce the BMG signing so casual fans will know I had no leverage and this is what I did."
Off topic, but...the philosophical inventor of Rochester:
Gary Starkweather, an engineer and inventor who designed the first laser printer, bringing the power of the printing press to almost anyone, died on Dec. 26 at a hospital in Orlando, Fla. He was 81. His wife, Joyce, said the cause was leukemia.
Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 — several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings — when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another.
He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he had a better idea: Rather than sending grainy images of paper documents from place to place, what if he used the precision of a laser to print more refined images straight from a computer?
“What you have to do is not just look at the marble,” he said in a talk at the University of South Florida in 2017. “You have to see the angel in the marble.”
Wtf? John Sterling is NOT retiring. Ever.
CC remains the only Yankee to ever appear in "Rock of Ages." I still worry about the radio booth. Sterling and Suzyn are getting up there, and the blandification of announcing is still in full swing. What idiosyncratic, mellifluous voices are out there anymore to fill their shoes?
By the way, I remember when Kay was on radio for games and he was much better then. The move to TV proved disastrous for anyone interested in interesting commentary. Too bad.
The replacements for John and Susan have to be CC and Ryan right? They already do a podcast together.
Not saying that's a good thing. Just seems logical.
Too bad the Arizona Fall League recently ended. After Bird flames out, he could use a gig like this.
Dave in CA would also be perfect.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EN69xfjX4AAT5bf.jpg
I do not have a detailed memory of all the posts I've ever read at IIH. I also don't remember when I started coming to this site.
However, I do believe this Tarpley Trade Good Sign post is the most optimistic formulation I've ever read here.
What's wrong?
So much wrong JoeFoB, one cannot grok the Ju-Ju.
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