We need to talk about the infield.

 

Sorry to be so long away, guys, but all this standing on Canal Street, selling my books off a blanket on the sidewalk, really takes it out of me at my age. 

Thanks for the nice comments. And if anyone's bored out of their minds this afternoon, starting at noon, I'll be on reddit doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about said book, under r/baseball and my username, monteward90. No cracks about the picture.

So...while most of our ire has been rightly focused on our woefully inadequate pitching staff, I think we must also spend more time on the second gasket that's bound to blow on this wreck of a Yankees team. That is the infield.

I agree with the general consensus here that Anthony Rizzo is more likely to have a bounce-back year than the sadly declining DJ. But Rizzo has not actually had a good year since the pre-Covid season of 2019. LeMahieu does look as woeful as ever. And I have to disagree with many of the commentators, and many of my brethren here: I don't think there's any indication that Volpe, much as I'd love to see him succeed, is going to do anything but rapidly diminish in what has now become the standard Yankees fate for young prospects.

And then there's The Gleyber. Anybody else, playing in their walk year, I'd expect a big season. Gleyber plays in such a perpetual mental fog that we can't count on anything.

How did we get here? 

Foodstamps Hal is one culprit, of course. Had the Yanks just signed one of three big, infield free agents in recent years—Freddie Freeman, Corey Seager, or Manny Machado, who famously came to the Bronx offering a discount—the team would probably have celebrated it's third or fourth recent World Series win last October.

But I digress. If Foodstamps thinks that he should already have a championship ball club with a total, overall payroll put—by one source—at over $295 mill, well, to quote the great Stevie Nicks, who am I to disagree?

But this is where the weirdness of making Brian Cashman GM for Life really hits home. If you're a team owner and you are determined to run your club with at least some budget restraints, why o why o why-o would you ever leave Ohio put a general manager in charge with absolutely NO ability to build a farm system or make all the little moves that turn also-rans into champions?

Don't want to shell out for YY—or Blake Snell—or our own Jordan Montgomery? Okay...but then where's that "super-charged bullpen"? Didn't materialize. Never does—no matter how many times Cashman teams fell short because they were a reliever or two short. Expect another such collapse this year.

But then there's the infield. Many here have rightly been exasperated over the failure to ink Gio Urshela,

lost in the disastrous Biceptvedt/ Josh Donaldson deal, for what amounts to baseball peanuts these days. 

Right you are. Cashie's failure here is inexplicable.

But that's just the tip of our Brian's Titanicish follies. 

Cashman doesn't do the big things well, but then he doesn't do the little things at all.

Case in point: how good an infield would we have now—how good an infield would we have had last year, injuries or no, had we just hung on to Ezequiel "See the Wheel, Hit the Wheel Hard" Duran, and Thairo the Pharaoh Estrada. 

Both played pretty much anywhere on the field last year, fielding capably and hitting for power and much more average than anyone but Torres did in our infield.

Duran, if you'll recall, was no mas in the Joey Gallo debacle. He's was a key member of the—still seems surreal to write it—world champion Texas Rangers.

Thairo went to the Giants for a bag of money. And not a big bag. 

Whereas we have...the broken down Oswaldii—suddenly injured and ineffectual for no known reason, like so many young Yankees before them—a shortstop who is dangling over the Mendoza line, and our sadly injured, sadly bad LeMahieu.  

Sigh.

Of course, this is a chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. Had Thairo and Duran stayed with the Yankees, they might be just as broken down and bad now.  Hmm, another reason to think about changing general managers? Ah, don't worry your pretty little head about it, Hal!

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