Minor Neglect?

Now that it looks like the Yanks will be letting Aroldis Chapman sign elsewhere, I think we're confronted with two trends on the farm. One is good. One could be catastrophically bad. First, I think we're seeing the benefit of all the scouting talent and crosschecking expansion we have done over the last few years. This year alone they found Gary Sanchez, Chris Cabrera and a few others in IFA, as well as Slade Heathcott, JR Murphy, Graham Stoneburner, Neil Medchill and others in draft and they've all been impressive either in games or instructs. That leads us to the the scary part: there should have been more of them.

For the past two years, the Yanks have missed on an alarming number of big ticket items in IFA and the draft. In 2008, Gerrit Cole wouldn't sign with them and IFA Michael Inoa backed out of deal with them to sign a bigger deal with the small market A's. Then this past year, they had a deal fall through with a Cuban who lied about his age, then another one fell through with a Domincan shortstop who was similarly suspended. Looks like they're gonna re-sign him for much less under his new name "Perez" at some point in the near future. So they ended up with only Gary Sanchez and Chris Cabrera from the 7/2 signing date.


Now, what they had originally intended to do was sign up to 25 more IFA's that were either bypass (didn't get signed at 16) or late birthday kids. But they changed plans because Aroldis Chapman defected and they really wanted him...


Now here's the sneaky problem . Before the draft and IFA were held, the Yankees felt the best impact bats available to them would be in IFA, so that's why they reportedly short shrifted the draft budget, which was less this year than it had been in a few years, even though they had saved a lot last year by not signing Cole.

So, though they decided to hold off on a bunch of IFA's like Sano, they had already decided to not spend as much on the draft so they could spend it on the IFA's like Sano. So now, we don't sign as many of our draft picks as we should have, and we don't even sign Sano! And we're not gonna sign Chapman.


Of course, you would think with the money saved on Cole, Inoa, some picks this year, Sano, the Cuban who's deal got denied, Arredondo (Perez) who's deal got denied, and now Chapman, you'd think we'd be sitting on a ton of budget and signing more of the IFA's at the very least or at least articulating some new commitment to the farm. Instead, we've traded a bunch of prospects including Arodis Vizcaino and Austin Jackson, and apparently nothing's being done to replace not only those prospects but the picks we haven't signed over the last two years and the big ticket IFA's we didn't sign.


I did hear some buzz in late November that we were going to be signing some other Cubans and late birthday kids, but nothing has been anounced on any of that, and I'm wondering if the plans were once against changed and money was once again saved on the wrong end of the operation.


This will be an area of concern till we see expanded spending on the farm.


Update: Cash casually dropped the idea that he might trade for another OF earlier today. Obviously, any more like that could also hurt the farm.