Yankees Meetings

The Yankee execs are all in Tampa to meet with Hal and Hank and perhaps make some moves intended to fix the farm.   Some articles are speculating that Mark Newman and Damon Oppenheimer could be on the way out.   Now I have long argued that player development has been the bigger problem than player acquisition.  

However; player acquisition has still been a problem, but I don't think that's Damon Oppenheimer's fault.     Until the draft caps of the last two years, the Yankees were free to spend whatever they wanted to in the MLB draft.   But Hal insisted on budgets.  Damon only spent what he was allowed to spend, and only drafted players he was allowed to draft.  Meanwhile, under Damon, the Yanks have been impressive with their picks outside the top 100.

Now, the Yankees also didn't play the QO game as well as teams like the Red Sox did, and thus didn't have as many top 100 picks as the Sox and others.   That's not Damon's fault either.

During the past several years, the Yanks have spent bucks adding more and more accomplished scouts, but really charged them with finding lottery tickets, rather than giving them free reign to commit Yankee dollars.

So, while I think there is a development problem that goes all the way up the chain (Hughes and Joba were ruined at the Major League level), I think the scouting issue is really more a Hal and his budgets issue, than a problem with the scouts.

We'll see what the Yankees conclude about this.   I hope they make good decisions this week, but that's not a given.