Yankees Farm: Short Season Stuff

The NY-Penn League starts tomorrow.  The much awaited GCL season doesn't start till June 20th.   The Yanks will once again have 2 teams in the GCL.   As soon as we get an SI Yanks roster, I'll take a look at it, but we probably won't have one till tomorrow.

The way the Yanks have used their short season teams has evolved.  Years ago, the SI Yanks were largely non-prospecty, and the league itself was a bit of a promotional adjunct to the local teams of the east coast.  To wit, the Yanks would often have to spend a lot of day three picks just to fill the SI roster with veteran college players, and thus, even before the rules changed, would forego the opportunity to draft and pay signability talent at many of those slots.

The GCL used to be where they would play the few preps they were drafting as well as the youngest IFA's who were stateside.

But this has changed in a few key ways.  First before the rules changed, the Yanks broke themselves away from using SI as a bit of an indoctrination center for organizational types.   Believe it or not they were just collecting so many preps and IFA's, that they had to use it for prospects.

It's also been acting as an extra step between the GCL and the Sally league.   This is a little problematic because, you end up with bottlenecking at the Sally league level, which has forced a backlog of prospects along the chain, most of whom end up in SI, but some of whom are now spending seasons in extended spring training, waiting for a shot. That's suboptimal.

Last year, they added a second GCL team, which hasn't yet solved the problem and may have moved the bottlenecking back to the SI level.

Another thing they did over the past several years, is draft some college players who were just 20 or 21, and were making a position switch, usually to pitcher, and added them to the kids in the GCL, Connor Mullee comes to mind.  Now, he kept getting hurt, which is another thing about these short season leagues, but it was a good idea and certainly remains worth a try -- it gives them a place where they can dominate younger kids while they're learning more pitches.

Besides the period where they were drafting more preps than college guys, after the mid decade scandal involving IFA's and kickbacks, the Yanks took a half a step back from the big ticket signings in IFA, and were spending roughly the same amount, but on more players.

(They've actually found some very promising guys that way. in fact, our whole farm would look a bit different if Ravel Santana hadn't destroyed his ankle and lower leg as he was tearing up the GCL.  That guy was going to rocket through the system and be an all-star.

On a side, note, that they are willing to go big on guys like Dermis Garcia and the rest this year, probably tells us we should be excited.)

So, the gross numbers of IFA's were causing back ups at the DSL level, which was a negative -- kids have to know they can play their way to America --- so now we have two GCL teams, a lot of IFA's coming over or already over and in EST, and very few preps from the `14 draft, but a bunch of guys from last year's draft who need places to play.

The college heavy `14 draft is going to create some weird rosters for awhile.   For example SI is going to contain some college graduates and some teenagers.  If there's a backlog, one or both of the GCL teams could have a similar mix.  It's unlikely that any of this year's IFA class will be over after they make things official next month.

So they've done some interesting things with the short season teams, and are giving more kids a chance to play with the extra GCL team.  

But there are still a few big problems with the short season teams.   The biggest is the teaching seems to be awful and they are not learning to grind.

We've seen this all season long in the Sally League, where the youngest full season players in both the Red Sox and Braves organizations are grinding our pitchers into sawdust, while our guys are swinging at anything that's round.

Now, if you ask them about it, they'll say it's hard to teach them, yet Kevin Seitzer has turned the free swinging Toronto Blue Jays into a grinding walking offense just this season, and vets are harder to teach than kids.

So I believe the teaching at the EST, GCL and NYPL level is just awful and in serious need of an upgrade, it might be the biggest problem the organization has in its development program.

We'll see if anything's changed there, starting tomorrow.