Yankees At The Break
Thus, it's really not a good idea for Cashman to trade for a pitcher right now. Today he said his first choice was Price. Price is a great pitcher, but his velo has been declining for a few years and hasn't Cash learned anything from Sabathia? Power lefties who start leaking velo are problematic.
What's even worse, is that he'd have to give up Severino or Clarkin of both to get Price. Their futures are probably better than his, from this point forward. And having two cost controlled young studs in the rotation for several years would be an absolute boon to the Yankees.
So these are dangerous times for Yankee fans. Yes, it sucks to have a bad team, but trying to fix it with a trade or two from a farm that is finally bouncing back, could extend the suck till the end of the decade.
Those IFA's we signed 12 days ago are all 5 or 6 years away..
posted by Kalel9 @ 12:50 PM
12 Comments:
As much as I think Cashman is an incompetent GM who happened to inherit one of the greatest situations in the history of sports, he said something the other day that caught my attention.
While declaring that he is aggressively pursuing the trade market, he said as an aside (paraphrasing): "Unless I am told otherwise."
That means that he is following the apparent mandate of competing until, as Clinton used to say: "The last dog dies."
They won't think about next year until they are mathematically eliminated, and obviously that isn't in the offing right now.
So while I think he is a bad judge of talent, and has failed miserably, despite many years notice, at preparing for the decline of the past era's core, I think he is doing what the owner wants which, as I have said, is doing just enough to fool the casual fan.
I really don't think he is a lame duck because I think the owner is too stupid or lazy to want the best possible people in positions of authority.
So right now, Hal is worse than Dolan.
I think that's true, too. I think they work from a model that that were unwilling to spend on continuing until it was broken-down.
On second thought, you could be right about the lame duck status. Most of what I said could be true, but he could be facing pressure based on what has turned out to be some very poor decisions.
Injuries aside, when you are spending this much money relative to the majority of teams, it's reasonable to expect a better result.
But how then isn't offense the priority when they are 13 out of 15 in RS.
Obviously a much better offense would hide bad pithing as it did for much of this century. I have no idea why they haven't pursued that, or just promoted the kids who can hit.
It's a little crazy.
Baseball 101 a good farm makes a great gm.
The reasons we don't have a good farm are on ownership.
I don't think we can absolve the GM. Ownership didn't mess up Hughes and Joba, or decide that IPK was the one to be traded. Or to not emphasize OBP in the mL. Now, if you want to say that ownership has tolerated thus GM despite the failures for too long, then I agree
They do emphasize OBP in the mL. They give every kid targets, including OBP of where they want them by year's end. They have a plan for every kid. The problem is they don't get implemented day to day.
Also, development has been made harder by being so good that they've never picked high in two decades, and they've also forfeited a ton of 1's on FA's.
And, under George, there was a period where they didn't care about the farm, and lots of the scouting talent and minor league coaching talent left.
Then, under Hal, they had stupid freaking draft budgets that made them bargain shoppers during their drafts.
Thus the bad farm is a product of 20 years of winning and also a product of 2 periods of indifferent ownership.
If it's not being implemented, it's ultimately the GM's job to ensure that it is.
Tampa has drafted Shields, Cobb, Moore, Jennings and others in the later rounds. The Cards have done similar things.
So yes, they could spend more (Hal sucks too), but when you haven't integrated a position prospect on to the ML roster since Gardner, and a starting pitcher since Pettitte (or if you want to say Wang), there is a problem, and the GM bears responsibility.
Again, if two of Hughes, Joba, and IPK were now important members of the starting rotation, people would be lauding Cashman, and rightly so.
He has failed. Not that it matters though. He is here as long as he wants and as a result, the team will probably always underperform its potential. Couple that with his poor trades and free agent signings (and factor in his choice as manager), and that's why $300m a year may be necessary soon.
I'm not saying he hasn't failed.
I'm saying the reason we don't have better mL players is more the fault of the owners than of anyone else.
We would have had Miguel Sano the same year we got Gary Sanchez, but Hal let us be outbid by the Twins.
He basically instituted draft pools for the Draft team before ML did.
Having said that, we have lost a bunch of really good prospect, pitching and otherwise to injuries.
Things would look a lot differently if Heathcott hadn't broken down and Tyler Austin's wrists didn't get screwed up.
Or if Angel Reyes didn't get hurt, or Ravel didn't destroy his leg.
So, while I agree that Cashman has failed, the mL story is more complicated than that, and not the biggest part of his job.
I agree with much of that, so I won't quibble on parceling the percentage of blame, although Heathcott was always high risk, and there is the issue of self-scouting and deciding that the risk of holding outweighs the gain of selling for some players that begin to emerge but are less safe bets than others either due to injury history or position changes or sudden upticks in power, etc.
And let's hope that Sanchez is still a Yankee by the start of next season.
On another issue, Robertson says that there have been no talks on an extension, and he sounds disappointed. That could be on Hal or Cashman or both. It's hard to know.
Via Anthony McCarron: Free agent-to-be David Robertson confirmed he has not yet had any contract extension talks with the Yankees. “We’ll see what happens (after the season),” he said while noting he’d like to remain in New York. “There haven’t been any talks, so we’ll see … There’s just been zero talks. When the offseason comes, it comes and we’ll hear what other teams and everybody else wants to say.”
They should have extended DRob, but, idiots that they are, they probably think Betances should be their next closer, and that they shouldn't pay DRob to be our second best reliever.
Of course they should.
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