Yankees Catching Conundrum

First off, let me remind you that Wally Pipp was a pretty good player.  What he wasn't was a ridiculously overcompensated player, so, when Lou Gehrig was ready the Yanks had no compunction about making the Lou the starter and packing Pipp off the Cincinatti the following year.  The decisions can be that easy when all things are equal, as they should be, and things like veteraness and salary don't become overweighted factors.  Unfortunately, that's happened repeatedly during this era of Yankee mediocrity.  By the way, that's Yankee mediocrity not regular mediocrity. And nowhere is is it so apparent than at the Catcher position.

In their history, the Yanks have won relatively few championshiops without either Dickey, Berra, Howard, Munson of Posada behind the dish.  I think Girardi and Schang (who had a Yankee Bat)  were the Catchers for virtually all of the other titles.  So, looking at their own long and majestic history should have clued them into the fact that they do better with homegrowns, and allowed them to chill until Gary Sanchez was ready.

They had a good situation at catcher a few years ago when they had Russel Martin and Francisco Cervelli catching.  They were actually the perfect tandem to keep the spot warm for the next great homegrowns, hell, Cervelli is now a wealthy homegrown playing for the Pirates and Martin is competing for titles with Toronto.

But instead of chilling with some combination of Martin, Cervelli, Murphy and Romine of the past few years, the Yanks, quite foolishly, in 2014, signed Brian McCann to a contract that is now keeping him in the lineup even though Sanchez is ready, and already a much better hitter.  As I pointed out two and a half years ago, when I was urging the Yankees not so sign McCann: his career has been trending down since his mid-20s, after peaking at age 24.

So the articles that say that Girardi is now puzzled with McCann's struggles (I believe he has not been under .210 for a calendar year) are hilarious.  He is clearly not the HoF type player that he looked like when he was 24, and the Yanks paid him like when he was 30.

And there is no way under the traditional Yankee values that McCann should be blocking Gary Sanchez right now. It's something they absolutely need to address, because you just can't run a team where better players are being blocked because of high salaries.  It hasn't worked and it's not gonna work.  And I'm pretty sure we are all sick of watching it.

I have no idea if they can trade McCann and have seen no evidence that they would man up and DFA him, but they can't keep running the Yankees like this and harming their own compete level.