After Hot Start, Yankees Looking Like Expected Flawed Roster
May 27, 2015 · Zachary D. Rymer · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
Through the first five weeks of the 2015 season, the New York Yankees looked good. Like, really good. Legitimately good.
… Too good.
Sure enough, what tends to happen with teams that look too good has happened to the Yankees. After starting off with a 21-12 record that had them leading the American League, they now find themselves at 24-22 and looking up at four other teams on the AL totem pole. Still good, but certainly not as good.
If you’re just now joining us, this is the result of a market correction of sorts—one that hit the Yankees really, really hard.
The Yankees didn’t win 21 of their first 33 games by accident. Per Baseball Savant, their powerful offense was leading the AL in Isolated Power at .182. Their starting pitchers had a solid 3.90 ERA. Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller were anchoring a seemingly unhittable bullpen by combining for 35 shutout innings with 56 strikeouts.
Basically, everything was going right for the Yankees. That meant one of two things: Either they really were that good, or they were a team playing way over their heads that was due for a harsh reality check.
Verdict: the latter.
Before putting a 19-1 hurting on the Kansas City Royals in their last two games, the Yankees had lost 10 out of 11 in cringe-worthy fashion. Along the way, their powerful offense could only muster a .111 ISO. Their starting pitchers regressed to post a 6.48 ERA. Even the Betances/Miller duo finally cracked when Miller surrendered a walk-off homer to Ryan Zimmerman in Washington.
And that’s how the Yankees have gotten to where they are today. It’s an equation that boils down to something really good turning into something really bad and, on the whole, creating something mediocre.
Or, put more simply: The Yankees have belatedly become what they were supposed to be this year.
Rather than just another ho-hum excellent year for the 27-time World Series champions, the Yankees came into 2015 looking for redemption after missing out on the postseason in 2013 and 2014. But as you’ll recall, they didn’t do much over the winter to make redemption an easily achievable goal.
The Yankees added some youth to a roster that had been one of MLB‘s oldest and creakiest in 2014, but not much. And though they did up their payroll by about $20 million, that was due more to Alex Rodriguez coming off his season-long suspension in 2014 than to the Yankees spending big money in free agency. They dropped $88 million on Miller and Chase Headley, but that’s all.
Bottom line: the Yankees changed, but they didn’t really improve.
Most everyone noticed. The consensus of various season previews—you’ll get the gist if you read Mike Axisa of CBS Sports, Albert Chen of Sports Illustrated and Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk—was that the Yankees’ collection of unproven youths and brittle veterans meant they were heading into 2015 as an ultimate boom-or-bust team. If things went their way, they’d be good. If not, they’d be a flawed team.
As it turns out, “flawed” is indeed the perfect word to describe these Yankees.
You can deduce as much simply from looking at the Yankees’ overall performance. Before their outburst in the last two games, they ranked eighth in the AL in runs scored. They also had slightly worse than an AL average ERA at 4.01. Defensively, Baseball Prospectus put them in the bottom 10 of the league in defensive efficiency.
Not surprisingly, a lot of this is owed to their most obvious boom-or-bust players going bust.
On offense, the Yankees were hoping to get more of what they got from Headley following last July’s trade with the San Diego Padres. Instead, the 31-year-old third baseman has settled back into the roughly league-average groove he’s been in since his big breakout in 2012.
Elsewhere on offense, the Yankees were hoping for bounce-back seasons from veterans Brian McCann, Carlos Beltran and Stephen Drew, and for a breakout from Didi Gregorius, the newly acquired heir to Derek Jeter. Instead, all four have been what they were in 2014: clearly below-average hitters.
Meanwhile, on the mound, the Yankees were putting faith in CC Sabathia feeling rejuvenated after season-ending knee surgery in 2014 and in Nathan Eovaldi translating his power stuff into results. Instead, the 34-year-old Sabathia still looks like a shell of his former self with a 5.47 ERA, and Eovaldi‘s 4.27 ERA puts him right where he was with the Miami Marlins in 2014.
Then there’s Masahiro Tanaka, who the Yankees were hoping would stay healthy and get back to the ace-like production he was posting before a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament launched him into a will-they-or-won’t-they Tommy John surgery quagmire. To nobody’s surprise, he quickly found himself dealing with more arm trouble in late April and has been on the disabled list ever since.
To be sure, the Yankees are not without their bright spots.
Jacoby Ellsbury and Brett Gardner have been a lethal tandem at the top of the lineup. Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira have shrugged off age and injury concerns to combine for 23 home runs. A healthy Michael Pineda has pitched even better than his rock-solid 3.59 ERA suggests. We’ve already mentioned the work of Betances and Miller, who are probably baseball’s best late-inning relief duo.
But when a team only has so many bright spots, it needs its other players to be capable role players. That hasn’t happened with the Yankees. And as a result, a roster that might have been nice and balanced has instead become a decidedly top-heavy unit. And as the Yankees can now vouch, top-heavy rosters tend to have problems with consistency.
Of course, there is time for the Yankees to get things sorted out. The troubling part there, however, is that it’s hard to see how that’s going to happen.
Given their recent track records, the Yankees can’t count on any of their disappointing pieces turning things around. They also have to be wary of Teixeira and Rodriguez succumbing to the age- and injury-related concerns, a very real threat considering that they’ve combined for 74 years on this earth and hundreds of days on the DL.
The Yankees could seek to add help, but that will be easier said than done. It’s a stretch to call their best minor league pieces (Aaron Judge, Luis Severino, Gary Sanchez) major league-ready. And with a $218 million payroll, the Yankees could be limited to hunting for bargain buys on the summer trade market rather than for real impact pieces.
There’s thus a good chance the Yankees will continue to be the team they are rather than revert to the team they were. That’s to say they’ll continue to hover between “not so good” and “just OK.”
And the projections for the rest of the season bear that out. As of Tuesday afternoon, Baseball Prospectus has the Yankees going 58-59 the rest of the way, and FanGraphs has them doing slightly better at 61-56. Either way, their goal is merely to beat the .500 mark rather than blow it away like so many Yankees teams of old.
We can, however, end this thing on a positive note: If the Yankees can even so much as do slightly better than .500 in the end, that could be good enough.
As bad as things have been going recently, the Yankees have a half-game lead over the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL East. To this end, Teixeira hit the nail on the head with his comments following Sunday’s 5-2 loss to the Texas Rangers.
“We’re still well within striking distance of first place,” the veteran first baseman told Ken Davidoff of the New York Post. “That’s the only thing we can take solace in, is we haven’t dug ourselves too big a hole. If there was a good team out there in the AL East that was lighting the standings on fire, we’d be in a big hole.”
Teixeira is right about the AL East not lighting the standings on fire, and that could be the case all year long.
The Rays are solid now, but they’re also loaded with pitching injuries. The Boston Red Sox can’t get on track on offense, on the mound or in the field. The Baltimore Orioles‘ roster resembles the Yankees’ in its top-heaviness. The Toronto Blue Jays can hit, but not enough to overcome their truly woeful pitching.
So even if we can’t give the Yankees credit for good roster-building, we can give them credit for good timing. Of all the years they could have chosen to traverse with a less-than-awesome roster, they picked one in which a less-than-awesome roster might actually be able to sneak into the postseason.
Sneaking into the postseason isn’t exactly a style the Yankees are used to, of course. But after falling short in 2013 and 2014, well, progress is progress.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.
Read more New York Yankees news on BleacherReport.com
Yankee Tickets
Shop Yankee
