It is now 2015. The Yankees, winners of 27 World Series titles, have gone 27 months without winning a single playoff game. New York has not even led a postseason contest since Derek Jeter broke his ankle in the first game of the 2012 ALCS.
The signs of a collapse were there, as plain as the X-rays showing Jeter’s broken ankle, but it has taken two additional years – and two playoff misses, the first such streak in two decades – for Yankees management to respond with a change in thinking. But unlike when I wrote about New York’s impending struggles two years ago, in a piece entitled “Pinstriped Pessimism,” the team’s moves this offseason see me approaching the coming year with guarded optimism as to the Yankees’ new direction.
Some critics, including this site’s proprietor just last week, have pointed to the team’s uncertainty at several key positions as an indictment of management’s poor planning in recent years. While this claim holds true to an extent, it is an oversimplification to cast all blame on general manager Brian Cashman et al. without considering the broader factors that have contributed to New York’s lack of readiness for a post-Jeter world.
The Yankees of the last decade routinely patched rotation holes with Randy Johnsons and Kevin Browns and filled out their lineup with Gary Sheffields and Bobby Abreus. But in recent years, those complementary pieces have showed their age, and with the increased emphasis on contract extensions for young stars league-wide, centerpiece-type players simply have been unavailable for poaching in free agency.
Evan Longoria’s contract extension in 2008 proved a turning point for how teams have handled their young players’ futures. Signing just a week into his MLB career, Longoria grabbed an extension that traded extra years for fewer dollars – providing the player with long-term security and the team with a bargain if the player lived up to his potential.
Even an abridged list of players who have signed similar extensions since 2008 could double as a veritable 25-man All-Star roster:
- P: Madison Bumgarner, Chris Sale, Johnny Cueto, Gio Gonzalez, Julio Teheran, Matt Moore, Chris Archer, Craig Kimbrel
- C: Jonathan Lucroy, Salvador Perez
- 1B: Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Rizzo
- 2B: Jose Altuve, Jason Kipnis
- SS: Troy Tulowitzki, Starlin Castro, Andrelton Simmons
- 3B: Evan Longoria, Matt Carpenter
- LF: Ryan Braun, Michael Brantley, Starling Marte
- CF: Mike Trout, Carlos Gomez
- RF: Giancarlo Stanton (whose new contract admittedly isn’t short on dollars)
The players on that list have 44 All-Star appearances and zero free agent dollars among them – and that doesn’t include Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez, and Buster Posey, all of whom signed much richer contract extensions. A decade ago, at least a few of those players would have made their way to the Bronx once their rookie contracts expired; now, the Yankees’ outdated philosophy has them signing a washed-up Carlos Beltran and a power-sapped Brian McCann instead of still-budding stars.
Even worse have been the team’s efforts to find complementary players to round out the lineup. In just the last two years, the Yankees have attempted to strike gold with short-term deals with players in their 30s, only to see those hopes dashed within a matter of weeks with each of those players. Brian Roberts, Kelly Johnson, Stephen Drew (acquired in a trade for Johnson), Lyle Overbay, Travis Hafner, Kevin Youkilis, and Vernon Wells combined for a meager .214 batting average and .639 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in their short stints with the team.
Instead of signing such a player to fill in the infield this year, the Yankees made a pair of trades in December that show the team will be relying on an infusion of youth up the middle. New York traded for Arizona shortstop Didi Gregorius – a move criticized on this site a week ago – and shipped veteran Martin Prado, then expected to start at second base, to Miami in exchange for young pitcher Nathan Eovaldi, formerly a top-100 prospect.
In replacing last year’s up-the-middle duo of Jeter and Roberts (combined age: 76), the Yankees will now pair Gregorius (age 24) with either Rob Refsnyder (23) or Jose Pirela (25). Although they have just a handful of MLB at-bats between them, the two second-base options have flashed impressive minor league numbers: Refsnyder hit .318/.387/.497 across Double-A and Triple-A a year ago, and Pirela reached double digits in doubles, triples, and home runs in Triple-A.
Last season, the Yankees were one of just two teams, along with the last-place Phillies, to have an average batting age above 30, per Baseball Reference’s metric. But that’s nothing new for New York, which has made a habit of fielding lineups full of players on the wrong side of the aging curve: since the 1994 strike, the Yankees have had an average batting age above 30 every season. In that same span, no other club has such a streak of even 10 years – the Yankees have gone 21 straight without pause.
Plugging in a pair of mid-20s middle infielders won’t halt that pattern by itself, not with the rest of the Yankees starting lineup still populated with expensive 30-somethings. But it’s a start.
Pitching-wise, moreover, the addition of Eovaldi, combined with potential rotation-mates Masahiro Tanaka, Michael Pineda, and Ivan Nova, could give the team four starters age 28 or younger. The most recent times that the Yankees’ average pitching age skewed younger than 30 were 2009 and the mid-1990s, coincidentally also years that saw New York win the World Series.
A main piece of criticism has come regarding the Yankees’ lack of a plan to follow Jeter despite knowing that their longtime captain was nearing his end. But having a ready-made replacement waiting in Triple-A is easier said than done.
Of the sport’s top 15 shortstop prospects (per Baseball America’s 2014 rankings), only one was drafted outside the top 20 of the first round—and the Yankees, by virtue of making the playoffs nearly every season, have picked outside the top 20 every year except one since the strike. (That one shortstop exception is Chris Owings, picked 41st overall by the Diamondbacks in 2009, who last year posted nearly identical numbers to Gregorius’s 2013 season in splitting time with – who else – Gregorius.)
The Yankees simply haven’t been in position to draft a Carlos Correa (1st overall pick) or Francisco Lindor (8th). Fifth-ranked shortstop prospect Addison Russell, the Athletics’ 11th overall pick in 2012, moved to the Cubs’ Double-A squad in exchange for three months of Jeff Samardzija last season, but it is simply unrealistic to have expected the contending Yankees of recent years to trade a major league star for future help. (See below for a more detailed look at the difficulty of drafting in the latter stages of the first round.)
While Gregorius admittedly looks helpless at the plate against lefties, he is a career .262/.332/.411 hitter against righthanded pitchers – not peak Jeter numbers but certainly not Brendan Ryan statistics either. Moreover, shortstop is a black hole of offense in baseball right now, with the league far removed from the halcyon days of Jeter, Rodriguez, Tejada, and Garciaparra posting eye-popping numbers from the position.
The average American League OPS last year was .706, and only two AL shortstops – Jose Reyes and Alexei Ramirez – bettered that mark. In 2013, only one AL shortstop, J.J. Hardy, rated better than average.
Gregorius’s OPS in 2013 was .704, ranking ninth out of 24 shortstops to tally at least 400 plate appearances and putting Gregorius ahead of more prominent names such as Asdrubal Cabrera, Jimmy Rollins, and Elvis Andrus. Gregorius is also a career .269 hitter away from home, with Arizona’s Chase Field rating as a below-average ballpark for lefties to hit in while Yankee Stadium’s short rightfield porch makes Gregorius’s new home a haven for lefty batters.
Reality check: the Yankees’ two offseason pickups were a pitcher with a career 15-35 record who surrendered the most hits in the National League last year and a .184 hitter against lefties who has fewer hits in his career than Jeter had in 16 separate seasons.
But that they’ll be given a chance on the roster at all is an encouraging step for New York’s philosophical shift as Cashman attempts to build the Yankees’ first playoff team in several years and end what qualifies as a drought in the Bronx. Baseball is changing, and the Yankees can’t continue to rely on aging ex-stars; they need to embrace the inherent uncertainty that comes from plugging rookies and minor league products into the lineup and see if the Refsnyders of the organization can become the next generation’s Jeters.
EVERY TEAM STINKS AT DRAFTING LATE IN THE FIRST ROUND
As mentioned above, only one of the top 15 shortstop prospects in baseball was picked outside the top 20 of the first round. But the issue of finding top prospects predominantly at the top of the first round extends to all corners of the diamond.
Beyond the top few picks each year, there simply aren’t many stars to be found. This phenomenon is well-documented – a Baseball America post from 2013, for instance, showed that only 15% of players picked outside the first round so much as make it to the major leagues – but it is still revealing how stark the drop-off is even from the beginning of the first round to its end.
Between 1995 and 2010, players picked in the latter third of the first round (pick 20 or later) routinely failed to become successful major leaguers. Of the 174 such picks, only 30, or fewer than 20%, have accumulated at least 5 wins above replacement in their careers thus far – and that number falls to just 17, or less than 10%, when counting only players who tallied 5 WAR with their drafting team.
As a methodological example, Jayson Werth was the 22nd overall pick in 1997 for the Orioles, but because none of his 31.1 career WAR came with the Orioles, he counts as one of the 30 successful picks but not one of the 17 successful-with-his-drafting-team players. CC Sabathia, though, counts as both an overall success and a team success, given that he accumulated more than 5 WAR with the Indians, his drafting team.
Of those 174 draftees, 72 never played in the majors, and a full half of those who did (52 out of the remaining 102) never produced positive WAR for their drafting team. Essentially, a team picking late in the first round is a lot more likely to end up with a September call-up or bullpen filler, at best, than it is to find the next Mike Trout or Sabathia.
In a similar analysis discussed on View from the Bleachers in 2012, albeit with slightly different parameters, Michael Jimenez found similar results: from 1990 through 2006, only 10% of draftees picked 20th or later in the first round became strong contributors for their drafting team, and a whopping 82% became what he labeled as “busts.”
At that rate, that label sounds less like “bust” and more like “expectation.”
Keeping with the theme of this column, the Yankees have turned only 50% of their late first-round draft picks into major leaguers, but that isn’t far from what other teams have accomplished. To cherry-pick a few examples: Oakland, the team most known for its drafting and player development prowess thanks to Moneyball, has seen similar results to the Yankees – just half of its late first-round picks, too, have made it to the majors, and between 2002 and 2007 alone, the Athletics drafted six players in that range who failed to progress all the way through the minor leagues.
The Red Sox have hit on just one of 10 such opportunities, the Dodgers on just one of nine, and the Braves have failed to turn any of their nine late first-round picks into solid major league contributors. There is no doubt that these teams have done a better job drafting players outside the first round, with Boston in particular unearthing gem after late-round gem to build an impressive minor league system, and this column is in no way intended to absolve Yankees’ management of blame for how poorly minor leaguers have been developed over the past two decades.
However, consider that Minnesota has perhaps been the most successful team at picking late in the first round: seven of 11 Twins draftees have played in the majors, with four passing the 5-WAR benchmark and a fifth, Ben Revere, likely reaching the mark with the Phillies next season. That the best team at drafting and developing these picks is successful less than half the time – perhaps parallel to how the best hitters reach base less than half the time, Barry Bonds circa 2002 excepted – speaks even more to the uncertain nature of this segment of the draft, to say nothing of picks in later rounds.
The Yankees are actually one of four franchises, along with Oakland, Minnesota, and St. Louis, to have at least three draftees hit that 5 WAR mark. For New York, 1996 selection Eric Milton was traded to the Twins for Chuck Knoblauch, who helped the Yankees win three straight World Series; 2004 draftee Phil Hughes made an All-Star team as a Yankee; and 2006 pick Ian Kennedy went to Arizona as part of the Curtis Granderson deal.
There’s a common thread between Milton, Hughes, and Kennedy: they are all pitchers. On the hitting side, however, the Yankees have fared much worse; the last position player they picked in the first round to amass even 10 at-bats with the team is Jeter.
Still, that’s not a Yankees-specific problem but rather a league-wide one. Only four position players picked in the studied range have ever made an All-Star team: Werth and Jacoby Ellsbury have been selected to one each, Carlos Quentin two, and Trout three in just three years in the majors. (Similarly, only five position players selected in this range have accumulated more than 15 career WAR: Werth, Trout, Ellsbury, Denard Span, and Adam Kennedy.)
What’s the lesson here? Perhaps nothing, beyond confirming what many have already suspected about the difficulty of identifying and selecting future All-Stars outside the top of the draft. Or maybe, given that several big-name free agents are still waiting for a contract this winter, teams shying away from signing a top player should be less concerned with losing a draft pick who likely won’t amount to much in the future and more concerned with improving their major league squads in the present – particularly given that the teams picking in the 20s already have playoff-caliber rosters and could use the extra help now.
The sacrifice is worth it. Besides, of course, the Yankees signing Mark Teixeira and in so doing losing the draft pick that became Mike Trout. So maybe the Yankees do have some draft lessons to learn after all.