Well, it's not just that. The Yankees in recent years have been built upon having a powerful offense. They have absolutely no problem flexing their muscles in the regular season on a pretty consistant basis. But for a team that invests that much into their offense, the fall of production between the regular season and post season totally kills they never could rely on their pitching to single-handedly win these games.
Exactly what should be done to fix that? They're still going to put together the best offense they can. Players like Damon and Cano, who go against the "power" type of offense, struggled mightily in the post-season. There's nothing you can do except getting the best players possible, and hope everything clicks in October, something it hasn't done the last two years. It's the pitching that needs to be upgraded. Nothing can be done to upgrade the offense, it just needs to click at the right time. The pitching, on the other hand, was awful, and featured a number of weak links that have been upgraded.
Gammons was on Dan Patrick's radio show and said he thinks Igawa's contract with the Yankees was the best deal of the off-season. He said Igawa will be a good back end guy who can win 12-14 games, is known as a "big game pitcher" in Japan, is young, left handed, and will only make $4M a year. As far as worst deal, he said probably Meche to KC for 5/$55M, although he can't blame them too much since they needed to make a signing and never spend any money. Maybe Pierre's absurd contract (I agree).
"best players possible" is a phrase that is constantly up to debate. In fact, I think the last few years have reinforced that. We didn't have the best players possible at each position during our championships. True, pitching was a huge strength at the time, but the offense didn't choke in the playoffs, as has been the case for many of our postseason failures. A lot has to do with filling roles in a lineup, not high paid sluggers, which we have had more than anytime in our successful years. What can be done to fix it? A lot is not correctable, since there are long-term, unattractive contracts. In the short term, I would've started with A-Rod. That would've eliminated 2 problems (individual choke job, and eliminating a big bat from our lineup...it's overkill), and we would have obtained highly competitive compensation since everything and their mother wanted him. I don't have a solution to this, but I honestly can't get too excited since nothing has changed.
Just glancing at the Yankees championship years: '96 postseason ALDS Offense: .218 / .315 / .373 Pitching: 3.46 ERA ALCS Offense: .273 / .351 / .497 Pitching: 3.64 ERA WS Offense: .216 / .310 / .286 Pitching: 3.93 ERA '98 postseason ALDS Offense: .253 / .313 / .451 Pitching: 0.33 ERA ALCS Offense: .218 / .338 / .330 Pitching: 3.21 ERA WS Offense: .309 / .398 / .475 Pitching: 2.75 ERA '99 postseason ALDS Offense: .235 / .312 / .378 Pitching: 0.33 ERA ALCS Offense: .239 / .313 / .409 Pitching: 3.80 ERA WS Offense: .270 / .333 / .416 Pitching: 2.19 ERA '00 postseason ALDS Offense: .244 / .309 / .333 Pitching: 4.70 ERA ALCS Offense: .279 / .362 / .417 Pitching: 3.06 ERA WS Offense: .263 / .357 / .408 Pitching: 2.68 ERA Now let's look at the last two postseasons. '05 postseason ALDS Offense: .253 / .347 / .392 Pitching: 4.40 ERA '06 postseason ALDS Offense: .246 / .289 / .388 Pitching: 5.56 ERA --------------------------------- This offense ranks in about the middle of the pack compared to the dynasty offense, however the pitching has been much worse than anything we saw during the championship run (save for the 2000 ALDS). The pitching is just as much, probably more of a problem, than the offense.
Yeah, I do understand that, but what just doesn't add up with the Yankees is the amount of the Yankees have invested in their offense relative to the amount of production they get out of it. So there is less bang for your buck on offense, and that hinders your ability to invest as much into the pitching.
Let's just take this past year as an example. Our regular season OPS was .824 and we scored 5.74 runs per game. Our postseason OPS was .388? Over a 400 point dropoff? Our regular season ERA was 4.41, giving up an average of 4.73 runs a game. With a postseason ERA of 5.56, had we scored like did all year long, we win in a sweep. No question the pitching has been subpar in the postseason for us, but to put more blame on the pitching, which we know to be porous, and not more balme on bats that did not keep up their end of the bargain is off the mark, IMO. We do need to upgrade the pitching, we do agree there. As I've said many a time, defense wins games. (Hence my stance on Melky.) However, we need to fix this lineup. If we don't create souveniers, we don't win.
So because we "expect" the pitching to be bad, they get lesser blame? Huh!? During the dynasty run, our postseason offense was generally subpar, but our pitching was generally great. And we won. During the last two years, our postseason offense has generally been subpar, and our pitching has been subpar as well. And we lost. The pitching gets more blame, here, folks. How many times does one have to use the cliche "pitching wins championships" before people actually believe it? And I'll never understand how one can say defense wins games in baseball, over pitching and offense, or a combination of the three. I mean, Boston had BY FAR the best defense they've had in a long time, specifically the last 4 years, and finished worse than they did in either of the previous 3 seasons. But I'm not getting into that whole thing again. Oh, and by the way, this last year the postseason OPS was .677, not .388
I count pitching as a significant part of defense bro. We're on the same page. I'm not excusing the pitching at all. I just feel that had the bats not totally let us down, we'd have gone further into October. My bad on the OPS. I thought that was one of the numbers you posted. My misinterpretation. But still, that's a 200 point drop. That's a lot.
The Yankees have signed Cuban infielder Juan Miranda to a $2.07 million, four-year contract, MSNBC reports. Miranda played for Pinar Del Rio in Cuba from 2002-04, and the Yankees said he hit .303 there with 27 homers, 73 walks and 87 strikeouts. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16328132/from/RS.1/
He is supposedly 24 years old. We don't know his actual age. He is gonna start in AAA and be there for a while. Our bullpen is probably one of the tops in the ML now. That's for sure. We have a couple of ?'s for the rotation. A) How is Randy's back? B) Kei Igawa: Is he as advertised? And that's all there is to it honestly. If we have the chance (which we do right now), we can sign both Loretta and Mientkiewicz to deals. Loretta can be out utility man and he is the perfect guy for the job. Loretta is a true professional and I don't think he would really mind taking a smaller role. He will probably play about 90-100 games. Doug is the man for first base, no contest. I don't care that he is a lleft handed bat, his glove is one of the best if not THE best at first base. We get these two guys, our offseason is a wrap.
http://buccoblog.mlblogs.com/my_weblog/2006/12/too_late_the_tr.html Though, I'm waiting for a second source....
Positive: Yankees get a very good lefty set-up man. Negative: Bernie will be back, and see a lot of playing time next year, specifically in the field.
As a Yankee fan I am going back and forth on this trade. I LOVE the addition to Mike Gonzalez and I think he could make us have a formidable bullpen which was a key ingredient to past success. However, giving up Melky is tough. He played an excellent left field last year while providing some great hits. I believe he could have been a starter in the future (1-2 years) because of the depth at outfield already on this team. However, since the Yankees are all about winning now this is a good deal for them.
This is from the link that FITM posted: UPDATE 1:11 am Saturday morning: A few people have emailed me that WPXI in Pittsburgh reported last night that Mike Gonzalez cancelled an appearance at a baseball clinic in Texas Friday to take his physical for the Yankees. More as it becomes available.
I am bit worried about Gonzo's elbow but if he is healthy this significantly upgrades the Yankees bullpen. I still dont like losing Melky but the Yankee BP will have to be strong to overcome the poor defensive OF.
I'm a fan of the trade. Gonzalez adds alil more depth to our bullpen and moves Farnsworth down a notch into a middle reliever type role. This also keeps Gonzalez away from Boston...who were rumored to be strongly interested. I loved Melky, but we already have plenty of hitting and outfielders..and needed help much more in the bullpen.
I can't see Farnsworth being a middle reliever. He can't pitch that many innings. He can barely stay healthy when pitching 3 outs every two days. Honestly, it looks to me that Cashman is setting the team up for the semi-near future. Sure, we all would love to believe that Mo can pitch another 10 years, but how many does he truly have left? Even he said he wants to "hang on" until the new Stadium is built. That's not too far off at this point. It's quite possible that Cashman isn't confident Mo can even pitch that long. There's nothing wrong with making sure you're protected. Given that Mo has some health issues each year now, and when he was out last year, so was Farnsworth, it's a good baseball move to make sure you have someone else in the stable to fill the role for half a month. I still don't like losing Melky, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet. Matsui had the left field job, and Bernie is still around. That relegates Melky to the 5th outfield spot. He'd play so little that his skills would deteriorate, and he would become useless to us, and valueless in a trade. Moving him now is the best move, and allows for the maximum ROI. I am taking the same approach with Cashman now that I did with Mangini/Tannenbaum before the season started. Let him make his moves, take an initial opinion on it, and have faith that he knows what he's doing. When he was in charge back in the 90s, we had perennial champions. Now that he has the reigns back in his hands, there's no reason to believe he won't bring that same magic back.
