Hal Steinbrenner has promised a thorough post-mortem this offseason to delve into why the Yankees missed the playoffs for the first time since 2016.
Of course, the Yankees owner has offered a version of this annually once the club is bounced from the playoffs.
This plays a little like when teams say they did their “due diligence” on an issue. For example, I am sure the Yankees would say they did their “due diligence” on Carlos Rodon, yet here he is with the second-worst ERA ever for a Yankees pitcher who made at least 14 starts in a season while combining injury (to his body) and insult (to both fans and to the pitching coach).
What will be different this time is Steinbrenner pledged to bring in an outside firm to audit his operation, noting analytics in particular. The way the Yankees have been duped in so many other areas, Steinbrenner needs to be careful he is not being provided more snake oil by someone good at taking his money and bad at solving his problems.
So, in this little corner of the world, we do try to help. In this week’s “Got my attention,” my attention is focused on Anthony Volpe. Because for the Yankees to return quickly to the playoffs next year, internal improvement is vital, and perhaps there is no player that is more true about than Volpe.
So rather than detail every question Steinbrenner should be asking (perhaps I will cover more in the coming weeks), I thought I would use the Yankees shortstop to delve into three areas the owner certainly should be exploring:
1. It was a hell of a success story by the Yankees to convince Volpe to forgo his commitment to Vanderbilt and sign to play pro ball out of high school after being the 30th pick.
They also had the 38th pick via a trade of Sonny Gray to Cincinnati. The Yankees took lefty TJ Sikkema.
Four picks later, with the first selection of the second round, the Orioles drafted Gunnar Henderson.
Now, let’s be fair, any club could have taken Henderson, not just the Yankees.
But Steinbrenner should find out why the Yankees didn’t take him, especially in light of the fact this is the entire list of position players drafted by the Yankees who were in the majors this season: Kyle Higashioka, Ben Gamel, Jake Cave, Rob Refsnyder, Aaron Judge, Tyler Wade, Blake Rutherford, Nick Solak, Canaan Smith-Njigba, Volpe, Josh Smith and Austin Wells.
To date that reads like Aaron Judge and The Pips. And, yes, never having a high-first-round selection where most of the best domestic talent (especially positional talent) comes from is a large hurdle.
But here is just a short list of players who were available to the Yankees besides Henderson in the draft: Mookie Betts, Marcus Semien, Matt Olson, Freddie Freeman, Austin Riley, Nico Hoerner, Bo Bichette, Cody Bellinger and Will Smith.
This also leads to a question not just about drafting, but then about development: Basically, are the Yankees maximizing the players selected?
Which brings us back to…
2. In 2018, Henderson was one of the final cuts for the American 18-and-under team participating in the Pan Am Games. Volpe made that team and batted third on a club that also had CJ Abrams, Corbin Carroll, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Riley Greene and Bobby Witt Jr..
He hit third because the people running the team thought he was the best hitter on a roster that the presumptive 2023 AL Rookie of the Year (Henderson) did not make and the presumptive NL Rookie of the Year (Carroll) did make.
What happened to that hitter? Why did Henderson — two months younger than Volpe, taken 12 picks later — blossom into not just a good rookie, but one of the best players in the game under the Orioles’ purview while Volpe hit .209? That was the second-lowest average ever for someone the Yankees let take 600 plate appearances (Frankie Crosetti hit .194 in 1940 and lost his shortstop job the following season to a kid named Phil Rizzuto).
Who along the way convinced Volpe to open up and try to pull so much? To what end? He made his amateur and minor-league reputation as a good all-around hitter. For the 2023 Yankees, he struck out in 27.8 percent of his plate appearances, the 13th-most among qualifiers. Among the 10 Yankees who batted most often this season — a list that, among others, includes Judge and Giancarlo Stanton — no one pulled the ball more often than Volpe did.
Steinbrenner should want to hear why Carroll and Henderson came up hitting and emerged as top-20 players in the game while Volpe’s hitting had some power but not enough good at-bats. Steinbrenner should want to know what is going to be done to get Volpe to hit .275 and get on base 34 percent of the time to use his speed.
And about his speed …
3. Volpe was the player who best mastered the teachings of the Yankees base-running philosophy of taking a momentum lead — basically a hop to try to gain forward momentum. It was carried over from the minors, where the Yankees had success with it. But there is a difference between the majors and the minors. In the majors, teams go to town on anything that is working to see a) if they can incorporate it, and b) if they can prevent it.
Volpe used the technique to go 15-for-15 in steals in his first 72 games. But in his final 87 games, Volpe was just 9-for-14 — and he was picked off three times. This is the major leagues. They will separate the real from the gimmicks. Pitchers just began to change their hold times against Volpe, and after at first being unnerved and thrown off in their timing by Volpe, that flipped. He became less successful and more tentative.
It fit into a general theme for the Yankees. The rules to steal bases were liberalized with bigger bags and fewer throw-overs allowed. There were 1,073 more steal attempts in 2023 than in 2022. The success rate went from 75.4 percent to 80 percent. The Yankees were 100 out of 130 (76.9 percent) this season and 102 out of 135 last season (75.6) — basically without changes in the number of tries or success. Fangraphs’ baserunning metric had the Yankees as third-worst in the majors.
Steinbrenner should want to know if this was another area in which he was sold snake oil by a new-wave philosophy that will not stand up in the majors?
Is it arrogance that the Yankees thought they could go down a road, not make adjustments and other teams would not catch up?
Roster stuff maybe only I notice
There were 1,457 players used in the majors this season — the third-most in history, trailing only the 1,508 used in 2021 (the first full season after the pandemic) and the 1,495 last season.
It broke down like this: 1,090 players came from the draft, 340 players were signed internationally and 27 were undrafted free agents.
The Guardians signed the most players who appeared in games this year to their first pro contract with 65, followed by the Dodgers and Padres at 60 and the Astros and Blue Jays at 59. The Yankees were next at 58. The Mets were 21st with 45.
It is important to remember that volume and impact are not the same.
Still, the A’s had the fewest at 28, and that was a contributor to their 50-112 season. It is nearly impossible to compete in a small market if you are not developing players for your roster or to use in trades — and the few good players you do develop, such as Matt Chapman, Sean Murphy and Matt Olson, are included in trades that, to date, do not work out.
Consider that the A’s are in the AL West with the Astros, who not only exert a financial advantage, but put 31 more originally signed players into the majors this year.
After the A’s, the next four lowest were the Nationals (32), Brewers (35) and Phillies (37). Note that Brewers total. It is not as if the Brewers were a developmental success story under new Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns.
My totally made-up trade
Gleyber Torres from the Yankees to the Mariners for Matt Brash
There are two questions the Yankees are going to have to answer this offseason about Torres:
1. Can they actually trade their best all-around hitter from the 2023 season when their offense was so bad?
2. How much can they actually get for a player who, though he hit well this season, is a year from free agency, about to make roughly $15 million and makes a lot of careless plays in the field and on the bases?
Let’s deal with Question 1: The answer to this is based on whether they believe Oswald Peraza and DJ LeMahieu (with a touch of Oswaldo Cabrera) can hold down the majority of the playing time at third base and second base and/or whether they believe they can find help at one of those positions in the offseason.
Torres limited his strikeouts, raised his walk rate and produced an .800 OPS surrounded by mainly bad offense. The Yankees just can’t move a player who should be in his prime (he turns 27 in December) when he is good at what the Yankees were bad at in 2023.
However, if they do not believe they will sign him long-term and they believe there are other ways to cover second base, then don’t they have to explore this? They did after last season. The Mariners were one of the interested teams and should be again.
The Mariners ended the longest postseason drought in the majors last year, making the playoffs for the first time since 2001. But they were eliminated in the final weekend this season, and one contributor was a team second base slash line of .205/.293/.313.
The Yankees need to find offense this offseason. But the Mariners really don’t have any to trade unless the Yankees got seduced by Jarred Kelenic (they shouldn’t).
Their second need is starting pitching, and they have no shot at the Mariners’ top three of Luis Castillo, Logan Gilbert and George Kirby. But I wonder if the Mariners, in the right package, might consider Bryce Miller or Bryan Woo.
As for relievers, the Yankees cannot totally close their mind here, though they traditionally have done well at finding arms at the margins. Only Clay Holmes stayed healthy throughout the season. Wandy Peralta is a free agent. Scott Effross, Ian Hamilton, Tommy Kahnle, Jonathan Loaisiga and Lou Trivino all have physical red flags. Michael King is likely earmarked for the rotation.
The Mariners have shown a willingness to trade good relievers, including moving closer Paul Sewald to Arizona at the most recent trade deadline. Andrés Muñoz is probably off-limits. A combination of, say, Justin Topa and lefty Gabe Speiers is not enough.
But what about Brash? He led the majors in appearances (78), and what that might look like a year later would worry me (Topa was second at 75). Lefties also had success against Brash (.770 OPS).
He struck out 34.7 percent of hitters he faced, though. And he has a combination the Yankees love (as many others do): a big fastball (averaging 98.5 mph) and a dominating pitch — his slider is one of the most effective in the game.
And he is not even arbitration-eligible until after next season.
Is a reliever with dominant stuff and lots of years of club control worth it for Torres? Is it worth it to the Mariners to give up those elements for a second baseman with one year of control?