Yankees playing a waiting game
As trade deadline nears, GM hoping panicked rival will pay big for bullpen help
For the New York Yankees to win at the trading deadline, they need another team to panic. In Aroldis Chapman, they have precisely the kind of player to make rival executives lose their sense of reason.
It has happened before, and with a closer nowhere near the calibre of Chapman, who conveniently hit 105 miles an hour on the radar gun against Baltimore on Monday.
“We just need to keep playing good baseball,” catcher Brian McCann said. “We’re playing a lot of teams in our division, and we knew coming back from the all-star break this is a huge homestand for us.”
At 47-46 after Tuesday’s win over the Orioles, the Yankees have at least modest hope of squeezing into contention and keeping their roster intact.
But selling can have its advantages, too. Just ask Dan Duquette, the Orioles’ executive vice-president for baseball operations, who traded his closer in 1997 for pillars of a future championship team.
Working for the Boston Red Sox then, Duquette acquired Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek from Seattle for Heathcliff Slocumb, fleecing a Mariners team trying desperately to win with Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez in their primes.
A confluence of factors made the deal happen, and while the Yankees cannot count on such good luck now, they should wait as long as they can, hoping that a team will decide it simply cannot live without Chapman or Andrew Miller.
For now, of course, the Yankees are still trying to define themselves. On Wednesday they tried to lift their record to two games above .500 for the first time since April 12.
“It’s been frustrating this year,” manager Joe Girardi said, “because we’ve been here so many times and we haven’t been able to break through, for a number of different reasons. Sometimes it’s been offence; sometimes it’s been pitching. It hasn’t been just one reason. But it’s been frustrating because I feel like if we can get over that mark, we can build on it.”
Barring a sudden surge in coming games against Baltimore, San Francisco and Houston — all contenders — and the also-ran Tampa Bay Ray, the Yankees may find themselves in roughly the same spot in the hours before the 4 p.m. non-waiver trading deadline on Aug. 1. It is not an enviable position.
“It’s kind of hard when you’re nei- ther fish nor fowl, you haven’t declared, you’re in the middle,” Duquette said.
“You don’t know whether to unload or add players. But it was easy for us because we were out of the race. It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be in contention the rest of the way.”
On the morning of July 30,1997, the Red Sox were 50-56 and trailing by 11 games for a playoff spot. The Mariners were in first place in the American League West and happened to be playing at Fenway Park, where they took a 7-2 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning.
A procession of overmatched relievers — Bobby Ayala, Bob Wells, a fading Norm Charlton and Edwin Hurtado — turned the game into a ghastly 8-7 loss that exposed a chronic Mariners weakness. Right in the middle of it, Slocumb pitched a scoreless ninth inning for the Red Sox.
“He threw the ball great, and I think Lou Piniella liked him,” Duquette said, referring to the then Mariners manager, who was famously competitive and impatient.
“Lou had seen him perform well against his team. Slocumb had a pretty good slurve to go with his fastball, and he’d pitched as well as he could pitch against Seattle.”
Generally, though, Slocumb was not pitching well; after blowing the save in Kansas City the next day, his earned run average rose to 5.79. But he had saved 63 games in the prior two seasons, and the Mariners were scrambling.
Earlier on July 31, they had traded their top prospect, outfielder Jose Cruz Jr., to Toronto for relievers Paul Spoljaric and Mike Timlin.
“I called up Woody, and I said, ‘Does that Spoljaric trade take us off the table?’ ” Duquette said, referring to Woody Woodward, the Mariners’ top baseball executive. “He said, ‘Not necessarily.’ ”
Duquette wanted Varitek, a catcher who had been drafted in the first round in 1993 and 1994 but did not sign until April 1995. The delay had somewhat diminished Varitek’s market value, and the Mariners had another young catcher, Dan Wilson, on their roster. Varitek was available, and when Duquette said he also wanted a pitcher, Woodward suggested Lowe.
Two of Duquette’s scouts, Eddie Haas and Gary Rajsich, liked Lowe’s athleticism and approved the idea, despite Lowe’s poor showing with the Mariners that season: 2-4 with a 6.96 ERA.
The sides struck a deal, and the Mariners held on to first place, with Slocumb on the mound when they clinched the division title. But they fell in the first playoff round, and seven years later, Lowe won the clinching game of the World Series for Boston with Varitek behind the plate. Varitek was back there again in 2007 when the Red Sox won another title.
Duquette was long gone by then, dismissed after an ownership change in 2002. But he attended the ceremony when the Red Sox put Varitek in their Hall of Fame.
“That was a terrific deal for the Red Sox,” Duquette said, understatedly. “You’d like to make a deal like that every year, but they don’t always come along.”
Yet sometimes they do, and the Yankees would be wise to use their considerable leverage. Several division leaders — the San Francisco Giants, the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Indians and the Texas Rangers — have an obvious need for a closer like Chapman or Miller. If they endure a well-timed bullpen blowup, they just might make an impulsive deal for a quick fix, no matter the cost.