Kap news reminds us Baby Bombers light on pitching

So much is being made of the long-awaited Yankee youth movement — the hallmark of their entire marketing campaign for the 2017 season. The kids are here to stay. Watch Aaron Judge hitting tape measure homers. Just wait ‘til Greg Bird gets it going and picks up the power surge he left off with in 2015. Gary Sanchez will be back soon enough, with plenty of time to hit 30-plus homers. And on the cusp are Clint Frazier at Triple-A Scranton and Gleyber Torres on an even faster track at Trenton.

It is indeed a bright “stay tuned” picture the Yankees are painting for their fan base, but it will all be nullified in terms of overall success if they are unable to reverse a dismal 27-year slump in regard to the drafting and developing of a single frontline starting pitcher. This is why the most important kids’ progress Yankee fans should be focused on is that of Jordan Montgomery, Justus Sheffield, Chance Adams and Chad Green. Michael Pineda’s brilliant 7.2-inning effort in the home opener Monday notwithstanding, the Yankee rotation, as presently constituted, is replete with question marks destined to likely render this another out-of-the-playoffs season, no matter how well the kids in the batting order perform. There are legitimate concerns about Masahiro Tanaka’s elbow. CC Sabathia is essentially a two-timesaround-the-order pitcher. Much as they love to hype him, Luis Severino is a twopitch pitcher destined for the bullpen and, until proven otherwise, Pineda remains a confounding enigma.

Inevitably, this rotation is going to need upgrades, and with the trade price for top quality starters such as the White Sox’s Carlos Quintana prohibitive, those upgrades are going to have to come from within. Montgomery showed promise all spring and in his major league debut Wednesday, but what does it say that he wasn’t even on the Yankees’ radar when Joe Girardi assembled the troops in Tampa back in February? At the same time, you can understand why scouts have been saying that the most important piece Cashman got back in the Andrew Miller trade with Cleveland last year was not Frazier, but rather Sheffield, the chunky hard-throwing lefty who is starting the season in Double-A Trenton.

Going as far back as 2006 when the Yankees took both Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain in the first round of the draft, Yankee GM Brian Cashman made special note of how expensive starting pitching was and why it was so important to develop your own. But it turned out Kennedy, who the Yankees determined lacked the mental toughness to pitch in New York, and Chamberlain, who they thoroughly screwed up, became part of the long litany of Yankee pitching prospects — since the drafting of Andy Pettitte in 1990 — who never panned out for them.

In the years after, they used their No. 1 pick on five other starting pitchers, one of which, Gerrit Cole, they failed to sign, the others who all went down with elbow injuries, including James Kaprielian, their top pick in 2015 who Thursday it was announced will miss the entire 2017 season with Tommy John surgery. The loss of Kaprielian, who also missed most of last year with a flexor muscle issue in his forearm, is especially devastating since most scouts agreed he had both the stuff and the makeup to be an impactful starter for the Yankees as early as this season. Compounding the Yankees’ inability to develop a front line starter on their own, has been Cashman’s misjudgments on pitchers from the outside — free agent disasters like $39.9 million and $46 million respectively for Carl Pavano and Kei Igawa, and ill-fated trades for Jeff Weaver (where Ted Lilly was sacrificed) and Nathan Eovaldi (which cost Martin Prado and then begot four years/$52 million for Chase Headley).

In fairness to Cashman, top quality starting pitchers have proven to be the hardest commodity to develop. Witness the Red Sox and Cubs, whose respective farm systems have produced a mother lode of position player talent over the past few years but whose starting rotations are largely comprised of pitchers acquired from other teams or as free agents. It’s just that no team in baseball has gone as long, done as badly, and spent as much to cover up their mistakes in the scouting and developing of starting pitchers as the Yankees. ight now you’d have to say the Indians are the gold standard for the value of developing their own starting pitchers. Their largely homegrown rotation of Corey Kluber, Danny Salazar, Carlos Carrasco, Josh Tomlin and Trevor Bauer (acquired in a trade with Arizona) will earn a combined $23.4 million this season, or just one million more than the Yankees are paying Tanaka alone, and two million less than they’re paying Sabathia.

So you can see why, especially with Kaprielian lost for the foreseeable future, at least two of the Yankees’ top starter prospects, Montgomery, Green, Sheffield or Adams, need to do what no other of their hundreds of drafted pitchers could do since Andy Pettitte. And sooner rather than later.

@BillMadden1954

R