Bombers follow winning design
Cashman’s ’17 club looking a lot like Houston’s ’15 team
T HE 2015 AL wild-card game seemed more than a 3-0 Astros humbling of the Yankees. It played like a baton pass — the ascension of Houston, the decline of New York.
In particular, the Astros’ cultivation of young, athletic everyday players contrasted with the tired, decrepit Yankees. Houston’s nine starting position players that evening all were completing their age-29 season or were younger.
Six of the Yankees’ nine position players were 31 or older and the two that were not — Greg Bird and Rob Refsnyder — were filling in for the injured Mark Teixeira (35) and Stephen Drew (32).
Thursday night in The Bronx, Dallas Keuchel — just as he did on Oct. 5, 2015 — seduced the Yankees for six innings with optical illusions that vanished from the strike zone, invoking meek grounders and awkward swings-and-misses. But the Yankees’ positional group that Houston’s ace encountered this time was actually younger on average than that of the Astros.
One of the Yankees’ most vital youngsters, 24-year-old Gary Sanchez, singled with two outs in the ninth off closer Ken Giles, to drive in Aaron Hicks, before Jacoby Ellsbury was thrown out at the plate, sealing a 3-2 Astros win.
Yes, Keuchel was dominant against the Yankees again. He now has not allowed an earned run in four of seven starts against them and has yet to permit a homer in 50 2/3 innings. But so much else has changed in 583 days.
In 2015, the Yankees had the oldest position-player group by weighted average in the majors at 31.1 years old. The Astros had the youngest at 26.6. The only Yankee under 31 to register even 180 plate appearances in that 2015 season was Didi Gregorius, in his maiden campaign as Derek Jeter’s successor.
The Yankees seemed far away from having anything that night that projected like the top three in the Astros lineup: Jose Altuve (25), George Springer (25) and Carlos Correa (20), young, athletic, two-way difference makers. Houston’s future was considerably more promising.
The Astros have aged, in part, by importing the players who hit third and fifth that wild-card night for the Yankees, Carlos Beltran and Brian McCann, who batted fifth and sixth Thursday against Michael Pineda. The Astros felt they needed experienced lefty hitting in their lineup and veteran presence in their clubhouse.
The maneuvering has worked for both as the Yankees and Astros arrived at their four-game series with the two best winning percentages in the majors.
“The New York Yankees team we faced in the wild card was dangerous, but not as dynamic as this team,” Houston manager A.J. Hinch said.
These Astros built by completely tearing down. They had six consecutive losing seasons (2009-2014), including a stretch from 2011-13 when they never lost fewer than 106 games. Their .333 winning percentage was the worst of any three-year stretch since the 1963-65 Mets.
The Yankees, as defective as their rosters were the past few years, never had fewer than 84 wins. Within that frame, general manager Brian Cashman recommended the Yankees trade Robinson Cano or David Robertson at July deadlines, but ownership did not want to surrender.
“That is not something that was afforded to us here,” Cashman said of tanking a few seasons for high draft picks and higher slot money, both domestically and internationally. “So, we had to go a different route.”
Like a hockey team changing lines, Cashman has been dropping the age of his roster on the fly. Gregorius in 2015, Starlin Castro and Hicks last year, Sanchez and Aaron Judge coming up from the system. In 2015, the Yankees had just 20.4 percent of their plate appearances taken by players 30 and under. It was 44.7 last year and 62.3 this season.
Still, this was not supposed to be a breakthrough season for the Yankees, just like 2015 was not supposed to be for the Astros. Houston was imagining it would challenge .500 that year and contend in 2016 when Correa and Lance McCullers, in particular, emerged. But those guys came along faster than expected, in the way that Sanchez did last season and Judge has this year.
The Yankees still envision Gleyber Torres and Clint Frazier — the two main positional pieces obtained when they dealt Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller last year — forming part of an even stronger nucleus for years moving forward.
But opportunity is here now and — in a coincidence — it appears the Yankees and Astros will both be hunting the same items come July: a starting pitcher and a lefty reliever. For now, they will measure themselves against each other this weekend in The Bronx, with the Yankees hardly looking as tired and decrepit as they did 583 days earlier.