'Big Maple' worth risk for Bombers
JAMES Paxton has the stuff to pitch Game 1 of a playoff series. The Yankees are willing to overlook almost everything else because of that. His questionable durability. His superior numbers working in pitcher-friendly Safeco Field. The unknown of him pitching in a big market. And having to give up one of the majors’ better pitching prospects.
The Yankees are at that place in their cycle — close to a George Steinbrenner championship-or-bust mentality — that going for it fuels their willingness to incur greater risk. So, they traded the player MLB.com had ranked as the Yankees’ top prospect and No. 31 in the whole sport, Justus Sheffield, as the key piece to land Paxton.
Because if it goes well and Paxton stays healthy and Luis Severino stops tipping pitches, the Yankees have a power 1-2 they could send out in October with the belief of controlling a series. And Brian Cashman reiterated that one starter is not the goal here. The Yankees still want to add one more, perhaps, Patrick Corbin, another starter with swing-and-miss stuff to go along with Masahiro Tanaka, who has proven himself a playoff stalwart.
This is the Yankees’ obsession now. They were a pleasant surprise in their run to Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS. They were disappointed even in winning 100 games last year that they could not outdo the Red Sox in the AL East or the Division Series. The next step is to be good enough to win the last game of the postseason. Period.
So the Yankees rolled the pitching dice on Paxton, who has been to the DL five times in the past three seasons. None of the injuries have been devastating and Cashman insisted team doctors gave Paxton a clean review. Still, his 28 starts and 160 ¹/3 innings were career-highs last year. Is that a sign of progression or symbolic that Paxton is not the type who will get through a schedule unscathed?
The Yanks were willing to surrender Sheffield, fellow pitcher Erik Swanson and outfielder Dom Thompson-Williams to find out. Because Paxton does what the Yankees like best in a pitcher — miss bats. The only team that has ever averaged more strikeouts per nine innings than the 2018 Yankees (10.1) are the 2018 Astros (10.8).
Houston last offseason obtained Gerrit Cole, who led the majors in 2018 in strikeouts per nine innings (12.4). The Yankees tried hard to get Cole, offering a deal fronted by Clint Frazier. But Pittsburgh preferred the diversity of what the Astros proposed and got Cole with two years to go until free agency.
Paxton now has two years until free agency and his 11.7 strikeouts per nine innings were fourth in the majors. To date, the Yanks have not gotten much from their 2016 trade-deadline sell of Andrew Miller with Frazier being often hurt and Sheffield not doing well in his cameo last year. But they were not willing to let a Cole-like starter get by them again.
Paxton early in his career — due to his left-handedness and similarities in delivery — was compared to Andy Pettitte. He actually throws harder than Pettitte and has developed a bigtime cutter like Pettitte, and as he has learned to better control his curveball his overall strike throwing has improved. A Canadian nicknamed “Big Maple,” Paxton has the rep as a hard worker and a good teammate, but what cannot be known until he plays here — like was learned to the negative about Sonny Gray and the positive about J.A. Happ — is whether he can handle the stressful Yankees environment.
The Mariners have gone the longest in the four professional sports without reaching the postseason and Paxton has yet to pitch as big a game as, say, June versus the Red Sox can be for the Yankees. Plus, he has benefitted from Safeco where he has a 2.98 career home ERA compared to 3.87 on the road.
But the Yankees love the stuff, so they gave up Sheffield, who the industry is split on — some see a quality No. 3 starter, some see small stature and command issues that might force the lefty into the bullpen. Swanson was the second piece from the 2016 deadline deal of Carlos Beltran to be ricocheted in a trade elsewhere. Swanson might be a back-end starter, but for the Yanks he would have been in play for a bullpen role sometime next year.
Pitching is the strength of the system, so the Yankees felt they could give up pieces here and still be well stocked — and Thompson-Williams was not viewed as a big-time prospect internally. By 8 p.m. Tuesday, the Yankees would have had to put Swanson on the 40-man roster to protect him from the Rule 5 draft, so with him and Sheffield gone and Paxton present they have one extra slot if they want to shield someone else.
But that was a secondary matter. The priority this offseason was to add two high-end starters to pursue a championship in 2019. The Yankees got one piece out of the way, taking on a risky proposition because the talent reward was so tantalizing.