It’s time for Yankees to deal veterans, rebuild with youth
Let’s be clear: No matter what the New York Yankees do over the next 10 days or so, there’s no actual choice to be made about how to approach the future.
There’s simply no way to look closely at the roster general manager Brian Cashman has assembled and conclude that there’s the nucleus of a future contender. The Yankees haven’t been devoid of success over the last several seasons, with a wild-card berth in 2015 and at least 84 wins in each of the previous three years, but at no point in the recent past have the Yankees looked anything like a team particularly likely to win a World Series.
There is an argument to be made for continuing like this, of course. We live in a time when one-third of all teams make the postseason, when surprising, small-sample streaks turn negligible playoff clubs into trophywielding champions.
Yet the wild card has created a true two-tier playoff system, as it was designed to do. The real money in baseball is to be made by those teams that can hover around 95 wins, not 85, collect division titles and the guaranteed shot at a real playoff series, and with it, the revenue and greatly increased odds of winning it all.
There’s essentially no excuse for the Yankees not to be one of these teams. Not with their revenue stream. Not with ownership prepared to spend $200 million on salaries, even while knowing they’ll get hit with a luxury tax.
Yet it is the ownership itself that seems to be holding the Yankees back, keeping them in this perpetual state of mediocrityplus, avoiding the teardown.
Wallace Matthews of ESPN New York reported last week, citing a baseball source speaking on the condition of anonymity, that Cashman was at odds with Hal Steinbrenner and Randy Levine, the team’s owner and president on the business side, respectively, about whether the Yankees should be buyers or sellers before the Aug. 1 non- waiver trade deadline.
There is a certain amusing factor to seeing everyone — the baseball people, fan base, everyone who cares about the Yankees — hoping to see the team trade off its veterans for young players who can help the next great Yankees team reach October, only to have the ownership stand in the way. There’s an old saw that you can’t rebuild in New York; apparently that’s true, but only because Steinbrenner says so.
Realistically, this comes down to the Yankees failing to act like the Yankees anymore and hoping things will still work the way they always have. The Yankees had a reputation, justly deserved, for not just outspending their opponents but also doing so by multiples. While the Yankees were spending about $200 million in the middle of the last decade, most teams weren’t spending $100 million on annual salaries, and those who were still weren’t approaching the New York total outlay.
Now the Yankees are still spending $200 million and can’t figure out why it isn’t going as far. Never mind that local TV money allows more teams than ever before to lock up players for more years or that the Yankees aren’t even spending the most on players, on average, for the last several seasons. That would be the Los Angeles Dodgers.
And let’s not forget: Doing things the traditional Yankees way worked. The Yankees made the playoffs every year but one from 1995 through 2012. It still does. The Dodgers have made the playoffs every season since 2013, when they’ve had the highest payroll in the National League, if not baseball.
An unlimited budget will generally allow you to procure the best talent in any industry. Even now, baseball is no different.
Yet the Yankees don’t seem to want to do that, either. Steinbrenner has repeatedly said in interviews that this approach didn’t work. Still, even if a high payroll doesn’t guarantee a World Series victory, it helped all but guarantee the Yankees a playoff spot for two decades.
But this is a path of diminishing return. The talent in the free agent market isn’t as robust in general. With more players locked up to longer deals and more teams keeping top free agents at the deadline because they can still gain high draft picks if these players are lost in free agency, the salary dumps that used to fuel the Yankees are no longer as readily available.
The game is overwhelmed by young stars, and young talent is the currency of choice in Major League Baseball. And so the Yankees are without a choice in a year when first baseman Greg Bird, 23, was lost to injury, right-hander Luis Severino, 21, has regressed and minor league outfielder Aaron Judge, 24, got off to a slow start (though he came on recently).
It is time to trade anyone who will not be part of that next great Yankees team and then to go about constructing it. Find Carlos Beltran, and his remarkable renaissance at 39, a new home. Send Brian McCann, and his reasonable contract for power hitting at the catcher spot ($17 million annually until 2017), somewhere and let the era of Gary Sanchez, 22, begin in earnest.
Revel in the thin starting pitching market, and find CC Sabathia a new home. Use the Yankees’ monetary advantage, but in reverse. Pick up most of the big salaries in exchange for additional prospects. Supercharge what needs to happen, an influx of young talent to turn the Yankees into an exciting team, one that will draw fans back to Yankee Stadium now that the certainty of October can no longer serve as a realistic talking point for the ticket-sales team.
The Yankees have been caught in-between as an organization for several years, and it is a tribute to their training staff and incredible athletes that none of these seasons, not even this one, has looked like the 1965 Yankees, when the last empire came tumbling down and an amateur draft kept them from restocking as they had in the heyday of George Weiss and Casey Stengel.
Back then, it took the Yankees a long time to change, to get with the times. We’ll see over the next 10 days if they’re ready to make that leap again. FOLLOW COLUMNIST HOWARD MEGDAL @howardmegdal for breaking news and insight on sports.