Baseball pullout:
Old is out in the Bronx, as Judge, Sanchez lead powerful new wave
A Yankees youth movement, a Tigers rookie-of-the-year candidate finds a mentor, fantasy, team notes and stats, Pages 23-42
It wasn’t just youth. It was movement.
Ballgames at Yankee Stadium had become a hot, expensive seance. The seats in the highpriced lower sections were often empty. So was the experience of watching older players chase their yesterdays or seeing free agent refugees struggle in the shadows of the immortals.
The New York Yankees had spent years trading away their younger players for quick-fix veterans, to keep the championships coming, or at least attempt to do so. At last it was time to renovate.
They started with a couple of blasts.
On Aug. 13, rookie Tyler Austin launched a home run off the Tampa Bay Rays’ Matt Andriese in Austin’s second visit to Yankee Stadium and his first major league plate appearance.
The next batter was another rookie, Aaron Judge. He smacked a home run to deep center field, the place where fly balls usually find a leathery destination.
Damon Oppenheimer, the vice president in charge of scouting, was attending an event in San Diego.
“All of a sudden the phone is blowing up and everything’s going wild on Twitter,” he said.
Austin, 24, said he had “over 100 texts, easily.” A week later he hadn’t had a chance to reply to them all. “I still don’t think I know exactly what happened,” he said.
It had never happened before. No rookies had homered back-toback in their first major league at-bats. And it happened on the day the Yankees were honoring their 1996 World Series champions, with Derek Jeter & Co. right there witnessing.
The core members of that team won four championships in five years and played in five World Series in six years. It was augmented by free agents but lived on the development of Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada, homegrown Yankees all.
“I grew up as a Giants fan,” said Judge, who lived in Linden, Calif., near Sacramento. “But every October I saw that team with the pinstripes playing for championships, so that was impressive.”
That Core Four (as Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte and Posada are referred) might be the prelude to a corps.
Judge is 6-7 and looks as if he wandered in from New York Jets training camp. He’s an outfielder, and Austin can play outfield or first base.
Greg Bird, 23, was an intriguing rookie first baseman in 2015 but has missed 2016 with a bad shoulder.
Gary Sanchez, 23, is a 6-2, 230-
pound catcher who has hit 99 home runs in the Yankees farm system and popped six in his first 66 plate appearances, with a .361 average.
But there’s a second wave of Baby Bombers, imported by general manager Brian Cashman near the Aug. 1 trading deadline.
TRADES BRING TALENT
For closer Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees got the Chicago Cubs to give up 19-year-old Venezuelan shortstop Gleyber Torres, who was rated the No. 2 international prospect by Baseball America in 2013, and outfielder Billy McKinney, a former first-round pick.
For closer Andrew Miller, the Yankees got the Cleveland Indians to part with outfielder Clint Frazier, formerly a fifth overall draft pick, and Vanderbilt lefthander Justus Sheffield, who was a first-round pick in 2014. Frazier, 21, is playing in Class AAA.
For 39-year-old Carlos Beltran, who had been their best position player, the Yankees relieved the Texas Rangers of pitcher Dillon Tate, a former UC-Santa Barbara right-hander and the fourth overall pick in 2014.
In the process, first baseman Mark Teixeira, 36, announced his retirement at season’s end and Alex Rodriguez, 41, was released.
The Yankees then put Luis Cessa, whom they got in the offseason from the Detroit Tigers for reliever Justin Wilson, into the rotation. They picked up Tyler Clippard to set up Dellin Betances, who, in 210 career games, has struck out 14.3 batters per nine innings.
A very late run for a wild-card spot, like the one the Yankees claimed last year before they lost the knockout game to the Houston Astros’ Dallas Keuchel (the 2015 AL Cy Young Award winner), is a possibility. But the probability was that collective arthritis would befall the franchise unless Cashman did something.
“It’s exciting when you win with your own players,” Oppenheimer said. “But that’s not how the system works. It’s fun to see our kids come up and start their careers this way. The key is impact and longevity.”
Although Sanchez’s offensive and defensive talents are irresistible to those who wonder where baseball’s catchers have gone, Judge will be the main conversation piece. He is not just 6-7. He weighs 275 solid pounds.
“He’s got a chance to be an absolute animal,” Austin said.
Judge, 24, is also a friendly giant who can’t wait to sample all the implications of Yankeedom. “It’s a thrill to put on the pinstripes,” he said.
The fact that Judge turned his broad back on football and basketball is a great victory for baseball on many levels. Not many African Americans make that decision anymore. He played high school football through his senior year.
“Defensive end and receiver,” he said. “They told me to just come up the side and hit somebody on defense, run down 15 yards and turn around and catch it on offense. In basketball I even played some point guard at times. But I just grew up with a passion for baseball. The game within the game always intrigued me. And my parents didn’t care what I played. They just wanted me out of the house, playing something.”
They are retired schoolteachers and Fresno State graduates who welcomed Aaron’s decision to go to school there.
“He was on our radar from the moment he walked on that campus,” Oppenheimer said. “Obviously his size made him stand out, but he showed quality tools even in high school. He had a natural grace. He didn’t have any of the gawky qualities that you sometimes see from guys that big. His swing wasn’t rigid. He played outfield well. Everything that you wanted was there. It just happened to come in a big body.”
Judge struck out 373 times in 348 minor league games. “God blessed me with long arms,” he said, “which means he also blessed me with a big strike zone.” But Judge also drew 89 walks in 2014, his first professional year. He was hitting .270 with 19 homers in Class AAA this season.
“He’s made good adjustments in terms of his setup and his load,” Austin said. “It puts him in better positions to hit, and this year he isn’t missing many.”
The Yankees still have shortstop Jorge Mateo, a 21-year-old top-30 prospect, in the minors. Tate, 22, and Sheffield, 20, join injured James Kaprielian, 22, in the cast of future starting pitchers. The Yankees rotation is mostly young, and they presume Luis Severino, 22, a sensation in 2015, can get turned around.
New York won the 2009 World Series but hasn’t been back since. It hasn’t won 90 games, drawn 3.5 million fans or taken the American League East since 2012. It might be too early to judge the youth and the movement, but it’s not too soon for Judge.