DIFFERENT WORLDS
Yankees’, Mets’ Series dreams off to opposite starts
For the first time in quite a while both New York teams go into the baseball season with legitimate World Series aspirations — but very different opening statements. While their Opening Day (and subsequent weekend) in Washington was being postponed because of a COVID-19 outbreak on the Nationals, the Mets took the opportunity to instead announce their 10-year, $341 million contract extension with Francisco Lindor. This, of course, had nothing to do with what we can expect from the Mets on the field this year. What it did establish, however, was how we can expect the Mets to operate going forward under the new ownership of Steve Cohen.
“He’s all about winning,” Lindor said of Cohen after the deal was announced. “I can’t wait to be stuck to his hip for the next 10-11 years.”
Easy for him to say after landing such a windfall without even having played a game for Cohen. Cohen didn’t have to do this — at least at this time. The price he’d paid to acquire Lindor from Cleveland — infielders Andres Gimenez and Amed Rosario — was relatively painless given the fact neither would have had a place in the Mets infield had they not been in the deal. And even though free agency was beckoning for Lindor, so, too, was it for four other elite shortstops next winter: Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, Javier Baez and Trevor Story. In that respect, Cohen, who could afford any of them, had more leverage than the other way around. But Cohen wanted to show his commitment to Mets fans by acting now, in a big way, and in doing so made it clear he plans to be all in when it comes to making whatever in-season improvements necessary to get the Mets to the World Series.
As for the Yankees, the top dog American League World Series pick by all of the oddsmakers, their Opening Day statement contained too many ominous reminders — most notably 13 strikeouts, 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position in an infuriating 3-2 loss to the Blue Jays — of why they fell short of the World Series last year. (We won’t even get into Gleyber Torres’ shaky play at shortstop or the mystifying spring slump of Gio Urshela.) When we’d last seen them, they were striking out 11 times in a 2-1 loss to the Rays that eliminated them in the 2020 AL Division Series.
All winter, the prime area of concern for the Yankees was the starting pitching after Gerrit Cole, and that still remains to be seen. But a deeper-rooted problem, which can be masked over the course of 162 games against so many vastly inferior teams in the American League, is the hitting — too many swing-and-miss right-handed hitters that can easily be vaporized by a steady stream of right-handed relievers (like we saw from the Blue Jays Opening Day) all throwing 95-plus gas. Granted, this is not a malady limited just to the Yankees. It’s an epidemic threatening to ruin the game. On Opening Day alone, nine teams struck out 12 times or more, topped by the Twins, who fanned 17 times in a well-deserved 6-5 loss to the Brewers.
Actually, the worst swing-and-miss culprits in baseball are the Yankees’ primary AL East rivals, the Rays, who had the most strikeouts in the majors (608) last year but somehow managed to offset them with deep pitching and solid defense. (For each of the last 10 years, the Rays have allowed fewer runs per game than the American League average.) The Yankees, with 480, had the seventh fewest strikeouts last year but that was largely because Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge were both out of the lineup most of the year. On Opening Day they started together for only the 33rd time in 222 Yankee games and went a combined 0-for-3 with men on base, striking out five times.
The Rays’ strikeout propensity finally got the best of them in the World Series last year when they struck out 70 times in six games against the Dodgers, including 16 times in the immortal Game 6 when Kevin Cash lifted Blake Snell, pitching a 9-strikeout, twohit shutout, after just 73 pitches. On Opening Day, the Rays picked up where they left off last year, striking out 12 times against Miami but managing to win the game on — what else? — a home run by Austin Meadows, with four different pitchers combining on the 1-0 shutout. Like the Yankees’ Opening Day loss to the Blue Jays, however, the game was unwatchable.
What is most concerning — not just for the Yankees but the game itself — is that no one knows how to rectify this strikeout problem, which is the product of the analytics-driven emphasis on slugging over batting average, combined with the emasculation of starting pitching in favor of multiple-reliever bullpens trained to pitch one inning at a time, throwing as hard as they can.
As we saw on Opening Day, and against the Rays in last year’s ALDS, the Yankees are particularly vulnerable to hard-throwing right-handed pitching. They will remain the oddsmakers’ favorites for the foreseeable future because of the overall weakness of the American League, despite the fact they haven’t been to the World Series in 12 years. But you have to wonder: How long before all these strikeouts start turning off fans and baseball, as a whole, ceases to be entertaining? This is not just a major concern for the Yankees but for the entire industry.