Time to commit to youth movement
SIX truer words never have been spoken: You play to win the game. And that, Joe Girardi insists, is his
raison d’etre as he goes about filling out the lineup card for a Yankees team inelegantly caught between the past, present and future.
“[My lineup] is based on trying to win that day,” the manager said Saturday. “We still believe we have a shot [at the playoffs]. We’re still playing to get in.”
That was before the 5-2 loss tot he Indians in which Corey Kluber faced the minimum 18 batters over his final six innings of work while CC Sabathia wilted yet again during a second or third time through the lineup.
So the Yankees remained behind four teams in the hunt for the second wild-card spot. They are 6-7 in their past 13 games and 11-11 since the All-Star break, on a treadmill to late-season obscurity as recognized by ownership and management over the final week of July before authorizing the great sell-off. It isn’t as if Girardi isn’t already managing with one eye toward next season, even as he protests (which is obligated to do). Gary Sanchez isn’t necessarily catching because having him behind the plate rather than Brian McCann increases the club’s chance of winning. Rather, the long-hyped prospect is getting a shot in order to a) accelerate his development; and b) give management a greater sample size to evaluate the 23-year-old.
And if now isn’t the time to suggest it makes sense to remove the 36-year-old Sabathia from the rotation in order to make room for Chad Green or Luis Cessa (while Luis Severino fills the spot vacated by the traded Ivan Nova), it surely cannot be far away.
“I got myself into bad counts, I guess,” said Sabathia, who allowed a fourth-inning solo home run to Jason Kipnis and a sixthinning, tie-breaking solo shot by Mike Napoli. “The home runs were on fastball counts in bad spots. I couldn’t go to my cutter. That made it tough for me.”
It is difficult to envision any circumstance under which Sabathia — who has a vesting option worth $25 million for next season — would be part of the 2017 rotation. It is equally difficult to calculate the immediate reward of sending the 220-game winner out to the mound every fifth day for the remainder of 2016.
The clock is ticking on Sabathia’s value to the Yankees as a 2016 starting pitcher. Sooner rather than later, it will strike midnight. It will be time for Green and/or Cessa. And the games the Yankees will be playing to win will be the ones on the schedule in 2017 and beyond.