Winning Move for Yanks is To Lose
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
For the last few years, I’ve been telling my friends who are casual Yankees fans that the best possible thing for this team would be for them to miss the postseason one year, basically on the principle that a year spent retooling is probably needed to set the franchise up for another run of World Series titles.
While hardcore baseball fans may disagree with me about this, they generally admit the idea is at least a valid one. Less passionate fans have tended to violently disagree, pointing out that since their last world title in 2000, the Yanks have either won the pennant or lost to the eventual champion every year.
This year, for the first time, these same fans are telling me that they’re outright rooting for the Yankees to miss the playoffs. A team with a $200 million payroll featuring Shawn Chacon as its most valuable long-term pitching asset, after all, obviously needs to make some changes. The most pressing reason the Yankees either need to make the playoffs or go into a rebuilding mode next year come what may, though, has less to do with their team than with others – specifically, those competing for the American League wild card. None of them are going away.
Probably the biggest threat to be a dominant team for the rest of the decade is the Cleveland Indians, who led in the wild card standings by a game entering play last night. This year’s success can largely be attributed to veterans like league ERA leader Kevin Millwood, closer Bob Wickman, and second baseman Ronnie Belliard, not all of whom are going to be with the team in the long run.
But the Indians’ unrivalled strength up the middle is what makes them a nightmare for the rest of the league. Twenty-six-year-old Catcher Victor Martinez (1.035 OPS since the All-Star break), 23-year-old shortstop Johnny Peralta (.513 slugging percentage) and 23-year-old center fielder Grady Sizemore (61 extra-base hits, 20 steals, and a .290 average) are each the best young player in the league at their positions. Having three players of this caliber at the most difficult positions to fill gives the Indians an enormous advantage over the competition, and there’s little reason to think they won’t exploit it.
The next biggest threat would be Oakland, which has a fairly terrifying group of young players itself, led by second-year shortstop Bobby Crosby, third year ace Rich Harden, and rookie closer Huston Street. General manager Billy Beane has certainly proved the skeptics (among whom you can count me) wrong again, and Oakland can probably be counted on as a 90-win team for the foreseeable future.
Thanks to top young talent, Cleveland and Oakland are likely to improve over the next couple of years. What this means for the Yankees is that to continue the dynasty, they’ll have to win the AL East outright year after year – something that’s simply not going to happen given the strengths and resources of the Red Sox’ current management – as they’re going to be in competition with not only the Indians and A’s, but strong teams in Minnesota and Los Angeles as well.
Part of the reason the Yankees were able to win four World Series in five years was that the American League had an unusually low number of perennial contenders. There was New York, Boston, Texas, Cleveland, and a lot of dross. Seattle rotated into the picture, then Minnesota, but the league was very top-heavy, and the competition for the wild card light. That’s no longer true.
The Yankees can’t coast now as a 90-win team, which is essentially what they are built as. To do what the team’s fans are accustomed to – enter every year as a lock for the playoffs – they need to win 100 games every year, and to do that they will need to both replace dead spots as they present themselves and groom young players to do so.
Fans, I think, are starting to realize that without a massive shock to the Yankees’ system, the team will never be organized to do that, and that’s why some of them are starting to root against their team – or at least for Cleveland.
The Yankees, of course, have more than enough talent to be competitive; this isn’t a question of punting next year. But it may well be a question of choosing between acquiring a young reliever who might apprentice under Mariano Rivera or an older and more reliable one without prospects of eventually taking over the closer job. It may be a question of easing Jorge Posada out of his full-time role even though he’s the team’s best catcher.
If the Yankees win this year, people are starting to realize, those sort of questions aren’t going to be answered in a way that will put the franchise in position to deal with a team with the Indians’ kind of talent.