The opening of the new Yankee Stadium is sure to come with plenty of pomp and circumstance. The guys at Dugout Central asked who would get tapped to throw out the first ball at the new place. The answers were to be expected, with Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and the Boss getting the votes. I think it should be George, unless he is in such bad shape that he would embarrass himself, in which case I would like Bernie to get the nod.
Who do you think should be given this honor?
For many years, I thought the idea that Red Sox fans were just as concerned with the Yankees suffering as they were with the Red Sox succeeding was a ridiculous canard put forth by egotistical Yankees fans to tweak Bostonians. Then I moved to Boston, and have witnessed first hand that the phenomenon is in fact real. This city is obsessed with the Yankees, and winning two world championships has not had a tangible effect in altering those emotions.
This point came into focus for me this morning, as I listened to Curt Schilling being interviewed on WEEI. Schilling was on the air for about half an hour, and spent the first 5 minutes discussing himself and his prospects for the future, and the last 5 minutes talking about Manny Ramirez. He spent the middle 20 minutes talking about the Yankees, most notably about Alex Rodriguez’s injury and Joe Torre’s book. That means that 2/3 of a conversation with a Red Sox icon on a Boston radio station was spent talking about the enemy. This is not an anomaly, as anyone who listens to WEEI can tell you that 20 minutes of baseball talk does not pass without a mention of the Yankees, something you could not say about WFAN and the Red Sox. The obsession is real, and it is never going to go away.
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A reader asked me to write a little bit about how the Yankees develop relief pitchers. This is a pretty cool topic, because the Yankees are on the cutting edge of the field.
The problem with developing minor league relieves into major league relievers is that teams don’t know how to do it. Most players that become major league relievers are either finished projects coming out of college, or more often failed starting prospects who were converted to the bullpen shortly before being promoted to the majors. Mariano Rivera was the latter, Huston Street the former.
It takes time to learn how to play major league quality baseball. While hitters certainly need more time to adjust, pitchers need it too. Relief pitchers have significantly less playing time, and thus less time to lear, than starting pitchers. For this reason, a lot of relief pitchers stall out as they climb the minor league ladder. They take years to ascend from one level to the next, even though they have the skills to conquer the lower levels of the minor leagues.
The result is that only the absolute best pitchers rise to the top. Starting pitchers have the opportunity to learn a new pitch or fix a mechanical issue while rising through the ranks. Relief pitchers don’t. Some of this issue is caused by starters being naturally better than relief pitchers, but some is caused by circumstance.
The Colorado Rockies drafted right-handed closer Casey Weathers with the 8th overall pick of the 2007 draft. Casey Weathers was the top college relief prospect at the time. He was sent to Double-A to start the 2008 season, and pitched with mixed results. His 11.0 K/9 was great. but he also walked 5.7 BB/9, which is unacceptable. He threw only 44 innings not because of injury but because of a mistake by the Rockies. Weathers pitched only 1 inning at a time, usually in the 9th inning.
How does a pitcher work out his control problems in 1 inning appearances a few times a week? It is very hard. They can do work on the side, but amid bus trips and the long minor league season that rarely happens. They generally make their adjustments before the season starts, and ride the wave whereever it takes them.
The Yankees are trying something different. They have decided to treat their relief prospects like starting prospects: throwing them for a lot of innings on a set schedule. Every third day, each major relief prospect throws at least 2 innings. This is how Mark Melancon managed to throw 94 innings (2.14 per game) immediately after undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2008. David Robertson, Edwar Ramirez, J.B Cox, Anthony Claggett, Scott Patterson, Wilkins De La Rosa, and Kevin Whelan. For De La Rosa and Whelan, the Yankees even converted them to starting in order to work some more development out of them.
This has allowed the Yankees to push their relief pitchers across multiple levels per season. Melancon’s meteoric rise was neither irresponsible nor accidental. In just two months, he faced more batters at Double-A than Casey Weathers faced all season. The jury is out on whether or not the tactic works long term, but I think it will. The Yankees are pumping out young relief pitchers very quickly, and we’re seeing that at the major league level.
Relievers raised the traditional way are taught to turn it loose for one inning or even just one or two batters at the major league level, and then wait for the next guy to come along. One great side effect of the Yankee’s method (and it should be noted, other teams do this too, just not many) may be a return to the 70s style multi-inning relief pitching. If Mark Melancon takes over as the Yankees closer one day, he’ll be much more like Mariano Rivera than Trevor Hoffman or K-Rod – coming in in the 8th if need be.
With yesterday’s news about Alex Rodriguez and his torn labrum beginning to set in, the blogosphere is off and running searching for someone to blame. It is important to understand exactly what happened before we can pass judgment. From Tyler Kepner:
Cashman said the Yankees discovered an irregularity in Rodriguez’s hip last May when he underwent a magnetic resonance imaging exam for a right quadriceps injury. By June or July, the hitting coach Kevin Long said he could notice subtle changes in Rodriguez’s hitting, notably in his right foot — the back one in his stance.
The foot was not pivoting fully, Long said, and as a result, Rodriguez could not completely turn his waist and clear his hips. This caused his bat to drag and prevented him from driving through the ball and generating maximum power.
It is possible that if the Yankees had given Rodriguez a follow-up M.R.I. exam on his hip after the season, they might have found the cyst and the labrum tear in time for him to have surgery and be ready by opening day.
Cashman said Rodriguez had always had stiff hips, and there was no need to examine him after the season. The condition was so minor, Cashman said, that Rodriguez did not seek treatment from team trainers last season.
“That’s why I termed it as an incidental finding,” Cashman said. “If you took an M.R.I. right now of everybody in our clubhouse, you are going to find in many of them — 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent — the same finding. Just because they have it doesn’t mean it’s a problem. Just because you have it doesn’t mean you need surgery.
“So that’s why you put it in the file,” he said. “You treat the patient, not the symptom. You don’t treat the M.R.I. You treat the patient.”
The person bearing the brunt of the blame has been Brian Cashman. Our very own Chris Harihar, of iYankees:
If you invest in Alex Rodriguez and pay him the most money in baseball, wouldn’t you treat every issue — whether it’s stiffness or soreness — as if it’s a serious one? Worst case scenarios always work, right? If you’re $275 million car is making a very slight humming noise, you’d probably still want to get it checked out, even if it’s a damn near inaudible. This is how you prevent major issues, obviously.
Either the Yankees have the wrong doctors in the clubhouse or they have the wrong GM, I don’t know. I’ve always been a Brian Cashman fan, but you would think he would be smart enough to encourage A-Rod to get checked out again after the season was over.
Ben of RAB:
Those among us who do not like Cashman are right to express outrage and incredulity at this latest revelation. The Yankees showed here an unwillingness to treat potential injuries with any sort of aggression or urgency. By letting A-Rod dictate the terms of his visits to the doctors, the Yankees are risking their investment and the team’s on-field success.
With this injury and the behind-the-scenes glimpse Kepner and Curry provided, the Yankees should use this experience as one from which they must learn. Injuries do not heal themselves, and Major League Baseball players never like to sit out. Someone has to protect the investment, and Brian Cashman and the Yankee coaches dropped the ball.
I am sorry, but I have to disagree entirely, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Cashman is not the team doctor, so I would not be shocked if he did not even know about the MRI irregularity until yesterday. Furthermore, why is it Cashman’s place to question the team’s medical personnel if they did not find it necessary to give A-Rod another MRI? As Brian states, you treat the patient, not the MRI. What that means in this case is that most players will have some sort of deterioration show in their exams, so that you have to go by what the player feels if the issue is not glaring.
The point is that I really do not get at all how this is Cashman’s fault. It may be that the team’s doctors made the wrong call, or that Alex was in pain all winter and stupidly hoped it would fade in time. If you want to point fingers, that is where you should look. Brian Cashman, on the other hand, is being made into a fall guy for something that he rightfully had little to do with.
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