Yesterday the New York Yankees signed catcher Brian McCann, formerly of the Atlanta Braves for his entire career, to a five-year contract worth $85 million that includes a vesting option for a sixth year that would bring the total to roughly six figures. It's a pretty great signing for them, as detailed here, and also a really obvious one. McCann is a dead pull left-handed power hitter, a perfect fit for Yankee Stadium's absurdly shallow right field fence. Plus, he already has a reputation as the "fun police" or "fun cop," as he started I believe multiple brawls this past season over opposing team's apparent enjoyment of their own success, and the Yankees as we all know are ideologically opposed to fun. It also, most importantly from a baseball standpoint, resolves their extremely messy catching situation, which until they signed McCann consisted of employing career backup catcher Chris Stewart as their everyday catcher and several players not good enough to be a backup catcher as Stewart's backup. Now, presumably, they can just use McCann/Stewart and have a genuinely good catching duo.
But here's the thing: this doesn't make them a good team. They're a long, long way from being a good team. I like to keep track over the off-season of how each team would look using only the players on their current roster, and looking at the Yankees' current roster, well, it's just not a good team. But I'm going to make two assumptions that go beyond just looking at the current roster, each, I think, pretty likely and the less certain one favorable to the Yankees. I assume first that Robinson Cano will resign with the team, and second that Alex Rodriguez will be suspended for the entirety of next season. That would save them a whole lot of millions of dollars, but on the other hand it would deny them the services of one Alex Rodriguez, who has been known to be pretty good at baseball. So, here goes:
The Lineup
Under all these assumptions but without any further action, it looks to me that the Yankees would head into 2014 with McCann catching, Mark Teixeira at first base, Cano at second, Derek Jeter at shortstop, Jayson Nix at third base, Alfonso Soriano in left field, Brett Gardner in center field, and Ichiro Suzuki in right field. The designated hitter... well, they don't have anyone great, but maybe Vernon Wells? Or something? Jeter will probably need some DH time, so some of the shortstop playing time will go to Eduardo Nunez (which is never a good thing). Soriano could probably DH some, and let maybe Zoilo Almonte handle left field. The projected lineup looks something like this:
Gardner, CF (L)
Jeter, SS (R)
Cano, 2B (L)
Teixeira, 1B (S)
McCann, C (L)
Soriano, LF (R)
Suzuki, RF (L)
Wells, DH (R)
Nix, 3B (R)
That does, in fact, match almost perfectly what their website's depth chart says, if you remove Rodriguez and add Cano.
That's not a terrible lineup, but it's not a great lineup either. Gardner's a very good leadoff hitter. Jeter would be a great guy to have hitting second, if he were still any good, but it's very unlikely that he will be. Cano is a legitimate All-Star. Teixeira had been trending mildly downward before essentially missing all of last season, playing in just 15 games and doing basically nothing in them; it's tough to know how he'll rebound from that. McCann should be good, although he was well below average offensively in 2012 and missed some time this season. Soriano looked like kind of a slightly-above-average hitter until he got back to the Bronx last year, when he suddenly started crushing home runs at a ridiculous pace; he'll probably be a decent power hitter. Ichiro looks pretty much finished, with an OBP below .300 last year; fair enough 'cause he'll be 40 next season. Vernon Wells as the DH is pretty hilarious, as he hit .233/.282/.349 last year; I'm honestly just not sure there's a better hitter on their team who I don't have playing a position already. And Jayson Nix is likewise pretty awful. So this is a lineup with a bunch of genuinely above-average hitters, several players who used to be great hitters but are now old and decrepit, maybe a couple of guys who are increasingly at risk for shifting from the former to the latter category, and a few guys who just plain suck. That sounds kind of league average.
The Bench
Being an American League team, the Yankees will probably have four players on their bench at the start of each game. One of them will be whoever isn't catching that day, so most days it'll be Chris Stewart, who hit .211/.293/.272 last year. That's not even good for a backup catcher. Maybe they'll go with Francisco Cervelli instead, but he's not very good either. They'll definitely need to carry someone like Eduardo Nunez or maybe recent acquisition Brendan Ryan as a backup shortstop, since Jeter is, as I said, old and decrepit. They're both terrible, Nunez kind of equally bad as a hitter and as a fielder and Ryan a brilliant defender but gawd-awful at the plate. They might also want to carry David Adams as an alternate third baseman. He hit .193 last year. If we consider Wells the primary DH, Zoilo Almonte is probably the fourth outfielder; though he got off to a hot start in the majors, he ended up hitting just .236/.274/.302 last year. You get the point: the Yankee bench, as it would currently look to be constituted, consists of a bunch of replacement-level or worse people to give their aging stars some time off. They don't look to get any actual production out of their tenth through thirteenth position players, which is not great when your lineup is shaky at best and doesn't look to get its best players in there every day. It all adds up to an offense that
The Rotation
This is where it gets fun. I'm going off the depth chart on the Yankee website, which gives a rotation of CC Sabathia, Ivan Nova, David Phelps, Michael Pineda, and Adam Warren. The fun starts at the top: the Yankees are paying Sabathia to be an ace through at least 2016 and probably 2017, but already at the age of 32 he's looking like he can't be that ace anymore. His strikeouts were down. His walks were up, a bit. Now, he might have gotten worse than he deserved with his 4.78 ERA, as more advanced metrics have him closer to a 4.00-level pitcher. But he also lost a ton of velocity on his fastball, averaging just 91.3 mph as opposed to 92.4 last year and 93.9 the year before that. Lots of great pitchers make successful adjustments when they lose some of their stuff; Sabathia didn't manage that last year. To be a good team the Yankees need the CC Sabathia of old, or at least someone who can get similar results, and there's no good reason to think that CC Sabathia himself is that guy.
And he's their best bet! Ivan Nova is a guy who keeps showing flashes of brilliance, like the 3.10 ERA in 20 starts and 3 relief appearances this past year, but also flashes of mediocrity, like the 5.02 ERA the year before. Maybe they'll get Good Nova, who's well above league average, but maybe they won't. Then there's David Phelps, an unproven 26-year-old who has yet to throw 100 innings in a season and has been used as a swingman thus far in the Majors, with 23 starts in 55 appearances. He had an ERA of almost five this past year, and for his Major League career sports a 4.39 ERA as a starter versus just 3.55 as a reliever. If they have to use Phelps to start, that's a problem. It's not as big a problem as if they have to use Adam Warren as one. He was one of their better relievers in 2013, sporting a 3.39 ERA over 34 appearances. But he's only ever made 3 Major League starts, and while it's an absurdly small sample, they weren't pretty, with just 10.1 IP over the three games, while allowing 14 hits, 5 walks, and 3 home runs, against just 9 strikeouts, amounting to 8 runs, all earned, and a 6.97 ERA.
And then there's good ol' Michael Pineda. I can't tell you his stat line from last year, or the year before that, because he hasn't played in the Majors since the Yankees acquired him from the Seattle Mariners after his 2011 rookie campaign. He had arthroscopic surgery on his throwing shoulder in May 2012, missing that whole season and the first half of 2013. And then he was sent to the Minor Leagues, where he put up a 3.86 ERA in six AAA starts. Not exactly all that encouraging. He's had a lot of promise in the past and maybe he's going to contribute to the 2014 Yankees, but it's not a great bet. Just like Sabathia, Nova, Phelps, and Warren aren't great bets. The Yankees have, in other words, a terrible rotation right now. And it's not a rotation that could be made awesome by adding one ace-level pitcher, though obviously that wouldn't hurt. They're looking at having to send someone to the mound who might well just get clobbered basically every single day. They need maybe three starters, one of whom ideally would be well above average and the other two of whom need to at least just be dependable.
The Bullpen
If there's one thing the Yankees have never really had to worry about, it's been their bullpen. Except now they do, because Mariano Rivera has retired. Again going off their website's depth chart, their bullpen right now looks like David Robertson, Shawn Kelley, Preston Claiborne, Cesar Cabral, Dellin Betances, David Huff, and Matt Daley. Two of the guys on that list I have legitimately never heard of. None of them are particularly intimidating, except maybe Robertson, but not every great set-up man becomes a great closer so even he's a question-mark. If they got two new starters and could return Phelps and Warren to the pen, that would help, but it would just make this less likely to be a 2008 Mets-style bad bullpen. The Yankees are not going to have what they've always had, and what the Braves have right now, namely the ability to shorten games and just preclude a rally by the opposition if they're trailing after eight or seven or even six innings. Opposing teams are going to feel, with good reason, like they're in the game right until the end if they're at all within striking distance.
Add it all together and you have an eminently mediocre team. There's no part of this team that's particularly good. In order to be good, they'd need a whole lot of aged veterans to reverse their recent declines all at once, and a whole lot of young, unproven players to start proving themselves in a big way. In any individual case, that can well happen. In the aggregate it's a terrible thing to be counting on. Even with Brian McCann, the 2014 Yankees are not shaping up to be a particularly scary team, unless they do a lot more to improve it.
Now, you may be asking, why not? After all, they won 85 games last year and were in playoff contention until pretty late in the season. The answer is that they were never that good a team. Their opponents outscored them by 21 runs, and by that metric the Yankees should've been 79-83 last year. They were, in other words, already a mediocre team, that happened to distribute its runs scored and allowed rather efficiently between games. Their offense was below average, and incredibly top-heavy, with Cano (7.6 bWAR) and Gardner (4.2 bWAR) the only players putting up any more than 1.6 WAR for them. And they've lost three of their four best pitchers, with Rivera (2.5 bWAR) retiring, Andy Pettitte (2.5 bWAR) doing the same, and Hiroki Kuroda (4.1 bWAR, and their best pitcher) either retiring or returning to Japan or maybe just being lost to free agency. If you replaced Rivera, Pettitte, and Kuroda with average pitchers last year, the pitching staff would've been about a win below average overall, making the modified 2013 Yankees about a true-talent 73-win team. And it's not at all clear that they will replace those three with average innings.
So even with Brian McCann added to the fold, and making a genuine three- or four-win improvement over what he's replacing, they are not a very good team. And that's if they retain Cano. Losing him would devastate them, making them a team that would have to struggle to reach 70 wins, and that you'd think would have approximately no chance of contending for the playoffs. They need to add multiple All-Star-type talents in order to get back to contention, in addition to signing McCann and keeping Cano. There's not a ton of room to do that on offense, since they have so many aging stars who can't easily be just tossed aside. So they need pitching, and lots of pitching, but pitching hasn't been coming cheap and they're trying to get under the luxury tax. Brian Cashman has a ton of work to do if the Yankees aspire not to suck in 2014, and it's not at all clear he has the resources or the opportunity to do it. Those of us who are avid Yankee haters might be in for some fun next year.
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