TORONTO – Any conversation about the state of the New York Yankees organization must begin with the club’s financial might. It’s been that way for years and rightfully so. When new addition Giancarlo Stanton, who owns the richest contract in baseball, blasted two home runs on opening day, that narrative only grew stronger.
The dialogue naturally weaves to the next topic: The top-tier farm system that recently churned out major-league stars in Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez and Luis Severino, with more left in the pipeline.
Where the discussion should move next is to an area that’s often under appreciated. Lost amid all the star power and Statcast destroyers the Yankees possess are solid supplementary pieces. Players who thicken the roster considerably.
These pieces fortified the Yankees in very impactful ways last season and are doing much of the same three games into 2018 campaign.
Shortstop Didi Gregorius, centre-fielder Aaron Hicks and reliever Chad Green are members of that supporting cast, who produce the equivalent of lead actors on other teams. That trio combined to tally 9.6 wins above replacement, per FanGraphs, in 2017. For context, Josh Donaldson, Justin Smoak and Ryan Tepera generated 9.4 total WAR for the Toronto Blue Jays last season.
“I can’t say it surprised me,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said of such success, during an interview with Sportsnet. “Essentially, they honoured our scouts’ assessments of them.”
More impressive than the skill of these players, though, is how the Yankees acquired them. It wasn’t via the draft or by wielding financial might, but rather through shrewd trades that were the result of heavy scouting and analytical evaluation. Each of the three players came to New York as unheralded, almost misfit, pieces in deals that flew far under the radar.
The organization appears to have added to that pattern this past winter with the acquisition of third baseman Brandon Drury.
“It was a good job that their pro scouts and front office did in bringing these guys over,” said a National League scout. “Finding that ability and then being able to bring that out.”
The first of those trades came following the 2014 season. Franchise shortstop Derek Jeter retired and the Yankees wanted an athletic defender as a replacement. Their pro scouts had been searching for such a player and came to like what they saw in Gregorius, then with the Diamondbacks. New York’s internal analytics agreed, profiling him as a high-ceiling talent that would eventually hit well if he was just awarded steady playing time. To that point, the 24-year-old owned a .243/.313/.366 slash line in 191 games with the Diamondbacks and Reds.
Cashman pulled the trigger on a deal, sending right-hander Shane Greene to Detroit in a three-team trade, then offered Gregorius simple instruction.
“They just brought me over here and told me you’re going to be our shortstop,” Gregorius said. “Go out and play the game.”
The left-handed hitter stumbled out of the gate in his first season as Jeter’s successor, but took off in the second half of 2015.
“When I got here they had A-Rod and Carlos Beltran,” Gregorius recalled. “Those are the guys I was able to pick things up from and learn from. They’ve been in the game for a long time. Close to 20 years. If you don’t want to learn from them, then you are stupid. I think that’s what helped me get better because I was asking them questions all the time.”
Gregorius has improved in each of his three seasons in New York, his OPS rising from .688 in 2015 to .751 the following year and .796 last season. He figures to see plenty of time in the cleanup spot of New York’s lineup this year and is under team control through the 2019 campaign, offering plenty of value already for Cashman.
The general manager followed a similar route to acquire Hicks, who began this season as the club’s centre-fielder before he was placed on the 10-day disabled list Friday.
Hicks was drafted 14th overall by the Minnesota Twins in 2008 but never managed to live up to that pedigree in parts of three major-league seasons.
“I was really just trying to find myself as a player and establish myself as a big leaguer,” Hicks said of his time with the Twins when flashes of brilliance were sprinkled in with mostly struggles. “Just learning my way through being able to play in the big leagues.”
Still, Cashman, his scouts and analytics staff saw enough promise in Hicks — who was 26 with little service time under his belt — to acquire him in a November 2015 deal for John Ryan Murphy, a fringe major-league catcher. The club’s front office executives made the transaction with the intention of cleaning up some flaws they identified in Hicks’s swing.
“In Hicks and Didi’s case, both were great athletes that we just felt hadn’t been finished off yet,” said Cashman. “So just untapped potential. In Hicks’s case, he’s a switch hitter, great arm, tremendous runner, so a true five-tool talent. He had done everything through triple-A, but just hadn’t gotten over the hump at the major-league level yet.”
He struggled in his first season with the Yankees, but accrued 3.3 WAR in a breakout 2017 campaign last season, pushing veteran Jacoby Ellsbury from the starting job in centre.
“Last year was the coming out party,” Cashman added. “A continued coming out party for Didi and a coming out party for Hicks. In both cases, they were essentially reaching their ceiling on their scouting assessments.”
As did Green, who came to the Yankees with fellow right-hander Luis Cessa in a trade with Detroit for reliever Justin Wilson. Green, an 11th-round pick, was not a big prospect, and at the time considered the secondary piece in that trade.
The Yankees acquired him with the hope that the excellent spin rate on his fastball would eventually translate into big-league success and in his second year with the Yankees, it did, in dominant fashion. His 41 per cent strikeout rate ranked third among MLB relievers in 2017, trailing only Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel.
“Sometimes, players need a change of scenery,” said the NL scout. “When you acquire these players, you hope your player development guys can bring out what you saw in them when you watch the team.”
Drury is the latest player Cashman hopes will be considered a coup. The Yankees acquired him from Arizona in a three-team deal with Tampa Bay in February, surrendering two mid-level prospects. The 25-year-old had moderate success in two full seasons with the Diamondbacks, but the Yankees feel there is untapped power in his bat.
“He fits the narrative of a player that is young, controllable, talented,” Cashman said of Drury. “We felt he was out of position, because he had that big, left-handed monster in front of him in Arizona named Jake Lamb. So they had to move him to second and the outfield to try to get his bat into the lineup. But he’s really a third baseman.
“Essentially, we feel he is at the very least an everyday major-league third baseman, if not a potential above-average, everyday third baseman,” added the GM. “We felt when we returned him back to third, we could get him back in the comfort level he was and he could unlock some of the potential in the swing because there were some things we saw that we felt allowed for more in the tank in terms of production. We’re going to test that theory.”
The ideology was put to the test in the club’s opening series and the early results were strong. With the heart of New York’s order stifled on Friday — Stanton, Judge and Sanchez were hitless in 12 combined at-bats — Drury shouldered a heavy load from the lineup’s No. 8 spot, registering two run-scoring hits off Blue Jays starter Aaron Sanchez, including a 106-mph opposite-field double off the top of the right-field wall.
On that day, the newest member of New York’s supporting cast only added to the horror film the Yankees appear to be screening at American League ballparks.
[relatedlinks]
