[I wrote this post on my site, but feel that it deserves a forum where it can be discussed, whether you agree or disagree]
Today’s inevitable Joba/Hughes debate, and the resulting arguments, one might come to realize, beg a question that’s much larger than who is the Yankees’ fifth starter in 2010.
The question:
Can the Yankees develop, successfully, a starting pitcher?
The answer, one that I’ve avoided very often, is that it’s been a very, very long time.
Since Andy Pettitte came through the system in the mid-90s, what starting pitcher has come up through the Yankees system, you are hard pressed to find a pitcher who came up through that same farm system and went on to have sustained success with the Yankees.
If you think about it, almost every 1-4 Yankee starter over the past decade, with very rare exception, from David Wells and David Cone to CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett, have come to the team via another team, whether it be trade or free agency.
The Yankees have developed pitchers in that time–but none that’s had any sustained success.
The closest we can come is probably Chien Ming Wang, who pitched great for a couple years before hurting his foot in Houston, effectively ending his career as a Yankee. It should be worth noting here that it might have not been the actual foot injury, per se, that derailed his career, but rather his rushed return.
The Yankees, in recent seasons, have not been without their prospects.
Let’s take a look at the prospect list presented in the 2007 Baseball America Prospect Handbook and see how it breaks down, pitchers in bold:
2007:
Phil Hughes
Jose Tabata
Humberto Sanchez
Dellin Betances
Joba Chamberlain
Ian Kennedy
Tyler Clippard
J. B. Cox
Kevin Whelan
Brett Gardner
Marcos Vechionacci
Jeff Marquez
Eric Duncan
Chris Garcia
Mark Melancon
Alan Horne
Angel Reyes
Austin Jackson
Chase Wright
George Kontos
Jesus Montero
Steven White
TJ Beam
Zach McAllister
Colin Curtis
Jeff Karstens
Josue Calzado
Bronson Sardinha
Tim Norton
Dan McCutchen
Of that list, Hughes, Chamberlain, Betances, Sanchez, Whelan, Garcia, Melancon, Horne, Kontos, and McAllister remain in the Yankees’ system.
Sanchez, Garcia and Horne have injuries almost on cue annually; Kontos is just coming off Tommy John and Melancon is strictly a reliever.
That leaves Hughes, Chamberlain, Betances and McAllister as remaining pitchers who were in the Yankees system in 2007, and remain with the Yankees as starters; Betances and McAllister have not pitched on a Major League level yet, though I believe it’s assumed McAllister will debut at some point this season.
While both Hughes and Chamberlain have had success out of the bullpen, the closest either has had to real success in the rotation is the way Hughes pitched in the rotation just before the Yankees rushed Wang back and shuttled Hughes back to the bullpen. Neither has had what we could consider sustained success as a starter; though it’s not for lack of trying with Joba, but with the exception of a week after the All Star break in 2009, his starts have generally been marred by high pitch counts and nibbling. The same kind of nibbling that got Mussina pulled from the rotation in 2007.
Now, of course, most prospects do not become superstars and it’d be erroneous of us to expect that. There are a number of teams that don’t have a solid #2 starter–heck, the Dodgers earlier named Vicente Padilla their Opening Day starter, so by this measure the Yankees shouldn’t have any reason to complain, right?
Not so fast.
There was a reason, in the mid 2000s, that the Yankees kept signing the high-priced free agents, or trading for the old(er) stars, such as Randy Johnson: the Yankees did not have the farm to be self-sufficient.
In the ideal world, of course, a team’s farm system is so stocked that they don’t need to make trades or sign free agents; but do so only because it takes their team say, from an 89 win team to a 95 win team–the crucial difference between playing in October or watching football on TV.
The Yankees, however, needed to make those trades and sign those free agents just to be competitive enough to make the postseason.
The year they didn’t do it–2008–is, not coincidentally, the year they missed the playoffs.
Around 2006, it’s widely considered that the Yankees began to draft decently, again, taking Chamberlain/Kennedy, among others (with Hughes drafted in 2004)
It takes time to see results, and it may be a while before we see the results of the 2008 and 2009 drafts, but, as one commenter on River Ave Blues phrased it, the current brain trust has yet to produce one pitcher who has come up through the Yankee farm system and gone on to have sustained success with the team.
It’s widely believed that Hughes and/or Chamberlain will go on to do this, but that is contingent on two things:
1) that they remain healthy–original injuries are not the fault of the brain trust, but injuries that occur as the result of rushing a pitcher through rehab or over use are (at least in part), and
2) that the shuttling of the pitchers between the rotation and the bullpen stops. Just, stops. They have to decide if Hughes and Joba are starters, and then commit to it. The point is fast approaching where Hughes and Joba will simply be too old to go back and forth between the two positions.
****
One commenter phrased it thus: where would the Yankees be had CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett not been available as free agents after the 2008 season?
One can, of course, argue that all of the Yankee moves starting in the 2007 off-season were predicated on the likelihood of Sabathia, at least, being available, but there was never any set-in-stone guarantee, nor was there a guarantee Pettitte would come back for one more year in 2009, or that his arm would not fall off.
In that sense, the Yankees ended up being the luckiest of all teams, because both Sabathia and Burnett decided they wanted to play for the Yankees.
****
The fact, however, remains that we’re still waiting for the Yankees to develop a successful starter. Maybe it will be Hughes.
We have to hope it will be, anyway.
A successful team isn’t the team that wins the World Series one year; it’s the team that can remain a contender every single year, not just because they have money, but because they can successfully manage all levels of their organization. They’re the team that can lose their #1 starter due to injury and come up with enough resources on their own to overcome it.
The Yankees can not and will not achieve any sort of sustained success, this decade or the next, if they cannot develop their own players–and, with everything else in baseball, it starts with the pitching.
View the original here: http://www.puristbleedspinstripes.com/2010/03/smoke-and-mirrors/
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16 Responses to Smoke and Mirrors
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TIQ IQ
The real question is can Yankees fans and the media have the patience to develop young starters. It takes a while, but every time these guys struggle a little bit people go insane. They are 24 and 25 years old and people just want to give up on them. The young phenom who is great right away is extremely rare. Show some patience. I still believe Hughes and Joba can both front end starters. Hughes will have a chance to show his stuff this year. Let’s see how he does.
Well said. Most do NOT have the patience to handle it, but if the Yankees had the type of patience that the Mariners had with Felix Hernandez, who knows what might happen
The Mariners had patience with Felix? He pitched 69 innings at age 17 (Low A and A), then jumped to 149.1 at 18 (high A and AA), then 172.1 split between AAA and the bigs. The only “bad” season he had was his first, when he threw 191 innings at age 20, but the Mariners were under .500 that season anyway, so they had nothing to lose. His first three full seasons his ERA went from 4.52 to 3.92 to 3.45 despite his WHIP inching higher (1.335, 1.377, 1.385) before he put it all together and went nuts last year.
Felix is only two months older than Hughes
A Rebecca post!
Opening day can’t be far away!!!!
Wow, I almost think you missed me!
Well, I see you at RAB all th….(shifts gears)
Of course, of course I missed you darlin’. How could I not? (wipes brow)
B/c Yankees draft from the lowest rung of the 1st round, we’re not going to get the sure-fire-no-doubt-about-it SP prospects. We had a shot with Gerrit Cole, but that’s a whole other mess i’d rather not get into.
Hughes clearly has the more-definite future as a rotation mainstay. He’s good enough to stick, and the potential is there for him to be a very solid 3; anything greater, and we’ll be lucky. So to return to your premise … I believe the front-office has prioritized Hughes’s future right now, and Hughes will have to execute so to become the next Yankee farm-hand to have earned his rotation spot a/l/a Wang and Pettitte. The Yankees will have developed a solid starter in Hughes, its just that it has come at the expense of Joba, or at least that’s the perception today.
Joba may not have “earned” it now, but he may “earn” it next season. That’s not certain at all, and its totally realistic to think the team will be players for another FA. Nevertheless, at least we know from Cashman’s “Joba is a SP in the pen” comment that last season hasn’t been completely written off.
The front-office has gone about developing its next rotation mainstay in a complicated, publicly-divisive way. Its not even a guarantee Joba won’t have serious competition next season. Z-Mac has no innings cap for this season, and if he can kill it at AAA, watch out.
Hughes and Joba both have the ability to be more than 3s. They should not be given up on. People need to deal with the growing pains.
I don’t think you give the Yankees nearly enough credit for Chien-Ming Wang.
Well, I give them credit for developing Wang, but not for rushing him back from his injury–which is just as important
Rebecca, I disagree with ” that the shuttling of the pitchers between the rotation and the bullpen stops. Just, stops. They have to decide if Hughes and Joba are starters, and then commit to it.” The brass was patient with poor results in Joba’s starts last year, yet the many ’round here wanted them to keep on doing it, in the face of obvious confusion. Joba was facing a brick wall, and the best was not to keep punching it, or “nibbling” at the corners.
I say think of the bullpen as an oasis. Phil last year was judged to have lost momentum, and he regained it by pitching with determination in a more limited role, as it turns out, temporarily.
The Yankees having Joba start for only 43 games before putting him in the bullpen shows no patience. At all.
A thoughtful post. Note, though, that some excellent starters such as Santana have begun their major league careers in the bullpen. And it is worth pointing out that the Red Sox have developed exactly one starter, Jon Lester, over the same period; they, too, go after starting pitching via trades and free agency.
The reason lies in the core tension between competing in a very tough division — historically the toughest in baseball — and developing starting pitching. Most young starters will struggle, and their inconsistency translates into a sub-.500 winning percentage and many short starts that tend to eat up a bullpen. With little margin for error, teams such as the Yankees or Sox shy away from letting starters develop.
I hope the Yankees begin to reserve the 5th spot in the rotation a promising young pitcher in the organization. But that presumes starters 1-4 are strong enough to hold up the rotation, which is no sure thing.
The Red Sox took no precaution with Lester either, he had pitched 60 innings in 2007, and his starts went well in 2008, so they used him for 200 innings.
An idea to consider is to use the 5th spot for tandems: have one prospect pitch four innings, if going well, five or six, and another doing four. Encourage them to use secondary pitches.
I find it hard to believe that Z-Mac will be with the Yankees organization this time next year. We need him as depth this season, but with CC-A.J.-Hughes-Joba and a handful of solid FA on the market, I don’t see how the Yanks will fit him in. It could make sense for them to trade him for a young guy pitcher that they groom as a RP from the get-go.
“The point is fast approaching where Hughes and Joba will simply be too old to go back and forth between the two positions.”
I really don’t think there’s an age limit to making such a transition. Derek Lowe and John Smoltz changed roles when they were much older, and Ramiro Mendoza did it several times a season in his prime. I think people make way too big of a deal about it.