Warning: Not actual A-Rod photo.

Say, for a minute, though, we accept that Rodriguez identifies with the mythological features of a centaur (and one can argue that the centaur’s half-man, half-beast composition is symbolic of Rodriguez’ on-field and off-the-field personalities ). We are then free to wonder what other mythological identifications might be appropriate for the rest of the Yankees—in case, you know, they decide that they too want symbolic portraits of themselves…

Derek Jeter as Unicorn
Unicorns are symbols of innocence (they can only be tamed by virgins), and the closest Derek Jeter has ever come to outright scandal is whether or not he should bat leadoff or second. Unicorns are also supposed to be exceedingly rare; shortstops who can play in three different decades with only two appearances on the 15-day DL in that time-frame while amassing over 3,000 career hits all with the same team certainly are not common. So maybe Jeter can’t heal the sick—not yet, anyway—but no matter. He is class, grace, and (given what we know about his marital status), apparently also impossible to catch.

A.J. Burnett as Dragon
First, the difference between Good A.J. performances and Bad A.J. performances is about as polar as the difference between the dragon in eastern cultures and western ones. Second, if we postulate that Bad A.J. is the western representation of the dragon—a dangerous thing that can cause all manner of destruction—it explains how a Bad A.J. start is often perceived by the fan base, either by pitching horrendously, giving his team no chance to win, or by igniting the media storm that follows. The love or hate people have for dragons may not entirely equate with the way fans love to hate Burnett, but the moral is still the same: you’re supposed to stay far, far away from fire hazards.

NOT the roof of A-Rod's house. (Wikipedia Commons)

Mariano Rivera as Pegasus
Pegasus ascended to Zeus so he could bring thunder and lightning from Mt. Olympus down to us mortals; Rivera himself said that his cutter is a Gift from Above. Clearly, any reliever who has survived 16 seasons on one pitch, earning five World Series rings and amassing 600 saves in the process, has to be in constant contact with a Higher Power. Pegasus is both a symbol of wisdom and poetry; Rivera is the Yankees’ equivalent of Merlin, Gandalf, and Dumbledore all rolled into one, and if his pitching was translated into poetry, he’d probably be a Nobel laureate.

Brian Cashman as Kraken
Okay, so maybe Cashman isn’t a giant octopus that lives under the sea (have you ever had octopus? It’s yummy), but he does have a habit of coming out of nowhere to make huge splashes, causing giant earthquakes in the baseball universe. After all, think about what happened when the Yankees, not the Red Sox or the Angels, signed Mark Teixeira (one went and got Adrian Gonzalez, the other Albert Pujols), and the expectations that the Yankees will win the AL East after Cashman’s most recent blockbuster. Oh, and one more thing—Cashman does have a Pirate-eating habit.

David Robertson as Griffin
Griffins are exceptionally majestic beasts known for guarding treasure. There is no greater treasure the Yankees have right now than the sight of Rivera on the mound in the ninth inning, and as the Yankees’ set-up man, it’s Robertson’s duty to make sure Rivera’s ninth is unimpeded by such intrusions as runs scored by the other team. After all of the starters and other relievers have made their appearances, Robertson is the Yankees’ last line of defense before their closer must enter the fray. Good thing, then, that Robertson’s strikeout rate is pretty darn majestic as well.

Nick Swisher as Phoenix
Unlike a bad Burnett start, which can ruin everything around it, Nick Swisher has an uncanny ability to rise from the ashes after a bad month or a bad year. There might be other, better examples of baseball players resurrecting themselves, but Swisher’s colorful personality  works nicely with the phoenix’s colorful red and gold plumage. I’m not sure if Swisher and Rivera have quite the same relationship as Fawkes and Dumbledore (there are no phoenixes in Lord of the Rings and I’m only on page 146 of The Once and Future King—NO SPOILERS!), but at the very least the two are teammates, and we all know that Swisher has saved the bullpen before…

Shane Spencer slugs: Remember him in 1998? (AP)

I was out to dinner last night with two old pals who used to be in the baseball business and Shane Spencer came up. I hadn’t thought about Spencer in any great detail since 2004 or so, so it was pleasant to recall 1998, a year in which just about everything went right for the Yankees, among the 26-year-old rookie Spencer going nuts and hitting 10 home runs in just 73 plate-appearances. He hit .373/.411/.910 in that little trial, setting a standard he could never hope to match. He had a good little career, particularly given that he was a 5’11”, 28^th-round draft pick in the Yankees organization—historically, such players are more likely to be struck by a falling chunk of frozen airplane sewage than they are to make the majors and have a 500-game stay.

The latter part of his career was mired by a couple of alcohol-related incidents which led him to be released by the Mets (if only his crime had been something like embezzlement—he’d still be there), but he was useful for several years. Spencer’s main talent was hitting left-handed pitching; he was a career .296/.345/.497 hitter against southpaws, versus .245/.316/.392 against same-side pitchers, numbers not good enough to keep him in the lineup. He had a reputation as a poor defender, but he was hardly Alfonso Soriano out there, getting to most of what he should have.

I love players like Spencer who are valuable despite their limitations. Andruw Jones, defrocked star, played that kind of role for the Yankees last year, as he did for the Rangers and White Sox in the two years before that. Jones will never win an 11^th Gold Glove to go with the 10 he picked up beginning in that same year of 1998, and you don’t want to see him out there against right-handers too often, but over the last three seasons he’s hit .208/.308/.467 against same-side pitching (hence my “too often” qualifier—with 29 home runs in 418 at-bats, he can still send the ball over the wall if he ties into one, something worth trying in the right situations) and .254/.374/.492 against southpaws, with 20 home runs in 331 at-bats. Over that same period, American League hitters batted only .262/.331/.409 against portsiders.

Platoon players have gone through phases in baseball from lack of acceptance (one early exec, in the days before statistical splits were commonly available, called platooning “a psychological fad”) to near-extinction due to relief pitchers overgrowing rosters like kudzu. There is not enough room to have multiple players at more than one position anymore. The Yankees might need to platoon at both left field (Brett Gardner is now a career .243/.349/.318 hitter against lefties) and designated hitter (because that position is still wide open). With 12 and sometimes 13 pitchers on the roster it will be difficult to make both work unless a utility player is potent enough to double up. In the glory days of platooning, most managers carried only 10 pitchers.

I miss those days, which were as recent as 20 years ago. Baseball was more fun when managers had substitutes to play with. With fewer pitchers, Whitey Herzog had room on his Cardinals team for a 25^th man like Tom Lawless, who almost never played unless there was an emergency. He would pinch-run or substitute if Herzog had to pinch-hit for an infielder, but otherwise he was just there to watch. In four seasons with the Cardinals he played in 166 games and got only 216 plate appearances. He couldn’t hit, batting .187 in those PAs, but he had skills that the team could use as long as they kept him away from the plate. One year he didn’t get into his first game until mid-May. I don’t recall that he was hurt—Herzog just hadn’t needed him yet.

Teams used to carry three catchers, five outfielders, whatever they thought would help. They kept their 11^th, 12^th, and 13^th pitchers in the minor leagues and called them up when they needed them, which is still sensible—perhaps in this day of fewer off days, teams do require an 11^th pitcher, but surely the second lefty and sixth right-hander could remain in Scranton until called.

Pinch-hitters have delivered some of the coolest small-sample seasons that we have had in baseball, seasons like Shane Spencer’s 1998. In 1968, Gates Brown was instrumental in pushing the Tigers to the World Series, batting .370/.442/.685 in 104 PAs, .450 of it coming as a pinch-hitter. Dusty Rhodes hit .341/.410/.695 as a outfield reserve and pinch-hitter for the 1954 Giants, then helped his team upset the Indians in the World Series by going 4-for-6 with two home runs. Smoky Burgess was a catcher who was basically too fat to catch, but he was a good enough hitter that he hung around forever anyway. He was a career .278/.376/.431 hitter in 551 PAs as a pinch-hitter, which doesn’t sound like much, but given the disproportionate role luck plays for one-at-a-time hitters, those rates are actually amazingly good. There were many seasons in which he hit .300 or .400 as a pinch-hitter.

Those guys are extinct now, but their skills still exist in some ballplayer of the present generation, probably more than one. The first team that casts off its 12^th reliever in favor of a 25^th man with a bat is going to reap a large advantage, particularly if that hitter is a powerful right-hander, because that team’s manager is going to be able to deter the opposition’s lame lefty specialists right out of the ballgame. That hitter would feast, too, because the platoon splits against those LOOGY types are often obscenely bad, and once that LOOGY is in the game, his manager cannot take him out until he’s faced at least one batter.

All it takes is one good season like this to start a trend in baseball, or in this case, reverse one. The only thing swelling bullpens is a mass delusion shared among all 30 managers at any given time that this is the right thing to do. The first one to break with the practice will so embarrass the others with the absurd vulnerability of their spot relievers that overnight they will all want to have extra bench players instead of extra relievers. That’s how platooning got started. That’s how spot relievers displaced platoon players. The pendulum can swing back the other way.

Alas, it probably won’t happen anytime soon. There are few innovators among managers these days. The Yankees have an opportunity to break with the pack in settling their DH situation, perhaps finding a left-handed Shane Spencer type to go with their right-handed version in Jones. It probably won’t happen, but I’ll keep waiting for the day. Think of that when the Yankees’ last pitcher, who may well prove to be Phil Hughes, comes into a 14-1 game to pitch a couple of innings.

Jim Hendry and a ball just out of reach. (AP)

It’s amazing that in baseball, a sport where the most respected statisticians preach large sample sizes and not rushing to judgment—how often do we hear the phrase “it’s a grind” in reference to the 162-game season—pennants and World Series are won or lost on the smallest play: Buckner’s error, Damon’s double steal, Jeffery Maier reaching over the wall to turn a fly out into a home run, or Steve Bartman doing what any of us would have done on any other night, trying to catch a foul ball.

Would the Cubs have won the 2003 NLCS had Moises Alou been able to catch that foul ball? After all, Alou later admitted he wouldn’t have been able to make the play, regardless of Bartman’s interference. It’s impossible to know, but if we accept that Bartman’s actions had nothing to do with the Cubs’ inability to halt the damage in the eighth, the logical follow through is that the Cubs lost the game because baseball games are hard to win, not because a billy goat had a bad day.

What we might have thought, however, is that in coming so close to making the World Series in 2003, the Cubs would reach that goal at some point in the near term. They did not. The Cubs did not return to the postseason until 2007, and in both that year and the following, they didn’t win a single postseason game. The “lovable losers” haven’t seen October baseball since. Making the postseason is hard, and a lot depends on luck—just getting a team to stay healthy enough to last all 162 games is a challenge—but one would expect a team with the Cubs’ resources for the last nine years to have made better use of them (then again, maybe not).

Jim Hendry’s tenure as the general manager of the Cubs is reflective of the notion of that team as perennial underachievers. The Cubs should have been much better than they were; even in the years the Cubs did make the postseason, they should have gone even further. Hendry isn’t responsible for all of that (it wasn’t Hendry who abused Mark Prior and Kerry Wood to the point of near-uselessness), and there are teams (the Pirates and Orioles, perhaps) who would envy the Cubs’ few years of relative success, but again one comes to the conclusion that the Cubs should have been able to accomplish more.

As an example, consider this: Hendry did not directly abuse either the arms of Prior or Wood, but neither did he step in—Dusty Baker, who often considered responsible, did not leave the Cubs until after the 2006 season. Hendry built a team that included sluggers such as Alfonso Soriano and Derrek Lee, which, in this particular case, meant he also built an offense which struck out at the same rate as the average person draws breath. Sabermetric schools of thought preach high on-base skills in a lineup; the mid-’00s Cubs could stand as the antithesis of that ideal (the 2006 edition is among just seven teams since 1995 to draw fewer than 400 walks in a season, and many of the other Hendry teams were not much better). On the other hand, Hendry’s love affair with the strikeout also held true for his pitching staffs, as the Cubs often ranked at the top of the league in strikeouts. Carlos Zambrano, Ryan Dempster, Kerry Wood, and even Carlos Marmol are or were known for their strikeout abilities; given the defense the likes that Soriano, Lee or, say, Kosuke Fukudome provided, the strategy to pursue pitchers who did not, in fact, pitch to contact could have worked—if only Wood had not gotten hurt or Zambrano not gone crazy.

How much credit a GM gets for his team’s success or blame he takes for its failure should vary because of a host of factors, not all of which are under his control. If ownership ever restricted a GM’s access to monetary resources, if ownership felt a need to interfere in player personnel decisions, or if a star player had a non-preventable injury (like being hit in the head by a liner) could all limit a GM’s effectiveness.* That said, we know—by looking at payroll tables, linked above—that the Cubs were not shy about spending money, and we know that if a team “gets bit” by an injury bug, there could be a systemic fault. Even if a general manger is not himself responsible for a certain fault, injury or other misstep (like, for example, a Zambrano tantrum), he still bears a responsibility for the consequence. If a team wasn’t good enough to win the NL pennant or the World Series, it doesn’t matter what the immediate cause was; the GM still has a responsibility to improve his team for the next season.

*I go much more in-depth in the analysis of how to evaluate a general manager in my chapter in Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers, which you should read, obviously.

Hendry was able to get the Cubs to return to the playoffs in 2007 and 2008, but one can argue that a team with their apparent financial resources should not have hit the valley of the 2004-2006 seasons, nor should they have fallen so far after the 2008 season, regardless of the success of their division’s other teams. How did this happen? Consider the dearth of home-grown players on the Cubs’ starting lineups over the season: outside of Geovanny Soto, Starlin Castro and Darwin Barney (the latter two being newcomers), there has been little presence of players the Cubs developed on their own. The farm system might be improving, but farm systems take years to overhaul and bear fruit; in this case coming too late to save Hendry’s job.

Hendry will now be joining the Yankees as a special assignment scout under Brian Cashman, on a multi-year deal. Unlike the Cubs, the Yankees don’t have a billy goat scapegoat (try saying that five times fast) on which to blame their failures; merely missing the playoffs is akin to the eighth deadly sin. Hendry isn’t going to be the next Yankees’ GM (at least, not in the next three years), so he won’t bear the brunt of the responsibility should the Yankees fail in 2012 or immediately after—unfortunately, the corollary here is that if the Yankees are successful, he won’t get the glory, either. The difference between running your own team and playing second fiddle for another shouldn’t come down to one bungled inning, but when that inning is the difference between a team’s first World Series berth since 1945 or yet another year lost to the billy goat, it means everything.

Raul Ibanez is likely past his sell-by date. (AP)

Let’s start with the former. It’s good that the Yankees are looking for a utility player who can sub for Alex Rodriguez on DH days and give the lineup more pop than Eduardo Nunez can. Per 162 games played, Hall has hit 32 doubles and 19 home runs. Nunez will probably hit 19 home runs in his career, but he won’t get close in a single season.

Resting Rodriguez is a great idea—he hasn’t played 150 games since 2007. However, the cost of doing that is going to be very high if the Yankees don’t have another bat to play third base in his absence. Hall, who hit 35 home runs for the Brewers back in 2006, would seem like a good idea, but the problem—by now you know there is always a problem—is that he has massive problems making contact and doesn’t walk, so the overall package is far from potent. In 2010 he hit reasonably well for the Red Sox, batting .247/.316/.456. However, in 2008, he hit .225/.293/.396, in 2009 he hit .201/.258/.338, and last year he hit .211/.261/.314, and was released twice. The Giants sent him to Triple-A in early July and he remained there for the rest of the season.

Hall’s weakness is his inability to hit right-handers. In his career he’s hit .258/.328/.454 against lefties, and .244/.297/.428 against right-handers. That doesn’t really depict the full extent of the problem. Over the last four years, he has hit .245/.304/.422 against lefties, .209/.274/.362 against righties. Hall is a decent glove and can play everywhere, but that’s just not going to work.

Raul Ibanez is going on 40 (he’ll get there in June) and didn’t field well when he was 25, but that’s not that the Yankees would want him for. He’d be the left-handed half of a designated hitter platoon. A career .286/.351/.488 hitter against right-handers (.265/.317/.426 against lefties), over the last two years he’s hit .244/.277/.391 against left handers, .267/.337/.448 against right handers. Perhaps a more salient fact is that he hit .291/.348/.510 in the friendly confines of Citizens Bank Park, but just .228/.292/.352 on the road. Perhaps Yankee Stadium would provide him the same uplift, perhaps not, but the road stats are about as ugly as Hall’s stats against righties.

As I’ve remarked in earlier posts, with Jorge Posada struggling for much of the year, it didn’t seem as if the Yankees got much production out of their designated hitters, but he actually hit well at times and almost every other player who was put in the spot did well, with the result that the Yankees got .251/.336/.450 out of the aggregate, a little better than the average .266/.341/.430. That average should be taken with a grain of salt, because three of the four AL West teams turned in DH performances so bad that you’d almost think they had gone all 1919 White Sox on that particular position. Mariners’ DHs hit .225/.316/.332. Ramiro Pena might have done better than that. I don’t see these teams making a habit of this kind of incompetence—you would almost have to try to be that bad again—so DH production levels are going to rise, putting more pressure on the Yankees to get the position right.

That peace of mind, unfortunately, only lasted about 30 minutes. Perhaps I should have known better…

In a span of about an hour, the Yankees went from a strangely quiet, maybe-they’re-holding-out-until-2012 offseason to the team having the best night of the winter. They bolstered their rotation by trading for one of the game’s most promising young starters in Michael Pineda. Minutes later, YES’ Jack Curry reported the team reached an agreement with respected veteran Hiroki Kuroda. The total cost for the moves? Ten million, a prospect in Jesus Montero—a tantalizing prospect, to be sure, but a prospect all the same—and Hector Noesi, who had only limited opportunities with the Yankees last season.

Most of the ensuing press has (rightly) focused on the Montero-Pineda trade; it’s been years since the Yankees had a position prospect as good as Montero that close to the major leagues, and the return, Pineda and Jose Campos, is promising. On the other hand, Kuroda is not a 23-year-old pitcher or prospect with a 98 mph fastball; yet for roughly the same price as Curtis Granderson, the Yankees might have found one of their most important players for the 2012 season.

Kuroda has had limited chances to pitch against American League teams (indeed, he’s only started 11 interleague games), but the jump from the Japanese leagues to the major leagues—one that he’s made successfully—is probably a much bigger gulf than going from the National League to the American League (and no matter what we might say about cultural differences between New York and LA, it’s still not the same as coming from Japan and adjusting to the United States). Kuroda’s injury risk is not negligible (he is entering his age-37 season, after all), but the history is a far cry from those of some of the other pitchers on the market.

Ivan Nova and Pineda both only have about a season’s worth of major-league games; with such a short track record it’s almost impossible to draw conclusions as to what the Yankees should expect (is Nova’s slider for real? What about Pineda’s second-half fall off last season?). On the other hand, Kuroda has four years of mostly similar results and no drastic home/road or first-/second-half splits; his reliability should be a bulwark in the rotation if something goes awry with the youngsters.

Over the past 20 years, Yankees history is littered with instances in which a trade not made or a buy-low deal has paid huge dividends even as headline signings have gone awry. Kuroda wasn’t the headliner on the 13th; he was the icing on the pitching cake. Unlike Pineda, Kuroda doesn’t have his career ahead of him, and his tenure on the Yankees might only be a season long, but, as the saying goes, flags fly forever.

Phil Hughes: Here he comes again... again. (AP)

In his second-ever start, Hughes flirted with a no-hitter, and then he got hurt. Injuries returned again in 2008, limiting him to just 34 innings that season. In 2009, Hughes moved to the bullpen to make room for Chien Ming Wang in the rotation. Wang would injure his shoulder on Independence Day that year and ultimately not pitch another inning for the Yankees; Hughes woud excel as the team’s eighth-inning setup man, helping the team, but at the price of his own development. In 2010, at the still-young age of 24, Hughes pitched well enough in the first half of the season to earn himself a bid to the All-Star game; whether because of fatigue or another reason, the second half of the season was not nearly as successful by most statistical measures (if it was successful at all). Those struggles continued in an exaggerated form in early 2011,  landing Hughes on the 60-day DL yet again. He returned in July and was still below league average, despite how much he seemed to have improved from April.

Going into the 2012 season, the pitcher many once thought might be the centerpiece in a trade for Johan Santana has surpassed 100 major league innings in a season just once (in 2010), and has spent a total of 319 days—almost a fifth of the five years since his major league debut—on the disabled list. It might seem cruel to call a pitcher who will turn 26 in June a failed prospect (if there is such a thing), but since Hughes started so early one has to measure in terms of seasons, rather than age. There’s no rule that says a player has to peak by his fourth season in the majors, but one would expect any player to have shown improvement, something Hughes—very likely do to the substantial time missed—has not done in quantities that would inspire confidence.

With the logjam currently provided by having seven starters for five rotation spots, it would thus seem logical that barring a stellar spring training, Hughes would not be the first choice for that last rotation spot. At the very least, Hughes offers the Yankees a certain flexibility they don’t have with A.J. Burnett or Freddy Garcia: Hughes has has had success pitching out of the bullpen, and he is not far removed from that experience, either.

There’s just one problem with that scenario: assuming Mariano Rivera, David Robertson, Rafael Soriano all pitch well and stay healthy, not to mention the possibility of a resurgent Joba Chamberlain at some point during the season, Hughes would end up quite far down on the bullpen depth chart, in roughly the same role Luis Ayala had last season. It would take a catastrophic injury or a mid-season retirement to boot Rivera from the closer’s role; Robertson more than earned  his eighth-inning spot (which he inherited after injuries to Chamberlain and Soriano) and Soriano is due $11 million in 2012. Even Corey Wade pitched well enough to have earned his place at the table. Assuming the starting pitchers throw the baseball vaguely in the direction of home plate on any sort of consistent basis, the current set up would allow Hughes the sixth inning as the highest-leverage situation available. Without getting into discussions about leverage and why the number of an inning is not necessarily a harbinger of how important that inning is to that particular game, the fact remains that in such an alignment Hughes would rarely be pitching anything other than mop-up innings.

Then again, there is a reason Joe Girardi’s Yankees have been known for the stellar work of their bullpens. By their very nature, bullpens are the most volatile component of any baseball team, and their composition changes frequently, often in-season, utilizing both prospects and cheaply-had journeymen. Mariano Rivera is deified by fans not just because he was that good at his peak, but because his peak has lasted the better part of two decades. History and logic both suggest that there is no way all four at the top of the Yankees’ current bullpen hierarchy make it through the season healthy and while pitching effectively.

Soriano, who has a lengthy injury history of his own (including elbow and shoulder problems) might be considered the greatest injury risk, but Robertson might very well be due to regress as well. Robertson’s numbers overall for 2011 were outstanding; his numbers in high-leverage situations are such that one has to wonder just how much longer that success rate can be kept. No tightrope walker, no matter how good, can walk the high wire forever. Robertson’s walk and strikeout rates in 2011 are well within his career norms; the sudden decrease in ERA might very well be attributed to the substantial decrease in both hits and home runs per nine.  Given the steady peripherals, it would seem that luck (or a very good defense) was at much at play in 2011 as anything else, and no one is lucky forever (and especially not with an aging infield, which, while maybe not the Detroit Tigers, is certainly no Evers-Tinkers-Chance).

In an ideal world, with every reliever healthy and pitching to his potential, and assuming Hughes doesn’t all of a sudden find “it”, the Yankees might seek to recoup some value for Hughes on the trade market (he is, after all, still relatively cheap and it might be tempting for some teams to think that a change of scene might unearth his untapped talent), but major league baseball is not played in an ideal world. bullpens almost never make it through a season unscathed, so should the Yankees decide to place Hughes in the bullpen and not the rotation, it is more than likely he will get his chance. Again.

Hiroki Kuroda: A veteran starter, and a good one, he won't be going to the bullpen. (AP)

Teenage girls are supposed to decorate their rooms with posters of guys their fathers wouldn’t be caught dead to have them date, but I took a slightly different approach. Instead of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt (okay, so there were a few of those, too), I decorated my walls and closet doors with clippings from Sports Illustrated, New York Times, ESPN The Magazine and the hometown paper, The Record.  If it had a member of the Yankees, Devils or Jets on it, it was good enough to go up, and thus my walls became so adorned.

One posting, in particular, I remember: a season-preview, with George Steinbrenner surrounded by members of the pitching rotation he assembled, and the headline: YOU CAN’T HAVE TOO MUCH PITCHING (Just ask George).

A couple of thoughts come to mind now, thinking about that particular cover:

1) The pitching hero of the postseason that year for the Yankees was not a starter, but instead Mariano Rivera, with his three shutout innings in Game 7 of the ALCS against the Red Sox;

2) When you have a full 40-man roster, unless you’ve got Felix Hernandez, Clayton Kershaw, Roy Halladay, Justin Verlander and Tim Lincecum as your rotation (and Dave Duncan as your pitching coach), you can certainly find yourself having too many pitchers.

Such is the situation the Yankees now have, both in theory (how do you cut a presumed seven-man rotation down to five?) and in fact (the 40-man roster is full, and Hiroki Kuroda doesn’t yet have a spot on it). The most obvious solution is to drop an excess pitcher; Kevin Whelan, who did not impress in the majors last season and turned 28 a few weeks ago, would seem an obvious candidate.

Spare bullpen pitchers are not as hard to find as one might imagine, so cutting Whelan or similar is a low-risk proposition, but the problem of seven pitchers vying for five rotation spots (CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Ivan Nova, Phil Hughes, Freddy Garcia, Michael Pineda, and Kuroda) is less easily solved. Barring catastrophic injury, one can assume Sabathia’s spot in the rotation is safe, and, as long as last season’s forearm injury has healed, the same goes for Nova. The Yankees didn’t trade Jesus Montero to put Pineda, one of the most promising young starters in the game, in middle relief, and the veteran Kuroda has been a very effective career starter. That means Burnett, Hughes, and Garcia are vying for one spot.

This is not quite the Joba Chamberlain/Hughes rotation battles of seasons past. Those were clashes of youth; Hughes can’t be called a prospect anymore, while Garcia and Burnett are veteran journeymen. If the Yankees chose to send one of the three to bullpen, Hughes would probably be the most likely candidate. He did, after all, pitch most of the 2009 season from the bullpen and was crucial to the team’s World Series run, so he would not be an entirely unknown quantity in that role, as volatile as relief pitchers may be. Garcia and Burnett have never pitched out of the pen; between them they total 70 years of age and seven games in relief.

If the Yankees do flip Hughes to the bullpen, they would, assuming no trade has been consummated by the end of spring training, still be left with Burnett and Garcia vying for the fifth-starter role and the uncomfortable question of what to do with the one left on the outside. The Yankees’ reluctance to drop a struggling Burnett from the rotation last season meant they ended up using a six-man rotation for much of the second half;  given Bartolo Colon’s second-half struggles, the Yankees lucked into a strategy that worked for a time. Over a full season, it becomes a different story—especially since it’s hard to argue that Sabathia’s or Pineda’s workloads should be reduced so that neither Burnett nor Garcia bear the ignominy of not being good enough to make the starting rotation.

There is, of course, an elephant in the room, a big one, decked out in jewels and with the King of Siam enthroned on it. Said elephant is Burnett’s massive contract. If Burnett and Garcia received similar-enough pay, the decision wouldn’t be quite so hard—Garcia hasn’t been brilliant, but unlike Burnett, hasn’t been so bad as to have writers and fans calling for his removal from the rotation. If Garcia outperforms Burnett in Spring Training, which would not surprise too many, the Yankees are still left with the problem that it’s a lot easier to unload a $4 million contract than an $33 million one (with limited no-trade protection to boot). It would be a heck of a lot easier to find another team willing to trade for Garcia than one willing to trade for Burnett.

Precedent does exist for trading underperforming players with bloated contracts, and the sheer fact that Burnett has managed to stay healthy over the past three seasons (an irony that should not be lost given his history) means that he has some value, although it’s unlikely the Yankees would be able to get much in return, and not without eating a substantial portion of the contract. For a team trying to rein in spending like a Eurozone economy, simply swallowing the remainder does not sound like a policy they would pursue, although it’s a moot point–the money is gone either way, so the choice isn’t between spending the $33 million remaining on the contract or not, it’s a choice between spending it and letting Burnett drag the Yankees away from the postseason or letting another team be the recipient of that gift.

It is almost an impossibility that the Yankees will be able to go through the entirety of the 2012 season with just five pitchers in their starting rotation. Pitchers get hit, get hurt, and, like all other humans, occasionally have personal emergencies that take them away from the team. If it turns out that last year’s success has no bearing on Garcia’s ability to pitch this year; if Nova’s forearm injury at the end of last season is a harbinger of a worse elbow problem (or he simply regresses); if Sabathia hurts his shoulder—if any of these things happen, then what the Yankees do with a spare part becomes a moot point. Sure, Manny Banuelos and Dellin Betances might be waiting in the wings (along with the lower-ceilinged, but still promising Adam Warren and David Phelps), but being a prospect alone does not guarantee success—of the Chamberlain/Hughes/Ian Kennedy Big Three of just five years ago, one needed Tommy John surgery, another struggled as much as (if not more) than Burnett at one point in 2011, and the third, while successful, is no longer with the team. Depth is a wonderful thing to have, but it disappears the moment it needs to be used.

It’s an odd situation in which the best-case scenario is that the Yankees would eat $33 million of a pitcher who was their number two starter in the World Series in 2009, has stayed healthy, and has pitched at least 185 innings in each of his seasons as a Yankee. This scenario assumes that the Yankees could get something of significance in return for their money; while an open roster spot is not without value, it cannot give you a quality start every five days. Best-case scenarios, though, rarely occur, and the Yankees, at some point will need a sixth (or seventh) starter. The Yankees are left with a situation in which there is no good answer where Burnett is concerned—even if he outperforms Garcia and Hughes in Spring Training, the sample size would still be too small when compared to the previous two seasons to inspire too much confidence—even as some would say, there is no such thing as too much pitching.

I am too young to remember Willie Mays playing for the Mets in 1972 and 1973, but when I was growing up, that last go-round for the Say Hey Kid had become a symbol of something sad, the pain that came with watching a formerly great defender struggle to cut off balls he used to catch before they rolled past him to the wall, to strike out at the pitches he used to hit. His fans didn’t want to see him that way.

My own experience with this phenomenon came in the early 1990s, when I watched Don Mattingly change all too soon from the MVP of 1985 to the sore-backed singles hitter who batted .256/.308/.335 in 1990. In his case the problem wasn’t age, but injury. The result was the same—we were forced to watch something we just didn’t want to see.

Jorge Posada officially announced his retirement today. One of the first Pinstriped Bible crusades, right at the beginning of this feature’s existence, was that Posada had to displace Joe Girardi, and the sooner the better. The 1998 season had demonstrated what a valuable hitter Posada was. Girardi’s lack of offensive value had been established for almost ten years. In 1999, the imbalance between the two was perhaps even more extreme, even though Posada had a poor year by his standards. He hit only .245/.341/.401, but Girardi was far worse at .239/.271/.354, and made a point of hitting into just about every double play possible. The Yankees finally figured that Posada’s “apprenticeship” was ready to end at 28, and in 2000 he had the first of his really big seasons.

Now we’re on the other end of the string, and it’s clear that Posada had reached the end of his utility. I know that you can look at his production versus right-handers (.269/.348/.466)  in isolation and say that Posada had something remaining in the tank, but what you’re looking at, given his lack of glove, speed, or right-handed swing is a left-handed DH and pinch-hitter with good-not-great numbers which were (A) compiled in a very streaky way, and (B) were no guarantee to repeat at age 40. The Yankees can approximate that and get more flexibility into the roster spot. It was, at least insofar as the Yankees went, time.

That Posada elected not to try to stretch his career for another year makes for a nice symmetry on his baseball card and a sentimental feeling in terms of fans, team, and player, but more importantly, his career can end on the note of his .429 average in the 2011 postseason rather than what would have been almost certainly the inevitable result of his transfer to a new address—too few at-bats to get going, followed by a midseason release when the roster spot was required for an extra pitcher or a player who could actually contribute in more than one dimension. That would have been a Willie Mays ’73 moment even more than last season threatened to be. Better to stop here.

Teams have won with a mix at shortstop, just as they have won with a mix at every other position. You will sometimes hear baseball talking heads say that it’s so important to have a regular at position X because X is the captain of the defense or the lynchpin of the something or other, but the truth is there are no hard and fast rules. The 1956 Yankees, to pick one championship team at random, had five shortstops. The 1998 Yankees split the starts at catcher almost evenly between Jorge Posada (85) and Joe Girardi (76). There is nothing inherently disqualifying about Boston’s combination of theoretical offense (Aviles) and actual defense (the other two guys), assuming that Bobby Valentine deploys them advantageously and doesn’t overlook the former’s defensive limitations or the latter’s lack of hitting.

Ross and Ryan Sweeney would make for an interesting platoon if Sweeney actually hit right-handers well enough to play an outfield corner. He’s a career .296/.352/.402 hitter against righties, while averaging .233/.306/.289 against his fellow southpaws. Both might play in the early days as Carl Crawford is questionable to start the season on time, but on the whole this is a timeshare that will struggle to live up to the .267/.337/.431 that AL right fielders hit in 2011 unless everything goes just right. (They will easily surpass the .233/.299/.353 Sox right fielders hit last year, but that isn’t the point. “Better than bad” still isn’t good.) This seems more dubious to me than the decision to go with a shortstop-by-committee, as right field is a place where one would have a greater expectation of offense.

Clearly there are more moves yet to come—it has been rumored that the Sox have been clearing money for Roy Oswalt—but it has been a strange offseason for the Yankees’ rivals to the north after a stranger finish to the 2011 campaign. I have argued on and off this winter, mostly on the SiriusXM radio show, that the Sox should not automatically be counted on to recover from their disastrous finish and be a contender in 2012. I still think that’s the case. They won’t be bad, but for them to win the 95 or more games that the AL East crown requires will mean they had the health they lacked last year from pitchers who may not be capable of that, not to mention a successful conversion of Daniel Bard to the rotation and no regression or subpar seasons on the part of, well, anyone.

None of these things seem certain, or even likely, with or without Roy Oswalt. You can’t ever dismiss the Red Sox, but the main threats to the Yankees’ return to the postseason may come from other directions.

Note 1: Johnny Damon hit .261/.326/.418 with 16 home runs.

Note 2: Carlos Pena hit .255/.388/.504 with 21 home runs against right-handed pitching.

Note 3: Andruw Jones hit .286/.384/.540 with eight home runs against left-handed pitching.

Note 4: Jorge Vazquez, a right-handed hitter, averaged .262/.323/.498 against right-handed pitching at Triple-A, with a strikeout in 35 percent of his at-bats. As a point of comparison, Mark Reynolds of the Orioles, the guy who has struck out between 196 and 223 times the last four years, struck out in 37 percent of his at-bats against right-handed pitching last season.

Still, I suppose you can’t leave any stone unturned lest the quarry think you’re bluffing.