- Image via Wikipedia
Among baseball’s many old saws is one that goes something like this: don’t believe what you see in spring training or in September. How teams react to the things they see in early spring can have a big impact on the first month of the season. Here are some questions I have based on what we’ve seen so far in Yankees and Mets camps:
1) Is Jenrry Mejia the next Dwight Gooden or the next “name your-hard-throwing, one-pitch, never-was prospect here”?
2) Is Alfredo Aceves a legitimate major league starter or a quadruple-A swing man middle reliever?
3) Do the Yanks have enough depth especially given the age on the roster?
1) It’s so hard to tell with a 20-year-old hard thrower. A kid with one great pitch can dominate in the minors and look good in spring training against a collection of minor leaguers and major leaguers who aren’t trying very hard. It’s different in the majors where every hitter is good and they’re all in the show because they make adjustments. To succeed Mejia, or any other prospect, has to show the ability to continually adjust to hitters who are consistently adjusting to him.
The Mets are so short when it comes to starting pitching — Maine, Perez, Pelfry and Nieve or Niese could struggle to win 40 games between them — that the team will certainly be tempted to bring the kid north if he continues his strong spring. But is he really ready?
2) On the basis of last year’s brief audition as a starter Alfredo Aceves seems to be a very valuable long man/swing man — filling the role Ramiro Mendoza so ably filled for the great Yankee dynasty of the 1990s — but not so great as a starter. The Yanks continue to claim that the competition for the fifth starter’s slot is wide open and in the early going Aceves has pitched best. But we’re talking about all of 6 perfect innings against the Pittsburgh Pirates’ spring training roster (the team’s ML roster ain’t much to write home about). Will the Yanks be seduced by Aceves (or Mitre) if they continue to pitch well this spring? It’s not the worst thing in the world to start April, when a team barely needs a fifth starter, with a more veteran swing man like Aceves or Mitre in the fifth starter role while the “real” fifth starter, say, Phil Hughes, gets his innings in at the triple-A level. In the end, whatever they do this spring, I’ll be surprised if Aceves or Mitre have double digits in starts unless there’s a significant injury to Hughes and Gaudin.
3) The Yanks have added veteran outfield depth this year, with Winn and Thames (who also has good pinch hitting numbers), and that’s excellent. But the early spring injuries to Nick Johnson and Francisco Cervelli have already exposed the team’s lack of depth at catcher and on the infield — where they get most of their offense. It’s fair to assume that Johnson will miss time this year, anywhere from 30-60 games. Posada too, at his age, will miss time, as he has in each of the last three seasons. I like Cervelli a lot — an athletic young catcher who the pitchers really like — but with two concussions in the last few months he is now also always going to be an injury risk at one of baseball’s few contact positions. A line-up with Winn in right, Swisher at DH, and I dunno who at catcher (there’s no third catcher on the team’s 40-man roster), with Marcus Thames and Ramiro Pena off the bench is a pretty steep fall off from the team at full strength. The Yanks clearly need to get a veteran hitter off the bench who can fill in at the corners and a veteran catcher and early, before the trade deadline or the inevitable DL stints for Johnson and Posada.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Predicting The Roster (slidingintohome.blogspot.com)
- Hughes OK, Joba Bad In First Spring Outings (slidingintohome.blogspot.com)
- New York Yankee notes: What have we learned? (pinstripealley.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=94dbe7f3-1cd8-44d7-b436-c105bda945cc)
