The Yankees have spent another offseason getting younger, but with spring training games set to begin, old questions remain.
The Yankees exceeded expectations last season — winning 87 games and earning a wild-card spot in the American League — but the offense slumped badly in the second half with veterans Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, Jacoby Ellsbury and Brett Gardner buckling due to injury or overuse.
“How do you keep the four main offensive guys from having a huge drop-off in the second half?” SiriusXM MLB Network Radio host and former Mets GM Jim Duquette said.
“I don’t know if there is an answer, you have to try and surmise it, especially when they had down second halves. A lot of it could be age, but there wasn’t a lot of guys on base in front of them.”
Greg Bird’s shoulder surgery means the Yankees have lost their most competent bat behind A-Rod and Teixeira, and the Yankees were the only team not to sign a major league free agent this offseason. However, Duquette was bullish on the Yankees’ two significant acquisitions via trade, Starlin Castro and Aroldis Chapman.
“It was going to be hard to upgrade the bullpen, but they did it with Chapman,” said Duquette, the former Mets general manager, of the Chapman-Andrew Miller-Dellin Betances trio.
“Whatever games he misses from a suspension, it was still a good value trade. I liked that deal a lot. And with the Castro deal they are going to be better offensively and defensively at second base — a position that was such a struggle for them last year. With the restrictions that they had, they did a real good job.”
The Yankees’ plan was to refrain from signing expensive free agents until some of their own big-ticket players come off the payroll in the next two years. Thus far, GM Brian Cashman has been able to keep the team competitive at the same time, and Duquette predicted the Yankees would win a wide-open AL East this season.
Aside from the veteran hitters, the Yankees will also be at the mercy of their injury-susceptible rotation.
“Will anyone get you 170 innings? That’s the big question,” Duquette said. “When you take their stuff — it’s all quality, I just don’t know how much quantity they can give you. You used to have guys who could give you 30-32 starts and they didn’t have that last year.”
Of the five starters — Masahiro Tanaka, Michael Pineda, Luis Severino, Nathan Eovaldi, CC Sabathia — Duquette is most interested in seeing what Severino can accomplish in his first full season in the big leagues.
“He’s got an electric fastball, that’s what jumps out at you,” Duquette said of Severino, who went 5-3 with a 2.89 ERA after joining the Yankees in August.
“I love his poise, and coming up in that environment last season being able to pitch and have success like he did is not easy to do. He just turned 22. That’s pretty rare. His fastball was over 95 mph in the games that I saw and he’s able to throw his secondary pitches.”