Yankees Dial It Up
By Lew Freedman
We shouldn’t be surprised. Whenever the New York Yankees need a fresh piece for the roster for a perceived need, they go shopping. And unlike some of us, they hardly ever go home empty handed.
Whether the pieces are as valuable as they seem right now will only be borne out by summertime doings. However, if fans recall, the Yankees’ starting rotation looked like the team’s weak spot last year and somehow the team coaxed valuable starts and wins out of Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia and turned Ivan Nova into a superstar. At least for a season.
Good old Bartolo has exited stage left and it remains to be seen if Ivan Nova will be a supernova or a regular sold contributor, but not willing to take chances the Yankees delved into the coffers the other day and signed free agent Hiroki Kuroda to a one-year contract and also threw Michael Pineda into the shopping cart before they entered the check-out line.
Neither the Yankees nor their fan base are known for their patience and in New York it is always wait-till-this-year. If the Yankees don’t win the American League East and don’t make the playoffs, the sky will fall. In New York, there is no such thing as waiting until prospects mature. Winning right now is the only thing. The Yankees always live in a New York moment. The future is something Steven Spielberg makes movies about, not something that is going to call on them.
If that is risky business, so be it. The Yankees have always come up with enough money to field a team that can win more than 90 games in a season and reach the post-season. These days, with wild-card teams and the like, just making the post-season guarantees nothing. The wild card playoffs have become the wild, wild west. Once you’re in, anything can happen. The Yankees have seen that enough lately. But you do have to get in and it takes playing well for six months to achieve that, so New York definitely took an upgrade step to ensure phase one.
Kuroda, who is 36, was a star in Japan, but has been less reliable in the majors. His record is 41-46, but his earned run average is a solid 3.45. He was even better last season with the Dodgers, going 13-16 with a 3.07 ERA. Kuroda could fare better in the win-loss column playing for a team like the Yankees that score runs in bunches. For now he fills a slot in the five-man rotation and if he can produce, he will stay there. Signing Kuroda to a one-year deal was a gamble worth taking.
Pineda, just 22, is another deal altogether. The Yankees gave up good prospects for him. This has the potential to become a major trade with long-term implications if Pineda’s promise is fulfilled. He was 9-10 as a rookie with the Seattle Mariners last season, but he is young and still developing. At 6-foot-7 and 260 pounds, his mound presence can be intimidating. Amazingly enough, Pineda was making a minimum Major League salary of $414,000 so he seems like a bargain all around.
It is always tough to bank on guys on their way up who don’t have a proven track record. But if Pineda improves and matures only slightly in 2012 he will probably be worth 14 wins for the Yankees. Given all of their other weapons, the Yankees won’t be worrying about merely making the playoffs, they’ll spend the entire season preparing for what might happen once they’re in.