By Roger Rubin, The Sports Xchange
NEW YORK — The underdog story of the baseball season is coming from the most unlikely of places.
The New York Yankees, long the high-payroll, free-agent-laden bullies on the block, punted on the season before the non-waiver trade deadline six weeks ago.
General manager Brian Cashman did what he said “a playoff pretender” would do and traded away the club’s top performers for touted prospects who could help in future seasons. For the first time in a generation, the Yanks seemed to accept they would miss the postseason — this for the fourth time in five years.
They broke up the best bullpen in baseball by sending Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs and Andrew Miller to the Cleveland Indians. Their best hitter, Carlos Beltran, went to the Texas Rangers, and starter Ivan Nova was dealt to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The bounty lifted the Yankees’ farm system from one of the worst to one of the best.
And then a funny thing happened on the way to the rebuild. The Yankees brought up the best of its home-grown prospects, not the top prospects from the trades, and the club started to win.
The call-ups played so well that they unseated many veterans for starting roles, and the victories kept coming. A 4-2 defeat to the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday at Yankee Stadium snapped a seven-game winning streak, but the Yankees have won 24 of 38. They are four games behind the first-place Boston Red Sox in the American East and two games out of a wild-card position.
“Everything is in front of us, and it still is because we have so many games in our division: (20) games left, (17) in our division,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “And it’s the teams we’re chasing. Yeah, it could be (more than a wild card). You try to win every day and see where you are.”
Pitcher Adam Warren, who was on the veteran-stocked team that clinched a wild card in 2015 and came back for this run in the Chapman trade, said, “(It’s) bizarre for the Yankees to be sellers at the deadline and for it to work out and play better. It’s been interesting the way these young guys have brought life to the team. It still has to do with some of the veteran guys (because) they create the environment for these guys to come up and still be comfortable here.”
Long a top prospect, Gary Sanchez has been the best catcher in the game for more than a month. In addition to calling games well and dominating opposing running games with his arm, he is hitting .341 with 13 home runs and 24 RBIs in 33 games. His play has relegated Brian McCann to a part-time designated hitter role.
Mark Teixeira and Chase Headley are now part-timers, too. Aaron Judge, Tyler Austin and Ronald Torreyes play regularly. After Masahiro Tanaka, CC Sabathia and Michael Pineda, the rotation is unrecognizable. It’s a youth movement, and it has changed everything about the big league club.
“The younger crowd makes for a different feel. It’s a different vibe here,” Warren said. “Because everybody wrote us off at the deadline, the expectations were gone and we’re just having fun playing baseball. We now have a feeling of, ‘No one expects anything, so let’s go out and prove them wrong and have fun doing it.’ Last year, you felt you had to live up to something.”
Could it be that a soil with no expectations and no understanding of big league pressure is the perfect environment for prospects to excel?
“I guess it’s possible,” Girardi said. “You’re never sure what you’re going to get when you get young players that come up here. You’re never sure how they’re going to perform, how they’re going to handle situations. But … it seems like these kids are extremely prepared. They understand the expectation of winning here. … You’re never going to be completely prepared until you go through it.”
The moves the Yankees made, including a precarious release of Alex Rodriguez, changed them into a team that was supposed to be nothing. Instead, they are something and threatening to be something big.
“When you have guys who come up, it seems like they have a tendency to play harder, to try to make their way in there,” Warren said. “You might see more emotion, unlike guys who have been there. We’ve seen some guys with super tools. Look at Sanchez: He hits, defends, throws guys out. … It gets you excited about what these guys can do.”
Making a push for the playoffs is not going to be an easy task by any means. The Yanks have three games at home with the Los Angeles Dodgers before a three-city road trip. This has not traditionally been where the Yankees have thrived over the past few seasons. Of course, these aren’t the same Yankees. The new players haven’t failed in those situations. So anything is possible.
“I want us to just keep doing the same thing because that’s what works,” Warren said.
And for the first time in a generation, the idea of the Yankees winning feels intriguing instead of just the same old thing.