Bill Madden: What went wrong for the Yankees, Mets and MLB’s other biggest disappointments
NEW YORK — Now that the postseason is set, the curtain is about to go up on baseball’s version of Les Miserables, with the Yankees and Mets in starring roles as moneyed teams that were supposed to be legitimate World Series contenders but were not.
In supporting roles you have the Padres, Giants and Red Sox, all of them also facing a miserable offseason of introspection, pondering all that went wrong and how to make it right again. It will not be easy for any of them after realizing they don’t have nearly as many good players — and good clubhouse cultures in some cases — as the teams that finished ahead of them.
We start with the Yankees, who are sitting out their first October since 2016. Hal Steinbrenner has reportedly hired an outside firm to analyze all the elements of the Yankee organization, but without waiting for the report, here are some irrefutable conclusions:
The Yankees under Brian Cashman and his analytics team have done a bad job of analyzing talent these past few years, both their own and other organizations, as evidenced by the recent trades of Jordan Montgomery to the Cardinals for Harrison Bader, Ezequiel Duran to Texas for Joey Gallo, along with the ill-fated deals for Josh Donaldson, damaged goods Frankie Montas, and the misguided notion that pickups like Jake Bauers, Billy McKinney and Ben Rortvedt were actually semi-regular major league players. Combine that with the failure of the Yankee player development system to produce any frontline regulars other than Aaron Judge and Anthony Volpe and what you had was lineup that had as many as 4-5 batters hitting under .210 on any given day late in the season. Of course, a big part of that is Giancarlo Stanton clogging up the middle of the lineup, and as they begin the process of trying to get more athletic with more consistent contact, Hal is going to have to gulp hard on the $98 million left on Stanton’s contract. The hard truth about the Yankee offense is that both the Orioles and Rays have better, more athletic players at every position except right field and that doesn’t figure to change any time soon.
A big part of the Yankees’ offensive woes has been the analytic upper cut swing, exit velo emphasis approach to hitting that, unfortunately, even with the dismissal of hitting coach Dillon Lawson, is still the law of the land throughout the organization, which is why the Yankees finished next to last in batting (.226) and hits with the 11th most strikeouts in the majors this year.
The Yankees simply can’t keep their players healthy and that falls on Eric Cressey, the High Performance guru they hired in 2020 to head up their training staff. Cressey is believed to be the highest paid physical training chief in the game but this season the Yankees had the third-most injured list assignments (37) and days lost to injuries (2,009).
Once Hal gets his report, it’s going to be up to him to decide what changes need to be made, although it appears there needs to be a lot of them. As for manager Aaron Boone, it’s still uncertain whether he’ll be fired but if he is, there’s then the question of who do you replace him with? There is one natural choice — Don Mattingly, who’s presently biding his time as the Blue Jays’ attitude coach and has been an outspoken critic of analytics hitting.
Moving over to the Mets, David Stearns takes over as baseball operations chief on Monday, and if he wants to know the reasons why Steve Cohen’s $343 million team morphed into a fourth-place under .500 failure here are the big three: (1) Poor roster construction with Daniel Vogelbach clogging up the DH spot all year, the absence of a second lefty in the bullpen all year and the shortsightedness of letting Chris Bassitt, last year’s innings leader, walk as a free agent; (2) Injuries. Edwin Diaz was lost for the season, Starling Marte was hurt all year and Jose Quintana, counted on to replace a lot of the innings lost with the free-agent departures of Bassitt and Taijuan Walker, missed the whole first half.
What Stearns will discover, however, is that the Mets don’t have to do a lot this winter to return to contention, starting with retaining Buck Showalter, one of the most astute managers in the game who is well liked and respected by all the Met players. Personnel-wise, even with the return of Diaz, Stearns is going to need to revamp the Mets bullpen with the emphasis of adding two high leverage relievers and at least one more lefty. If he is going to spend any big money, it should be on Japanese prodigy Yoshinobu Yamamoto to solidify the rotation. The offense should be fine, especially if Marte comes back, with top prospects, Luisangel Acuna expected to take over second base and outfielders Jett Williams and Drew Gilbert on the fast track for ’24 at some point.
As for the other Miserables, no one has had a more miserable season that Padres GM A.J. Preller, who’s filled his roster with stars and bumped his payroll up to the third highest in baseball ($253 million), only to see them grossly underachieve, under .500 all season long. Changes are coming, starting with the firing of manager Bob Melvin, who has been feuding with Preller for two years. It is likely Preller will replace him with ex-Cardinals manager Mike Shildt, presently a Padres senior advisor, but whoever the manager is he faces a yeoman task restoring unity in the clubhouse while likely NL Cy Young winner Blake Snell departs as a free agent.
Further north in San Francisco, it’s beginning to look like Giants ownership is finally beginning to sour on the analytics of GM Farhan Zaidi. Friday they fired manager Gabe Kapler after the Giants’ fourth postseason miss in five years and a second-half collapse after they were 12 games above .500 on Aug. 4. To that we say, how’s that 12-person coaching staff working out? Giants ace Logan Webb, in a subtle indictment of Kapler, said it all last week: “It’s not enjoyable. We’ve got to make big changes here to really create that winning culture where we show up every year and try to win the whole thing.”
Lastly, the Red Sox, having completed their third last-place season in four years, are searching for a replacement for Chaim Bloom, who did everything ownership asked of him but still got fired. They don’t seem to know what they want in a successor but whoever they choose will then have to convince ownership to loosen up the purse strings and go all in on starting pitching, starting with Snell.
