So we grabbed another older (36), righty DH type who will strike out 130 times and is batting .241 now! To make room for Edwin Encarnacion (EE) we optioned Frazier down to the minors who had an OPS of .855, which is slightly above Encarnacion's lifetime OPS of .851???
That is one way to look at it, however, THIS IS A VERY GOOD SIGNING! EE (This will save me typing time) is an excellent hitter who walks a lot and hits a lot of HR's. As we add Stanton and then Judge, think about the lineup we can throw out? EE has an OPS of .888 this year and while he was .810 last year, he was .881, .886 and .929 for the previous 3 years. Estimating an OPS of .850 at the start of the year for him would make total sense. He is leading the league in HR's right now and is not showing signs of age decline (or not anything statistically significant). He hits both sides pretty equally (tiny bit better against lefties) and that is important because you can bet right handed pitchers will be facing this lineup a lot. We got him for virtually nothing and we barely added any payroll. In fact, Tampa is paying more of his salary than we are from what I read. We are on the hook for 3.4 mil this year and then we can buy him out for 5 mil or pay him 20 mil next year (or trade him). This also was a possible preemptive move as our competition could use some power bats. As my first paragraph suggested, this is not what we needed, but the pickup was a good and prudent one and gives us a lot of chips to work with.
Now take a look at what a great lineup this is. This is NOT the batting order I would choose and I would have Torres playing almost every day while resting DJ and Urshela more.
DJ LeMahieu (Torres)
Voit
Judge
Stanton (LF)
Didi
Sanchez
Encarnacion
Hicks
Urshela (Torres)
Honestly, I don't love DJ leading off, but the key is to have Didi and Hicks split up the righties the best we can. I will tinker with a lineup, but I may have Judge leadoff and have something like this.
Judge
Voit
Stanton
Didi
Sanchez
Encarnacion
Hicks
Urshela (Torres)
DJ (Torres)
That lineup is a seriously tough lineup to face.
As for pitching, I have a different take than some. If our guys our healthy, I wouldn't do anything, unless it was trading two good guys for an ace type of a deal. While I am not saying adding a stud would be a bad idea, I am hopeful that we will be adding Severino and Betances which is huge (if they are healthy). We also will be getting German back as well as Loaisiga and even Montgomery in August.
Those are a lot of arms. Bumgarner and his postseason success is interesting, but his highest ERA before this year was 3.37 (which is pretty amazing, even in the NL) and this year he is at 3.85. Do we want to trade away the future for someone who may help? What we do with all of those arms if we do grab a guy, I mean we just sent down Frazier because we added EE, do we want to do the same with a good arm?
My take is that my goal is to have a team that competes for the WS every year. The Yanks have done a good job over the past 5 years building the team with the future balanced against the present. The team is setup for a long run of excellence, whether you win a title or 2 is hard to predict, but you want a team that can compete and this team, when healthy, can compete for the title. I don't want to give away the future abilities to compete for a title for a slight upgrade.
A few other Notes:
- The Yankee probably want to break HR records by adding EE, maybe get our 25 games with a HR record as well
- Boston has won 5 in a row
- In the 2nd inning, Chicago's Castillo hit one hard off the wall with a man on 1st and 1 out and he thought it was gone as he didn't run hard until the ball hit off the fence. Gardner made a nice play barehanding it and throwing it in and held Castillo at 1st base. If Castillo ran hard he would have made it to 2nd as the Yankees were not even covering 2nd base in their cutoff. The next batter hit into a DP to end the inning!
- Romine had more RBI's (4) last night than all of May and June leading up to last night (roughly 50 AB's)
- Paxton's fastball was not in the upper 90's and that makes a big difference for him. He threw strikes which made him effective, but he wasn't great.
- Big series against Tampa starts tonight!
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