2018 Yankees Season thread

[jacksonianmarch]

Lind released. Bird has been healthy albeit not terribly productive this spring. Last spring he was on fire and sucked in April, so here’s to hoping for a reverse of last yr.

[jacksonianmarch]

Anyelo Gomez returned to NYY. I thought he was definitely a goner. Good to have him back. Kid throws smoke

[jacksonianmarch]

Judge with 2 more bombs, OPS over 1.000. He's ready

[jacksonianmarch]

Yanks going with 13 pitchers out of the gate. I anticipate that to be temporary. I assume they’ll bring up Austin for the sox series. The first two turns through the rotation are usually limited in terms of their duration so having extra mop up duty on the team is a good idea. We also have a few guys we can rotate through that slot until the starters get to their usual workloads

[jacksonianmarch]

http://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/ya...ent-on-the-way

[Carpin]

http://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/ya...ent-on-the-way

Great read, specially the remarks about Florial, I'm really looking forward for this kid, his job this season is to improve pitch recognition, if he does it, he will be a top 10 prospect before the end of the year.

[jacksonianmarch]

He has .300 30/30 GG OF potential.

[jacksonianmarch]

Bird’s foot is hurt again. CT and MRI today. Eval tomorrow. That depth might be tested early

[jacksonianmarch]

So it looks like Austin will come north with a bird on the shelf. I didn’t understand his demotion from the beginning as Austin has 1B, COF, and emergency C and 3B capabilities. Also, he absolutely bludgeons left handers and if we look at matchups, the Astros best pitcher the last 5 yrs is lefty and if your rotation stays healthy, you’ll have 4 in your rotation. In the division, Happ, Snell, Banda are also slated to start as well. He’ll see a fair amount of PT as the lefty masher alone. He has shown in the minors that he can hit righties, but he hasn’t been healthy enough to get the chance vs righties. My hope is Austin shows enough in his (hopefully) limited time as the 1b to stick and stay at least on a platoon basis. Austin isn’t that far from being a top prospect before a wrist injury almost ended his career. He’s back now and should at least make his presence known vs you guys.

The only good thing about Bird this time is that they aren’t removing anything big or anything that has been there for his life. Bird was born with os trigonum and they had to remove that an tighten up his foot, aka a reconstructive surgery. This is an arthroscopic (presumably, unless too much scar tissue) procedure. He should be back in the bigs by 8 weeks, but with his health history (back, shoulder, now two foot surgeries) one can never be certain. Reminds me a lot of Nick Johnson

[bkzwhitestrican]

I'm actually looking forward to seeing Austin play because it also means Wade will get more playing time at 2B with Walker playing mostly first.

Heck, the Walker/Austin platoon can't be worse than Chris Carter last year.

[jacksonianmarch]

Austin will hit lefties. Walker has been a consistent offensive producer his whole career. The combo will produce. I just don’t think they’ll produce like a healthy Bird can

[bkzwhitestrican]

Of course the platoon won't match prime Bird (does that even exist if you only have like 300 career ABs?). But the offense is stacked enough to absorb one of our top 4 hitters going down. I mean the offense was top 3 last year without Bird for most of the year. And is still better than last year without Bird:

Holliday vs Stanton (no comparison needed)
Castro vs Wade (Castro was definitely a better hitter but Wade is a lot better fielder with hitting upside)
Headley vs Drury (Headley had his moments last year, but was mostly a singles hitter. Drury should be a noticeable upgrade)
Carter vs Walker/Austin (Carter was trash. 50 year old Jason Giambi would've been an upgrade over him)

So yeah, if we could mash with those guys last year.. we should still mash this year. Plus some.

[jacksonianmarch]

Hicks to the DL with an intercostal strain. Here we go again with his core muscles. Who know how long this’ll be. McKinney coming up. My guess is Stanton moves to the OF or McKinney gets regular ABs in LF. Gardy likely moves to CF

[bkzwhitestrican]

Geez it's only day 2 and we're already onto our 7th outfielder in the depth chart.

[jacksonianmarch]

Thankfully we have depth. I anticipate if Hicks needs to miss a lot of time, we’ll bring up Andujar to DH