Taking the Pulse of the Yankee Farm System
The people who run baseball are busy doing what they do best. No sleep for them until they finish setting the game back a solid 30 years by cancelling part of their season and making it as joyless as it could possibly be. Fear not, by the time fall rolls around, the MLB commissioner will wonder aloud why interest in the game is waning, then curiously point to "analytics" as the main reason. I have a headache just thinking about it, but I digress.
With the start of the 2022 baseball season nowhere in sight, I want to take the opportunity to write about a group of people that baseball owners unequivocally care nothing about: young men trying to become major league baseball players. The venerable Keith Law at The Athletic has released his annual Top 100 MLB Prospect list. The young Yankees on this list are of particular interest given that the only way the big league team is going to get out of its current rut is through home-grown players. Over the last 20 years the organization has proven inept at converting minor league prospects into useful Yankees, so seeing improvement on lists like this is vital.
The results for the Yankees on Law's 2022 list are mixed, especially in comparison to where they were last year. Therefore, we'll take a Clint Eastwood-style approach to assessing them.
The Good - The Yankees have a Top 10 prospect!
In 2021 you would have to scroll all the way down to number 48 to find the first Yankee prospect on Law's list, but that has changed dramatically this year. He now sees Anthony Volpe as the crown jewel of the organization. The 20-year old New Jersey native - and first round pick of the Yankees in 2019 - had a breakout campaign last year, splitting his time between Single-A Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. It's clear that home run power is now part of his arsenal, which makes this shortstop a prospect with no glaring weakness.
This is a revelation for the Yankees. Volpe represents only the second legitimate (he was top 10 in Baseball America's prospect list as well) top 10 prospect for the Yankees in recent memory. And the other - Gleyber Torres - was mostly developed in the Cubs' system before being traded as a major league-ready prospect. If Volpe continues this career path through Double-A and Triple-A, the Yankees will have a major building block set at a premium position in about two years.
As Law suggests in his write-up for Volpe, he could be the reason the Yankees have been conspicuously quiet in acquiring a top-dollar shortstop this winter. Their reluctance to spend money on areas of need where they don't have top prospects in the system would suggest otherwise, but I can appreciate the thought. The Yankees are essentially saying that Volpe is the shortstop of the future and will keep the position wide open for him by not improving it over the next couple seasons. This is both satisfying and maddeningly frustrating at the same time, if that makes sense.
Volpe landing near the top of these prospect lists is very much worth getting excited about. In fact, it would be great if we could see more Baby Bombers shoot to the top as quickly as he did. But let's remember that he's 20 years old and hasn't played a single game at even the Double-A level yet. His bat, speed and glove are impressive, but still raw. Let's not make any comparisons between him and my best friend just yet. Let the kid play and become the best player he can be. No more, no less.
While we're on the topic of shortstops, the Yankees had another one on the opposite end of Law's list. Oswald Peraza came in at number 95 and is likely to see time at shortstop in the Bronx before Volpe does. Peraza's skillset is similar to Volpe's, if not as complete, but he did reach Triple-A last year and is already on the 40-man roster.
The Bad - Regression abounds
The lone Yankee holdover from Law's 2021 list is the highly touted Jasson Dominguez. The Dominican product signed with the Yankees as an international free agent in 2019 at the ripe age of 16. He has appeared on Law's top 100 list every year since. So what's the problem?
The problem is that Dominguez was signed because of his huge power potential and athleticism, but was going to need some serious development to become a viable prospect at the higher levels. Due mostly to COVID-19 he hasn't had that chance, playing just 56 games in his career to date. All of those games were played last year where he showed some flashes of power, but also posted a relatively low batting average, a high strike out rate, and a skillset in the field that suggests he may be better suited as a corner outfielder rather than centerfield.
Law dropped Dominguez to 78 on his list this year - 12 spots lower than he was last year - but still thinks highly of him. He's still just 18 years old, is built like the scariest of MMA fighters, and has earned the nickname "The Martian" due to his out-of-this-world ability to destroy baseballs from both sides of the plate. He needs to destroy those balls on the field during competitive games for it to have real meaning, though, and we simply haven't seen enough of that yet.
The story of the other two Yankee prospects on Law's 2021 list is far worse. Clarke Schmidt and Deivi Garcia were expected to contribute in some capacity to the big league pitching staff in 2021, but between the two of them they totaled just under 15 ineffective innings for the Yankees. The top two arms in the Yankee organization fell well short of expectations, and in 2022 have fallen off Law's top 100 prospects.
Schmidt's campaign last year got derailed before it even started. A strain in his pitching elbow delayed his debut for Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre until August. He pitched well there before his disastrous stint with the Yankees, but Schmidt's been injury prone his entire career and just turned 26 years old. It's safe to say there's no future for him as a mainstay in the Yankee rotation. More likely, they'll squeeze what value they can out of him as a reliever for the rest of his pinstripe career.
Garcia's regression can't even be blamed on injuries. As bad as he was in just eight big league innings last year, he was even worse when pitching for Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. In just over 90 innings there he showed an alarming lack of control which led to a putrid 6.85 ERA for the season. Maybe the Yankees' questionable decision to use Garcia as an "opener" without actually telling him the plan in a pivotal 2020 playoff game against the Rays messed with his head. Better yet - as Law suggests - maybe the Yankees ruined the diminutive righty by forcing him to change his delivery prior to the 2021 season. Either way, they're left with no pitching prospects in the top 100 and are proving incapable of successfully developing pitchers.
That's obviously a problem. In fact, with no pitchers in the pipeline projected to be anything more than a back of the rotation starter, Law ranks the Yankee farm system just 22nd out of 30 MLB teams. They were 14th in 2021. With the Yankees forcing themselves into relying on prospects in order to be successful, a weakening crop of players on the farm just won't cut it.
The Ugly - The grass is greener within the division
Why will a system in the bottom third of MLB not cut it? Let's take a look at their division rivals and how their systems compare to the Yankees.
Each of the teams that will make up the bulk of the Yankees' schedule have a player pipeline more rich and diverse than they do. The already strong Rays have plenty of players ready to keep the big league team competitive. Toronto has promoted a stable of top prospects in recent years, but that's not slowing their pipeline down. The lowly Orioles are poised to get out of the basement, with catcher Adley Rutschman ready to lead the way as baseball's top prospect according to Law.
Even the Red Sox have a slight edge over their arch rivals, and something tells me that with the luxury tax thresholds reset for them as well, they'll be more willing to spend to supplement their prospects than the Steinbrenner brain trust will be. Add it all up and the future is bleak for the Yankees, at least the way things stand right now.
Of course, the situation that Major League Baseball is forcing itself into at the moment is far uglier than the current state of affairs with the Yankees. Strap in folks, the people who already price out tons of fans from going to games will make sure no baseball gets played until they secure their sizable bottom line and continue to keep those fans out. It might be summertime before we get back to our favorite pastime: Complaining about how unnecessary the Yankees' struggles are.
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