FG on FOX: About This Unusual Yankees’ Offseason

By their own standards, the Yankees’ offseason has been strangely quiet. Has the team’s offseason to date flown under the radar? They’re simultaneously busy and quiet, signing two reasonably high-profile free agents and engineering two trades for everyday players. They’re both smart, imminently defensible trades but they don’t quite qualify as Yankee-scale blockbusters.

The team improved, but as it currently stands, New York trails the Blue Jays and Red Sox in terms of talent. Steamer Projections rank the Rays and Yankees as equals, forecasting an offense that marginally outscores the runs their defense and pitching allow. The offseason is far from over, but the Yankees are clearly taking their club into another direction.

The Yankees, against all odds, are getting younger. In doing so, they’re adding an element unseen in the Bronx for many years: uncertainty.

For years, fans of rival AL East teams waited on the mighty Yankees to age, decline, and finally collapse like an Old Vegas hotel rigged with dynamite. For the most part, those fans never got their wish. The Yankees had some down years, but they always had the resources to paper over their mistakes, to throw good money after bad and put together a competitive team. The second wild card spot kept the 2013 and 2014 Yankees within shouting distance of the playoffs when the talent on hand suggested they didn’t belong.

But the one thing the Yankees and their core of established talents always have is known commodities. With all their money and ability to spot a salvage job worth undertaking, the Yankees always manage a reasonably high floor for their talent. They traffic in big leaguers with little mystery. The opposite of the 2015 Chicago Cubs, in other words.

The recent veteran-laden Yankees teams came with long resumes and a whole lot of plate appearances to look back on when looking to their future. Especially over the last few seasons, the Yankees bent but never broke. They won 85 and then 84 games in the past two seasons, unable or unwilling to blow up their roster. It was never stars and scrubs as much as stars and plugs – upmarket scrubs preventing the Yankees from wallowing in rebuild seasons and netting higher draft picks.

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