In defense of the Yankees' trade deadline deals

The Yankees didn't acquire anyone resembling a star player, but Brian Cashman's patchwork might be enough. Meanwhile, Bill Madden remains hackish and the Diamondbacks continue to perplex.

This morning, Hall of Fame baseball writer Bill Madden wrote rather grumpily of the Yankees' trade deadline activity:

Are the Yankees better with Drew and Prado? Perhaps, but only marginally. On the other hand, the AL East-leading Orioles made a huge move in acquiring lefty reliever Andrew Miller from the wheeling-and-dealing Red Sox.

This is comedy, and "only marginally" is key to the whole thing, but let's backtrack a bit so we can see it. Right field has been killing the Yankees this year. A lot of other things have been killing the Yankees, like the death of the starting rotation, no farm system, and a flawed theory of rebuilding that went something like, "If you have no prospects, just add the living dead!" or possibly, "We're gonna make a lot of money on people wanting to see degraded Derek Jeter not play well one last time, so we'll spend $250 million to ..." It doesn't make sense, but then it never did. Nevertheless, the Yankees have done rather well for themselves in spite of all that. But right field, let's concentrate there. We'll get back to the overview part of the program in a moment.

The average major-league right fielder is hitting .261/.324/.411. That doesn't seem like much, but with offense going the way of Argentinian debt service, it's not bad. Yankees right fielders, who have numbered among their motley lot Ichiro Suzuki, the long-since released Alfonso Soriano, the now DH-bound Carlos Beltran, Zelous Wheeler, Zoilo Almonte, Kelly Johnson and Brett Gardner, have totaled .240/.281/.344, the worst production at the position in the American League. Only the Cubs and Cardinals trail them in the National League.

We are far from Dave Winfield here. Paul O'Neill. Tommy Henrich. Babe Ruth. They're all feeling insulted these days, wherever they are. With Soriano gone, a big part of the blame falls on future Hall of Famer Suzuki, who simply isn't an everyday player at this point. He's more like an internationally famous Sam Fuld, except that Fuld is having a better year. Suzuki can still run and field, and he was hitting .300 -- a soft .300, but .300 -- as recently as July 12. A 3-for-34 stretch in 12 games since then has dropped his rates to .269/.320/.316, which is consistent with everything he's done since 2010 except for the 67 games he played with the Yankees in 2012.

Martin Prado is as much a right fielder as Stephen Drew is a second baseman, though the two career innings he's played there mean he's more experienced at his new position than the latter is at his. He's also not what you would call a traditional right field bat, especially not when he's hitting .270/.317/.370 -- with upgrades like that on offer, you might as well stick with your current cell phone -- but he's been better in the past, and even if that means he only hits as well as he did last year, .282/.333/.417 in a season grossly aided by Chase Field, that will be an upgrade for the Yankees.

Stephen Drew (Jim Rogash)

As with the Drew trade (you can see my remarks on that deal here), this was a deal made with one eye on the possibility of a division title or wild card, something still very possible despite a -30 run differential on the season given the marshmallowy softness of the AL East, and one on the future: Prado can play second base, third or left field, so if Alex Rodriguez comes back or doesn't (or comes back with all the mobility of the statues of himself that will never be built), or the team doesn't re-sign the recently acquired Chase Headley, the Yankees have a player who can be positioned wherever they need the most help. And they will continue to have that player until 2016 at $11 million a year, when he'll be 32.

By Yankees standards, that's youthful, useful and inexpensive.

To get Prado, Yankees shipped off Peter O'Brien, the leading home run hitter in the Yankees' system. "Leading" is a quantitative rather than qualitative description. With 33 home runs on the season. he led the team's paltry pile of prospects by a wide margin, but there are issues. Signed as a catcher, the Yankees had tried him at third base before he ultimately looked like a first baseman-designated hitter. If you hit enough home runs, that's not a problem, and O'Brien has popped 23 of the suckers in 274 at-bats at Double-A Trenton, which is impressive given a ballpark slightly less nurturing than my fifth-grade science teacher, an icy maiden of 55 who thought nothing of bursting into the boys' bathroom to see what the kids were doing in there. (They were using the bathroom.)

O'Brien's major talent deficit, other than bringing to mind the Rangersfirst baseman of the 1980s, is that he has the plate judgment of a starving man at a casino buffet. He's walked 20 times in 102 games. If the foregoing conjures associations with Mark Trumbo, you'd be right, and you might also ask yourself, "Who needs two of that?" Ever been given a completely non-functional item as a housewarming gift, say, some kind of ceramic egg or something else "decorative" and thought, "Gosh, that was nice of them. Where the hell do I put this thing?" Imagine if you doubled up. (A: Craigslist, eBay.)

David Phelps (Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports)

Returning to the Yankees and "but only marginally." That's the whole point. As I wrote recently, the Yankees have aggressively addressed problems in the starting rotation. They haven't replaced them with peak-year Ron Guidry, but the staff that created their massive run deficit is gone:

Of those eight disaster games, two were started by Ivan Nova, who is broken and can no longer affect things, three were begun by Vidal Nuno, who is now the Diamondbacks' problem, for good or ill. Two blowouts were started by Hiroki Kuroda, but Kuroda has seemingly righted himself -- he's made nine starts since the calendar turned to June and put up a 3.10 ERA in 58 innings. The remaining 10-plus game belonged to David Phelps, who has made three consecutive quality starts and, at the risk of picking arbitrary endpoints, has been solid in six of his last seven appearances.

Again, no Cy Young candidates have been added, just Brandon McCarthy and Chris Capuano and Shane Greene. Eleven pitchers have started for the Yankees and no doubt that number will grow higher. Yet, it's working. Over the last two months, the Yankees have allowed about 4.2 runs per game, which is roughly league average. With park adjustments, it's probably a little better than that. In that same period, they've averaged 3.8 runs per game. Somehow they were nearly .500, going 26-27. That's a couple of more games than you might have expected them to win. Now, let's say the pitching staff remains consistent and the new acquisitions push them up by half a run a game on average. Big if, but not impossible. Just slightly better pitching and you can imagine the Yankees going something like going 32-23 the rest of the way. That's a 94-win pace over a full season, asking a lot, but slight improvements on replacement-level players like Roberts and Ichiro can pay huge dividends. There's a reason Jay Jaffe called such players "replacement-level killers."

No, it's not enough to win the AL East, not unless the Orioles collapse -- and that doesn't seem like an impossibility -- but the second wild card, with the Blue Jays having been silent at the deadline? They're only on a pace for 88 wins. Another 32 wins would have the Yankees finish at 87-75. A little luck and you're there, even if the Jays remain on the current pace. In other words, "marginal" was entirely worth doing if the Yankees want to make the postseason. Bismarck said, "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable -- the art of the next best." That applies to general managers as well, and it perfectly describes just what Brian Cashman did on Thursday and has done all season.

Last note on the Bill Madden quote that opened this column: "The AL East-leading Orioles made a huge move in acquiring lefty reliever Andrew Miller ..."

More from our team sites

New York Yankees

Follow

Is he bleeping kidding? Miller has been very good this year, finally, finally getting his command under control (or is that getting his control under command? No matter), but the Orioles have a minimum of 495 innings left in their season and if they really push Miller, he'll throw 30 of them. Perhaps he'll be an important factor in the postseason, should the Orioles make it that far, but unless Buck Showalter leverages him perfectly, something no manager today does with relievers, he's not going to have a decisive impact on the regular season.

You might not have noticed -- Madden didn't -- but Matt Wieters is dead. Chris Davis has five gears in reverse. Nelson Cruz has hit .213/.287/.371 over his last 50-plus games. Steve Pearce is becoming himself again. Adam Jones hit six home runs in July but also had a .287 on-base percentage. Manny Machado has finally shaken off the rust resultant from his horrific knee injury of last autumn, but on the whole, there's less here than meets the eye. Adding Miller certainly doesn't hurt, but he's in no way a decisive addition.

Of course, when you start writing with an agenda instead of looking at the facts and seeing where they take you, you'll say anything in an attempt to make your point. You could swap "Andrew Miller" out of the above quote and replace him with "Edwin Jackson," "Kevin Correia," "Steve Trout" and he still would have arrived at the same predetermined outcome.