Goldman's baseball quotables #8: Yankees push player development exec into retirement

Yankees vice-president of baseball operations Mark Newman is set to retire after 26 seasons with the Yankees. Twenty years ago, Sterling Hitchcock had a complaint for Yankees player development that still applies.

I planned today's quotable before the news came down that Yankees vice-president of baseball operations Mark Newman is set to retire after 15 seasons in his current position and 26 seasons with the Yankees overall. During that time he rose from "Coordinator of Instruction" to Director of Player Development and Scouting to his current position. Sometimes during those years the Yankees developed some very good players. Mostly, deprived of first-round picks due to their extensive free-agent commitments, they didn't.

Much of the credit, or lack thereof, for that must be shared with scouting director Damon Oppenheimer, who has been in his position since 2005. The organizational incoherence that generally afflicts the Yankees makes it hard to know who is responsible for what at times, but first-round reaches such as C.J. Henry (2005), Andrew Brackman (2007), and Cito Culver (2010) all suggest the obvious, that you cannot develop what you do not have. Nonetheless, this report by the New York Post's George A. King III suggests that Newman did not so much jump out of the organization as he was pushed.

"Damon Oppenheimer's recent amateur drafts have been solid, and he is believed to be safe," King says. We shall see. The problem with making a judgment based on two recent drafts while ignoring the evidence of the 10 prior drafts is you won't know if you were wrong until a couple more blown drafts have gone by. Certainly players such as Aaron Judge, Ian Clarkin, and Eric Jagielo (all 2013) look promising, and 2014 second-rounder (the team's top pick) lefty Jacob Lindgren, wiped out 17.3 batters per nine innings in his 25-inning professional debut as a reliever.

Aaron Judge, 32nd-overall pick in the 2013 draft, and 6-foot-7 of .308/.419/.486 this year (Getty Images).

Still, Yankees prospects have a way of dying once they reach Double-A... And in many cases the organization won't use them anyway. For example, 2012 5^th-rounder Rob Refsnyder, a second baseman, probably could have helped out at second base once Brian Roberts' career predictably proved to be over -- he hit .318/.387/.497 in a season split about evenly between Double- and Triple-A. He wasn't called; the organization preferred to try the 31-year-old Stephen Drew, a move that has really, really not worked out.

That brings us to full circle to what Hitchcock said 20 years ago. He was then a Yankees pitching prospect (twice ranked in the Baseball America top 100, including that spring). He said the above in an organization-angering interview with the New York Daily News in March, 1994. Drafted in 1989, he had had cups of coffee in 1992 and 1993, but hadn't stuck. Thus, the spring of '94 represented his third try at the big leagues. His full comment:

"You hear a lot about our young guys, but then there's no slot for us... It's, ‘Go back to Columbus and have a great year, and thanks for coming.' It's frustrating because you look at other teams around the big leagues and you see you pitched against them in the minors. You say to yourself, `Geez, how does this guy have this job?' If the Orioles' Ben McDonald was in the Yankees organization, he'd probably be in Double-A this year, Triple-A at the highest.

"It's going to take dedication from this ballclub to be willing to give a guy 20-25-30 starts to realize what they've got. I mean, Tom Glavine wasn't a stud his first year. He lost 15 or 16 games. Glavine was 7- 17 in 1988 . But it takes dedication to be willing to stay with that guy. From past history, I doubt that will ever happen. As far as I can remember, it's been give a guy six-seven starts, and if he doesn't do anything, then get him out of here and bring in Dave LaPoint."

Just to refresh your memory on the names in question if you weren't around back then, Ben McDonald was the first overall pick of the 1989 draft, the same one in which Hitchcock was selected. A more or less finished product out of LSU, McDonald made it to the majors that same season and by the time 1994 had rolled around he was in his sixth big-league campaign. He evolved into a pretty good pitcher, went to the Brewers as a free agent; rotator-cuff miseries set in at that point and he was done at 29.

Dave LaPoint, 1982 World Series (Getty Images).

Dave LaPoint didn't deserve what Hitchcock gave him, but the younger man still had a point. A lefty who was in the big leagues from 1980 through 1991, LaPoint was the kind of junk-throwing pitcher who the Yankees tended to use in the 1980s and early 1990s because between forfeited draft picks, dumbass trades, and collusion they couldn't get anybody better. Don Mattingly has talked about how those teams asked fortysomething pitchers like Phil Niekro and Tommy John to be No. 1 pitchers when they should have been No. 4s or 5s at that stage of their careers, but at least they had Hall of Fame or borderline Hall of Fame track records. LaPoint and many others like him (Andy Hawkins, Richard Dotson, and so on) were context-dependent pitchers who looked great when, say, pitching with Ozzie Smith behind them.

The Yankees didn't have Ozzie Smith, they had Bobby Meacham. LaPoint, signed by the Yankees as a free agent in the winter of 1988, posted an 83 ERA+ in two seasons with the Yankees and moved on. In truth, he wasn't as bad as that number makes him seem, he just wasn't good, wasn't ever going to be good so long as he was expected to be more than a back-of-rotation piece.

Obviously, by the time Hitchcock had a microphone to talk into the Yankees were on the cusp of getting better, though the aborted 1994 postseason and a shattering October loss to the Mariners in 1995 delayed the arrival of the good times until 1996. BY then, the Yankees had traded Hitchcock to the Mariners as part of a package for Tino Martinez, Jeff Nelson, and Jim Mecir, a move that can hardly be criticized. Hitchcock had a 13-year-career in the majors, a tour which included a two years and change back with the Yankees. With a 4.80 career ERA, he proved to be roughly the kind of pitcher he had complained about.

Still, he had a point, and he still has a point. He didn't know that Andy Pettitte was about to break through as one of the best homegrown pitchers in team history, one who would (with the exception of a brief sojourn to Houston so the Astros could pay for the arm breakdown the Yankees had seen coming for years) stick around instead of being traded for Ken Phelps, Joe Niekro, or a return engagement for Mike Stanley. After Pettitte, though... Well, it's a short list. Here are the team's top homegrown starters by games started from the moment Hitchcock spoke to the present, excluding pitchers who were acquired as veterans of other leagues, such as Orlando Hernandez or Masahiro Tanaka:

1.      Andy Pettitte (438 games started)

2.      Phil Hughes (132)

3.      Chien-Ming Wang (104; pitched in Taiwan but signed at 20, so what the heck.)

4.      Ivan Nova (86)

5.      Ramiro Mendoza (57)

6.      Sterling Hitchcock (44)

7.      Joba Chamberlain (43)

8.      David Phelps (40)

9.      Scott Kamieniecki (37)

10.  Vidal Nuno (17; drafted by the Indians but spent more time in the Yankees system.)

11.  Chase Whitely (12)

12.  Ian Kennedy (12)

Shane Greene will have tied Whitley and Kennedy by the time you read this, and I'm stopping before we get to Randy Keisler, career ERA of 6.63. That's it for 20 years. The actual leader list is populated by Mike Mussina, Roger Clemens, CC Sabathia, David Cone, El Duque, David Wells, A.J. Burnett, and so on. It's not that many of those pitchers weren't great, it's that it just goes to Hitchcock's point and to the point about Newman's tenure: You can't develop what you don't have, or what you don't choose to develop. Since they so rarely were inclined to the latter, we'll never know how much impact that decision might have had, if they could have made more out of the arms that they did draft. The bullpen at least, with David Robertson and Dellin Betances, demonstrates that time and patience sometimes does yield outsized rewards.

You can't fault Newman for so many of the arms on the list above falling off. That's just something that happens.

But for the brief flourishing of the Yankees farm system that brought Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and a few others, no doubt the position player list is just as sparsely populated. You're almost certainly never going to see Cito Culver in the Bronx, or Dante Bichette, and probably not Slade Heathcott either. It will be fascinating to see what the Yankees do if their current players keep developing, because the major league team is tied into declining old-guy contracts through the end of time and there has always been a reluctance to call a sunk cost what it is and move on, but more importantly, to trust.

One of George Steinbrenner's most oft-quoted lines was a 1978 question to a young infielder: "What the hell were you doing last night? Jesus Christ! You looked like a monkey trying to fuck a football out there!"

George is dead now, but the perception of rookies as football-fucking monkeys lives on, and thus Alex Rodriguez will still be paid through 2017, Mark Teixeira through 2016, and on and on. Newman is going, Hitchcock is long gone, Steinbrenner is dead, but everything else is the same.