Yankees spring training roster battles: Making the Team Meter round three

It’s a Monday in March, and you know what that means: it’s time for another edition of Pinstripe Alley’s Making the Team Meter! The third week of March is typically a major milestone, as we are now officially closer to Opening Day than we are to the first spring training game. As such, this is typically the week that teams take an axe to their spring training roster, and the Opening Day squad begins to slowly take shape. Thanks to the World Baseball Classic, however, the Yankees have taken their time trimming down the roster, as they have worked to make sure that they have kept enough players in the big league camp to get through the spring schedule.

Despite this relative lack of cuts, we can look at usage, individual performance, and comments by Aaron Boone and Brian Cashman to get a sense as to how these few roster battles are shaping up, and begin to more firmly project the anticipated Opening Day roster — although, as will be clear shortly, comments from the organization might actually increase the uncertainty, rather than help us gain an insight into what the team is thinking.

As always, in case you need it, I’ve included the key below as a refresher. I’d also like to remind you that, like last week, players who were cut or removed from the injured list prior to last Monday will not appear on these lists, while those cut in the last seven days will.

Making the Team Meter Key

As always, let’s start with the pitchers:

In a spring where injury news has been fortunately few and far between, the majority of the pitching staff looks, in theory, rather set. Max Fried, Cam Schlittler, Ryan Weathers, Will Warren, and Luis Gil represent the team’s five starters. David Bednar, Camilo Doval, Fernando Cruz, and Tim Hill will be the team’s quartet of high-leverage relievers, while Ryan Yarbrough and Paul Blackburn will at least open the year as multi-inning relievers capable of starting if needed. Even if Weathers and Gil have looked inconsistent on the mound so far this spring, nothing that we have seen has truly changed this projection, which leaves just two bullpen spots up for grabs.

And yet, early during yesterday afternoon’s broadcast on the YES Network, Michael Kay, David Cone, and Meredith Marakovitz threw a wrench into these projections by highlighting the number of off-days the Yankees have during the first month of the season. From the start of the season on March 25th through the end of April, New York has a whopping five days off, including three in the first eight days of the season. Because of this, the team can open the season with just four starters for at least the first two trips through the order.

Judging from Aaron Boone’s comments during his fourth inning interview on YES, I think the Yankees are inclined to use a four-man rotation to start the season; after all, Boone did say he wants to avoid giving his starters seven or more days of rest between starts, something that can easily happen with a five-man rotation early in the season. But exactly how this changes their plan for the roster remains to be seen. The simplest way, which the Yankees have done in recent years, is to have the No. 5 starter begin the season in Triple-A, allowing them to carry an extra reliever for the season’s first week; this is especially useful, as most starters are only built up to 80-90 pitches for their first start anyway. But Boone stressed the fact that the team has seven to eight players who will be built up as starters, and suggested that possibility of lining up those not in the rotation to piggy back behind the starter, allowing them to remain stretched out, at least early in the season.

How the Yankees opt to approach this — something which Boone suggested they will do this week — will have ramifications throughout the roster. If they take the first way and bring an extra reliever, one of Warren and Gil will open the season in Scranton (hence why both are now listed as yellow, although I think the team is more likely to carry Warren than Gil, even before Gil’s stinker yesterday), and they will carry three relievers. If they opt to employ Yarbrough, Blackburn, and Warren/Gil as swingmen, as David Cone called the role yesterday, then they may be able to carry one fewer reliever than normal, allowing them to carry 14 position players (and thus solving the roster jam there, discussed below).

Regardless of the number of relievers the Yankees will take, there’s still very little clarity. The team cut another round of pitchers this week — Michael Arias, Brendan Beck, Kyle Carr, Dylan Coleman, Dom Hamel, and Ben Hess — but none of them were exactly in line to crack the roster anyway. Angel Chivili and Jake Bird have struggled, Cade Winquest and Osvaldo Bido need to make the roster (the former because he was a Rule 5 Draft pick, the latter because he’s out of minor league options), and Yerry De los Santos, Kervin Castro, and Brent Headrick have looked good this spring, but lack long track records. How will the Yankees weigh these considerations? Bryan Hoch has Bird and Headrick make the team, with a shoutout to Castro, but as we’ll see later, his projected roster has some flaws. The FanGraphs Depth Chart has not wavered from its Winquest/Bird pairing. For now, it truly is anybody’s game.

Catcher, on the other hand, looks very, very different:

Austin Wells will be the starter. J.C. Escarra will be the backup. With the Yankees opting to have Ben Rice focus on first base this spring, this will be the Yankees’ catching tandem. Michael Kay’s offhand comment yesterday that Ryan McMahon’s struggles at shortstop may put Escarra’s roster spot in danger should be ignored, because it would be malpractice to have Rice start the season as the backup catcher without any game action behind the plate to start the season.

Miguel Palma was reassigned to the minor league camp after yesterday’s game.

Last but not least, the position players:

Out of the players on this list, 11 can make the Opening Day roster. After the Yankees took an axe to the roster this week — George Lombard Jr., Marco Luciano, Braden Shewmake, Duke Ellis, Yanquiel Fernández, Ernesto Martínez Jr., Jonathan Ornelas, and Zack Short were reassigned to minor league camp, 23 remain with the big league club — a testament to the team’s need for bodies with so many players representing their country in the World Baseball Classic.

With a pair of veterans in Paul Goldschmidt and Amed Rosario under contract, the Yankees entered the spring with just one bench spot up for grabs. That fact has not changed, although the nature of that last spot has. Heading into the spring, Jasson Domínguez and Oswaldo Cabrera were penciled in by fans and journalists alike. The Martian, however, is now ticketed to Scranton despite a strong spring, barring an injury to one of the team’s three outfielders or Giancarlo Stanton, and while Cabrera has returned to the diamond, it seems likely that the team will have him start the year in the minors, possibly on a rehab assignment, as they continue to bring him along slowly as he recovers from last May’s gruesome ankle injury.

As it stands, the Yankees have two options for the final spot, either a right-handed hitting outfielder to serve as a platoon bat in Randal Grichuk, or a backup shortstop in Paul DeJong or Max Schuemann (Jorbit Vivas is not a realistic option due to his inability to play shortstop, while Zack Short is clearly behind the other two in the pecking order). In an ideal world, the Yankees clearly want to bring Grichuk north with them, letting Ryan McMahon open the season as the backup shortstop — both Hoch and FanGraphs, in fact, hand Grichuk the final spot on the bench. At the moment, though, this is unrealistic. McMahon has looked uncomfortable moving laterally at shortstop, and while he certainly can play the position in an emergency, the Yankees simply cannot go into the season without a backup to José Caballero. Unless the third baseman shows major improvement with more reps at the position, they almost certainly will be taking DeJong or Schuemann.

There may be a solution to this conundrum: piggybacking the starting pitchers. If the Yankees open the season with a four-man rotation, and use Gil, Yarbrough, and Blackburn for 60-70 pitches behind three of Fried, Schlittler, Weathers, and Warren, they may be able to operate with only 12 pitchers on the active roster, at least for the first two weeks of the season. Carrying one fewer arm than normal would allow the Yankees to carry 14 position players, enabling them to carry both a shortstop and Grichuk. It wouldn’t be a permanent fix — once the five-man rotation begins in earnest, they will need to bring the bullpen back to full strength — but as we’ve seen in recent years, by the time a decision will need to be made, the baseball gods tend to make the decision rather obvious.

And that’s where we stand today. We’ll be back again next week, this time on Monday, for one last projection before the Yankees open the season next Thursday. In the meantime, let us know in the comments section below what you think about our read on the Yankees roster bubble.

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