Yankees Bullpen Adjustment Better Late Than Never
A good baseball manager is a problem solver. While continuity, in lineups, roles, etc., is preferred, and constant juggling can create tension that is anathema to the vibe a team needs over a long season, sometimes things get so bad that only a fool would repel change.
Aaron Boone can get like that. The Yankees skipper is such a staunch believer in “his guys” that he becomes blind to the obvious. It took years before he accepted the fact that the injury toll had diminished outfielder Aaron Hicks, playing him well past the point he became unplayable to everyone on the outside. We’ll see if this season’s DJ LeMahieu sidelining is something like the old Bob Uecker joke of his team injecting him with hepatitis to keep him out of a pennant race or if, as the infielder told The Athletic on Friday, he took a cortisone shot to the hip so Boone could put him and his miserable .204 batting average back on the field soon.
With regard to how Boone has recently adjusted the back end of his bullpen, however, let’s call it better late than never. And it has helped turn a Yankees season that was on the verge of going off the rails back in the right direction.
A 30-38 stretch encompassing more than 40% of the season basically washed away the cushion from a roaring 50-22 start, but after taking the third of a four-game set with Boston on Sunday, the Bronx Bombers head West to Seattle and Oakland for a six-game road trip looking to build on their three-game lead over Baltimore for the AL East crown. That this current 7-3 spurt occurred after Boone finally relented and removed Clay Holmes from the closer role isn’t a coincidence.
The last straw broke when Holmes surrendered a walkoff grand slam to Wyatt Langford in Texas on September 3 to blow his MLB-leading 12th save of the season. No one else is in double digits. Boone has since been utilizing more of a committee to close games, with Luke Weaver the primary caretaker of tight games. He has responded with four scoreless outings to earn a pair of saves and a relief win, including a two-inning save to hold off the Red Sox on Friday night.
It was borderline managerial malpractice that it took so long for Boone to correct such a critical flaw. While Holmes was lights out when everything was going New York’s way early in the season—he did not allow an earned run in his first 20 appearances covering 20 innings while registering 13 saves through May 19—his numbers thereafter were ugly: an ERA over 5 and a nearly 1.5 WHIP over his next 37 innings that included 11 of his 12 blown saves. That’s three-and-a-half months where Boone refused to hold Holmes accountable for his failures.
There were always excuses, like “soft contact” and other forms of bad luck. In a “the world doesn’t want to hear about labor pains, it only wants to see the baby” profession, the bottom line was that Holmes was killing a club that had already been struggling just to get leads. I don’t want to say that coughing up winnable games late automatically has a long-lasting effect on a major league team, but it’s not great for the psyche either. And when you get to the postseason, there is no longer a ton of time to rebound from a choked outing.
Let’s also acknowledge that going with Weaver, 31, down the stretch is a bit of a risk as well. He too should be on a short leash. Those two saves were the first of his nine-year career, as he was primarily a starter until this season—Boone gave him the ball for three starts after the Yankees claimed him off waivers last September.
His transition to the pen this season mostly involved the seventh and/or eight innings (58 of his 78 innings), where opposing batters have hit .165 against him. He has been even better in what baseball-reference.com defines as “high-leverage situations”, allowing just a .208 on base percentage. For comparison purposes, Holmes’ opposing OBP in similar situations is .346, as in more than one of every three batters he faced reached base. Not ideal when you’re tasked with protecting a one-run lead.
Weaver has gotten his fastball up to an average of 95.7 mph, per fangraphs.com, but he uses it less than half the time, mixing in a curve and a changeup. While I wouldn’t say he has your prototypical flamethrowing closing stuff, baseballsavant.com has him at a 32% swing-and-miss percentage and his 21.2% difference between K-and-walk percentages ranks 33rd among 175 qualifying MLB relievers. Pretty good, though not great.
Still, swapping Weaver for Holmes was the right move at this juncture, if not earlier. Like most Yankees fans, I have to wonder why it took so long for Boone (and I’ll throw General Manager Brian Cashman in the blame folder as well) to open his eyes as to what the rest of the baseball universe had been seeing. Boone’s unwieldy allegiance to his players may earn him some affection in the locker room; among the fan base starving for playoff success, it’s a called strike against him.