Dallas Keuchel fits for the Mets…after the MLB Draft

Let’s say the Mets do what the fans and media are pushing them to do and simultaneously designate Jason Vargas for assignment and sign Dallas Keuchel within the next five days. That would be around April 17.

Presumably, Keuchel has been throwing regularly and is in reasonable shape. Reasonable shape is not Major League Baseball game shape. So, he’d need to go to extended spring training and then make a few starts in Double and Triple-A. Being conservative but reasonable, say he’s ready by May 5 and joins the starting rotation on or around that date.

The MLB Draft is June 3. The Mets would get, at most, five starts from Keuchel prior to the draft. Is it worth the total cost? What are the Mets sacrificing and what are they getting?

Here’s the applicable rule regarding a free agent in Keuchel’s position from MLB.com:

A team that neither exceeded the luxury-tax threshold in the preceding season nor receives revenue sharing will lose its second-highest selection in the following year’s Draft, as well as $500,000 from its international bonus pool for the upcoming signing period. If it signs two such players, it will also forfeit its third-highest remaining pick and an additional $500,000.

The Keuchel contract is secondary and is not the issue. The issue is that the Mets would be surrendering a draft pick to sign him. They would also be giving up $500,000 in the increasingly valuable international spending money.

The same people who called the Mets shortsighted or outright stupid for trading 2018’s sixth overall pick Jarred Kelenic as the centerpiece of the deal to get Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz are screaming that the Mets “all-in for 2019” justification means they should continue that trend by sacrificing a relatively high pick and that international money to get someone who is a stylistically similar pitcher to the one he’s replacing.

It cannot be ignored that the pick they’re surrendering by such a move is in the same general vicinity of where they selected Pete Alonso – another subject about which the media and fans engaged in intense and mostly ignorant debate of how best to handle his service time and whether he should have been demoted for the first two weeks of the season to save a year of team control.

Alonso’s performance aside, the Mets and general manager Brodie Van Wagenen said it would be the best 25 players making the roster. In spring training, Alonso was one of the best 25 players. He made the roster. Everything else is noise. The damage that would have been done not just to Alonso, but to Van Wagenen as he tries to establish himself in his nascent new career as a GM, might have been worse than that extra year of team control that could end up being irrelevant.

There is a limited percentage of fans and media members who want to hear or accept these fundamental realities no matter how fact-based they are. Fewer will want to hear the next fundamental reality that Keuchel, despite being five years younger and far more decorated, is essentially the same type of pitcher as Vargas.

Not the same, but the same type.

He’s touch and feel; will not blow anyone away; needs a solid defense behind him; and if he’s not hitting his spots, he’ll get pummeled.

Sure, Keuchel’s velocity is a few miles superior to that of Vargas, but we’re not talking about 94 to 97. We’re talking 86 to 89 – numbers that make it imperative that both are hitting their spots and have sufficient differential between the fastball and changeup so both can be effective.

They’re not the same, but are similar enough to pause before immediately thinking the problem will be fixed by replacing one with the other.

The arguments for Keuchel are not based on Keuchel himself, per se and those aggressively pushing for him to be signed if not openly demanding it are using an argument that is not based on the same objective facts they purport to use via sabermetrics, but are that of a reactive sports talk caller, delusional blogger or Twitter lunatic.

After the draft, there will be greater competition for Keuchel’s services and he will likely end up elsewhere. But by then, the Mets’ situation and needs will be far clearer than they are now. Perhaps whomever takes Vargas’s spot in the rotation – Corey Oswalt, Hector Santiago, Robert Gsellman, Seth Lugo or by using “the opener” – will have a body of work to make an informed decision if one needs to be made at all and they’ll have their draft pick and international bonus money.

The real competition in the National League in general and the National League East particularly will be known. Teams might throw in the towel on the season and make arms available – arms who were not projected to be available on April 14, two weeks into the season.

The Mets can use Keuchel, but it’s not make or break for their season. The cost is not worth it. Not now, anyway.

Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees – Book Review

It would be a stretch to compare Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees to a piece by Leni Riefenstahl mirroring content usually produced and presented on the Yankees’ state-sanctioned propaganda ministry, the YES Network. Were that the case, it would have been penned by Jack Curry, had twice the ingratiating obnoxiousness and a quarter of the skill.

Still, within the first 20 pages, the direction of the narrative was clear as the authors – Bob Klapisch and Paul Solortaroff – dumped on, in order, Derek Jeter, Joe Girardi and Joe Torre. Ranging from a Yankees icon to a Hall of Fame manager to a key role player and World Series winning manager, they had fallen out of favor in the Bronx for a variety of sins and were cast out to the purgatory not limited to estrangement, but to open hostility.

This is no coincidence as it occurs simultaneously to avoiding foreshadowing (or foreplay) or any other writerly (or sex-based) techniques and going straight into the borderline pornographic worship of Brian Cashman. Reading between the thinly veiled lines, Cashman could also be referred to as “The Man Who Could Do No Wrong.”

Part of the book’s disappointment and failure is not the story itself, but of the expectations that preceded the news that it was being written in the first place. For those who read baseball tell-alls like Ball Four, The Bronx Zoo and others, a yearlong case study followed by an autopsy regardless of the outcome holds tremendous allure. Unfortunately, the writers retreat to the safety of the current trend of “baseball business” books, most of which pale in comparison to the initial and admittedly interesting while incredibly flawed and misunderstood Moneyball. Post-Moneyball, The Extra 2% was the next and last of the immersing stories that had yet to be told. After that came the love letters to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Chicago Cubs and Theo Epstein, the Houston Astros and Jeff Luhnow, and a few others, all of which were agenda-based, misleading and largely dull.

It’s tiresome not just because the stories have basically been told, albeit in different forms with a different cast of characters, but because the stories are so repetitive and devoid of criticism. This goes beyond the caveated individual mistakes that turned into learning experiences with substantial blame doled out on others since the main characters certainly couldn’t have been at fault as that would have sabotaged the entire goal of the story: to create a hero even if there wasn’t one.

The book doesn’t enter the realm of The Yankee Years by Torre and Tom Verducci where Torre aired his gripes, executed his vendettas and cemented his self-created and media-promoted visage of a combination Vito Corleone and the Pope, but Cashman and Torre’s perception of what occurred during that time and, by extension, how that impacted his replacement Girardi, are key parts of Inside the Empire.

The baseball business book model might be what publishers are looking for and what editors steer the narrative towards, but for those who want an insider’s perspective, it simply no longer works. We want meat, not cotton candy.

Perhaps Klapisch was scarred by what was, on the surface, a legitimate attempt at a tell-all with The Worst Team Money Could Buy about the disastrous 1992 New York Mets. The book itself was also a disappointment for those who hoped for a day-by-day diary of spending spree, a cast of compelling characters and a promising season that quickly devolved into a nightmare, but it was far better than this patched together mess, a book that tries to appeal to the Yankee fan and retain access while taking care not to offend anyone who is still closely affiliated with the club.

As much as Klapisch says those Mets players labeling him as someone who can’t be trusted did not affect him one way or the other; that he was not intimidated when Bobby Bonilla physically threatened him, for someone like him, who is and has for a long time been under the impression that he was not just a journalist who covers the team, but a peer who sees himself as a player, this is a scar that could have been reopened had he been completely honest about the 2018 Yankees and not diluted the tale so as not to “betray” anyone in whose confidence he was taken.

And therein lies the problem. The authors traded access for the lavishing of praise upon the characters who remained in the Yankee family.

Aaron Judge? Awesome player and human who everyone loves.

Didi Gregorius? Emerging leader whose good humor and affability masks an intense competitor.

CC Sabathia? The Yankees’ version of Yoda.

Aaron Boone? Wonderful guy whose even keeled demeanor was a marked departure from Girardi’s twitchy tightness.

It goes on and on.

At its end, there is an open question of Cashman’s blueprint of power above all else, ignoring situational hitting and strikeouts, wondering whether he would eventually look at the Red Sox and Astros and admit that perhaps adaptation needed to extend beyond the restructuring of the organization and adherence to cold numbers, accepting that the analysts didn’t know everything and there was nuance to the tactics by using the strategic single rather than every swing being for the fences.

The one remaining Yankee who did get criticized was Giancarlo Stanton, but even that was limited to a hand-wringing, halfhearted musing of his positives and negatives.

Gary Sanchez – the player who deserves to be slaughtered for his inattention, lack of fundamentals and bottom line laziness – is largely spared from a deserved lashing.

Boone is protected from criticism for inexplicable reasons that one can only surmise of him being a nice guy who is so completely devoid of any responsibility apart from following orders and providing monotonous platitudes that the team could have won 100 games if they stationed a mannequin in a uniform at the corner of the dugout and used a series of wires for him to perform “managerial functions.”

It all reverts to Cashman and his vision; his goal; his intent when masterfully taking charge of the organization and nudging Hal Steinbrenner into the direction he wanted.

The excuses are mind-numbing and fall into precisely what the late Boss, George Steinbrenner, would not have tolerated not because he was an unhinged, raving lunatic (he was), but because he would have been right not to want to hear that Sanchez’s lackadaisical behavior was because he was injured; that Boone’s absence of fire was a positive; that Stanton repeatedly striking out was part of the $300 million package. Nor would he have quietly acquiesced to the other explanations as to what went wrong as a team that won 100 games was discarded like irrelevant debris by its most hated rivals.

Cashman tried to assuage the concerns of fans and media members who were slowly coming to grips with the reality that this was no longer the Yankees of The Boss by proclaiming the organization a “fully operational Death Star,” implying that the so-called Evil Empire had gotten its payroll under control, rebuilt the farm system sans the Boss’s constant interference and template of preferring to trade young players for proven veterans while spending on exorbitant free agents, and was again prepared to combine tactical decisions with price being no object to return the Yankees to baseball’s pantheon not with a sole championship to break their decade-long drought, but with a team that was set to be the next dynasty.

In truth, it was unabashed hyperbole. Without Darth Vader, there is no Death Star. And The Boss was the organizational Darth Vader and proud of it. Instead, the Yankees’ ultimate weapon is more something out of Mel Brooks with Cashman as Rick Moranis’s “Dark Helmet,” someone who looks unimposing in person, sounds unimposing in practice, and is a technocrat who seized power piecemeal with an admittedly admirable Machiavellian efficiency and has decided to use that power to be like every other supposedly forward-thinking organization in sports and hope for a chance at a championship rather than winning the championship itself. The constant statements about accountability are nonexistent under this regime because no one is getting fired if they fail; players are unafraid of checking their names on social medial for a missive from the deranged Boss; and a Little League credo of “just try as hard as you can” is deemed sufficient.

And that’s not the Yankees that George Steinbrenner built.

The book could have been an exposé of what would otherwise have been a failed season for the Yankees, but was instead a borderline celebration of what they have become with the architects credited for its own sake. Had they ignored the fallout of telling truths that would have angered the organization, the book could have been excellent. Instead, it’s another generic tale about the baseball business, the kind we’ve seen too much of already to be memorable.

Joe Maddon’s days as Cubs manager could be numbered

Yes, it’s early.

No, it’s not too early to begin speculating on Cubs manager Joe Maddon’s job status.

This is largely the byproduct of the action – or inaction – of ownership and team president Theo Epstein. After six games and five losses, the club looks just as disjointed, ill-fitting and uninterested as it did in the second half of 2018.

Of course, it could be a slow start. They certainly have enough talent to turn it around. However, certain factors indicate otherwise. This is essentially the same team as 2018. Apart from new hitting and pitching coaches, the Cubs added nothing of note over the winter. Sans a contract extension, they blatantly left Maddon in the wind to twist with the unsaid mandate of, “The vault’s closed. Win with this group or else.”

Whether it was done as a protective device or Maddon was publicly seeking new ways to connect with his team, he claimed that he was reading Managing Millennials for Dummies. Such a move had the potential to annoy his detractors, implying that it wasn’t him who was the problem, but those goddamn kids who pushed too far against the cool older guy in the neighborhood who let them skateboard in his empty pool.

Viable defenses aside, the players are acting as if they’ve had their fill of him. There’s little doubt the front office would like to move on. The “one last go-round” is more of a last gasp than an actual strategy. It rarely works. Epstein has openly said he’s going to clean house if this team underperforms. That will start with the manager and it may be sooner than people think.