One week into the baseball season and New Yorkers were clamoring to know: Are the Yankees really this good and the Mets really this bad?
Well, for the Yankees, we can say, probably not, and the Mets hopefully not.
Who among us had the Yankees going 6-1 on their opening-season road trip to Houston and Arizona, two of the best teams in baseball, without Gerrit Cole? Somehow, they did, despite a subpar performance by Nestor Cortes (13 hits, 7 ER in 10 innings) in his first two starts, 11 strikeouts in 20 at-bats by Giancarlo Stanton and a mostly silent (5-for-28, 1 HR, 4 RBI) Aaron Judge in the seven games. (I hate to say this, the noticeably slimmed down Stanton really does look like he’s finished and that’s a decision the Yankees are going to have to come grips with sooner rather than later.) They also caught a lot of breaks on the trip, most notably Arizona manager Torey Lovullo running out of players last Wednesday and watching helplessly as reliever Scott McGough, hitting in the DH spot, struck out to end the game.
On the other hand, Juan Soto had a sensational road trip, offensively and defensively, leaving no doubt of his maiden season in New York being a smashing success — and a $500 million gulp for Hal Steinbrenner.
Then the Yankees came home to the announcement Jonathan Loaisga was landing in a familiar place, the injured list, with a strained flexor muscle that will likely sideline him for weeks, and the bullpen void immediately showed up on Opening Day when secondary relievers Caleb Ferguson and Dennis Santana followed Marcus Stroman’s brilliant six innings of shutout ball by surrendering the three runs in Toronto’s 3-0 win.
All that said, we know that Judge is going to start producing, while Anthony Volpe has really come into his own with his revised swing, and Luis Gil looks like a real find for the rotation. The Yankees are going to be a much better team than last year’s desultory 82-80 bunch, but not nearly as good as the Orioles and Blue Jays, and their challenge will be hanging close with those two teams until Cole comes back in mid-May.
(For the record, I’m seeing this as the year the Rays’ penny-pinching ways, especially with their starting pitching, finally catches up them.)
As for the Mets, thank God for the pitiful Marlins, the only thing standing in the way of them going on their first road trip of the season as a last-place team. (I have to believe there’s nobody happier to be no longer in Miami than Kim Ng, who did a brilliant job of trading the Marlins into the postseason last year only to be pushed aside by their clueless owner Bruce Sherman.)
It was indeed a disastrous opening homestand for the Mets in which Francisco Lindor, Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo went a combined 3-for-60 with no RBI. We know that isn’t going to continue, and Francisco Alvarez has developed into one of the best catchers in the game, so going forward the Mets should not have concerns about their offense.
What should concern them, however, is their bullpen beyond Edwin Diaz, which GM David Stearns has filled with a lot of mediocrities, most surprisingly bringing back Adam Ottavino, who was pretty much shot last year, for $4.5 million. Their disastrous loss to the Tigers in the first game of Thursday’s doubleheader in which they blew a 3-0 lead was largely the result of manager Carlos Mendoza having to pull his starter Adrian Houser, who wasn’t built up, after just 67 pitches and using Ottavino and Drew Smith in a high leverage situation for which neither is up the task anymore.
I think Mendoza has the makings of being a pretty good manager, but this is going to be a test for him, rallying the Mets back from this early season hole. I’d feel a lot more confident about a veteran manager who’s been through the wars and knows the players intimately, but Stearns was not willing to let Buck Showalter finish out the final year of his contract, was he?
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
Larry Lucchino, the hard-driving, uncompromising former CEO of the Red Sox and George Steinbrenner’s most famous antagonist, died last week at age 78 after as long, recurring battle with leukemia. Let it be said the Red Sox would not have won those world championships, Fenway Park might have fallen victim to the wrecking ball, and Camden Yards in Baltimore would not have started the ballpark renaissance in baseball were it not for Lucchino. It was Lucchino who hired Theo Epstein, who ended the Curse of the Bambino in Boston, and Lucchino, who fostered a relationship with Boston mayor Thomas Menino that led to the Red Sox being able to secure the necessary funding for the renovations to fast-decaying Fenway, including the seats above the Green Monster in left field that really should be named after him. It was also Lucchino — who never met a fellow baseball lord he couldn’t engage in mortal combat with — who breathed new life into the age-old Yankee-Red Sox rivalry by dubbing the Yankees “the evil empire” after Steinbrenner had out-maneuvered he and Epstein to sign Cuban defector Jose Contreras in 2002 a week after they’d also signed Hideki Matsui. In 2002, Red Sox owner John Henry told Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy that it was Lucchino who brought him in as the primary investor to the group that bought the Red Sox in 2002. Sadly, Lucchino had a falling out with Henry and Sox chairman Tom Werner, who blamed him for the disastrous hiring of Bobby Valentine as manager in 2011 and the loss of Jon Lester in 2014. Werner was said to have long been jealous of Lucchino getting all the credit for the Red Sox successes, and with Henry’s blessing was able to push Lucchino out. In his last years, Lucchino owned and operated the Red Sox Triple-A farm club in Worcester but friends said he died a bitter man after the way things ended for him in Boston. I would add it’s no coincidence the Red Sox ownership/front office has been a dysfunctional mess and the team has gone backward since his departure.
