Yankees’ Woes: Little League Coaching 101 for a $350 Million Mess

If you’ve ever coached a bad Little League team, you know the feeling. Two-thirds of your roster are automatic outs. You scribble the lineup knowing that half the kids will swing through air or watch strikes go by. The New York Yankees are living that reality right now, only the stakes involve a $350 million payroll and the weight of NY.

Brian Cashman has constructed a roster that defies logic. Spending north of $350 million to field a team where the majority of hitters look lost at the plate is a mind-blowingly bad job by the general manager. Yet here we are in August, watching a club that was supposed to contend instead sputter through another frustrating stretch of offensive futility.

Any weekend warrior coach knows the basic rule of survival when you find yourself in this spot: bunch the few guys who can actually hit. Stack them near the top of the order. In Little League you often bat the entire roster, so it might take three full innings to grind through the automatic outs in spots five through thirteen. You just pray that when the top of the order rolls around again, those few hitters you do have can do some damage and push a few runs across.

Right now the Yankees players you could honestly characterize as “can hit the ball” are Ben Rice (even though he’s been slumping) and Luis Garcia. That’s it. The rest of the lineup is a parade of automatic outs, with the occasional “run into a fastball” home run thrown in for good measure. Anyone who has stood in a dusty dugout with a clipboard understands the next rule: you do not take out the two guys who can hit. You simply cannot do it. Obviously.

Yet on Wednesday evening against the St. Louis Cardinals, with the Yankees once again stuck in another dreadful offensive performance, Aaron Boone found a way to violate that rule. The master of terrible decisions decided to pinch-hit for Austin Wells with Paul Goldschmidt in the eighth inning. On the surface that move makes some sense—Wells has been struggling mightily at the plate. Let’s roll with Goldy!

The problem arrived with the double-switch that followed. Boone put Goldschmidt at first base, removed Luis Garcia from the game, and inserted Ali Sanchez (who replaced Wells) into Garcia’s three-hole spot in the batting order. Some say that Sanchez has not recorded a hit in his entire major-league career. At the time of this writing I have not been able to confirm that detail, but the broader point stands regardless of the exact number.

Why would you take out Luis Garcia? Nobody has offered a coherent explanation. There were multiple sensible alternatives. You could have slid Garcia over to second base in place of Jazz Chisholm. You could have moved him to third base in place of Ryan McMahon. You could have left him at first base and simply removed Goldschmidt from the game after the pinch-hit appearance. You could even have thrown Jazz into center field in place of Trent Grisham. Any of those options would have been fine, because the players you would be removing—Jazz, McMahon, or Grisham—are NOT GOING TO HIT THE BALL. You replace Billy with Timmy even if it means hoping the ball doesn’t get hit at Timmy. What you do not do is take out Luis Garcia.

Sure enough, Boone made the bonehead decision to remove Garcia. Sure enough, Garcia’s former spot came up in the ninth inning. Ali Sanchez struck out to end the game. Painful to watch.

It is already hard enough to overcome this roster construction. Pairing disastrous roster building with mindless in-game management is a surefire way to lose baseball games and throw away a season. It will likely be the footnote to how Aaron Judge's career was wasted. The Yankees are doing both with impressive consistency.

More and more Yankee fans are beginning to wonder whether missing the playoffs entirely—and perhaps a long work stoppage after that—might be the kindest outcome available. Just put us out of our misery. Until that happens, Cashman and Boone will keep “running it back.” Nice job fellas.