Monday, June 23, 2014

Monday Afternoon Food For Thought: The Quad-A Replacement Brigade

From this morning, we know that the Yankees have a ton of guys hitting at well below-average rates this month.  From watching the season in its entirety, we know they've had plenty of guys struggling to produce since Opening Day.  There's been no indication that any new "shakeup" roster moves are coming as a means to jump start the offense, but there is a bounty of potentially interesting call-up candidates in Triple-A right now:
And that's not including guys like Zoilo Almonte and Scott Sizemore who've already spent some time on the Major League roster, and Ramon Flores, who's on DL presently but was hitting .261/.352/.447 before getting hurt.  If he were healthy, there's a non-zero chance he'd be on the Yankee bench by now.

Among the 4 guys mentioned above, only 1 of them is young enough to be truly considered a "prospect" and that's Pirela at age 24.  The other 3 are classic Quad-A 'tweener types and none of the 4 are currently on the 40-man roster, which is surely a major determining factor in why the Yankees haven't made a move to call any of them up.  Another is expectations, which are tough to accurately set for players like this.  None of these guys is even close to a sure bet to replicate his current production at the Major League level or even match what underperforming 25-man guys like Alfonso Soriano or Brian Roberts are doing.  I suppose it couldn't hurt to give someone like Roller or Garcia a look, but at the same time they really haven't dominated Triple-A to the point where it's clearly worth it to cut bait on a more established, albeit mostly terrible, option.

I'll say this, I'm glad that's not my decision to make.  Classic "damned if you, damned if you don't" scenario.
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