We’re still in April, baseball’s stupid season, as the Yankees and Red Sox kick off their 2017 season series Tuesday night at Fenway Park. This early, just one rivalry-conjoined assessment/prediction can be stated with any level of confidence:
Boston’s John Farrell stands virtually no chance of winning American League Manager of the Year honors.
The Yankees’ Joe Girardi has a real chance to win the same award.
That speaks to the dramatically different expectations surrounding the two clubs. Which in turn, given what we’ve seen so far, provides the Yankees with an edge this week.
They enter New England with their best blend of low pressure and high hopes in … well, maybe ever. They can wear the “Underdog” label with authenticity and try to use it to their advantage.
“I would think so,” Girardi agreed Sunday. “And you can come out of that, and they can have even more confidence.”
“I think when you have a team that a lot of people don’t believe that they are capable to be in [the playoff race], this passes a message to players,” Girardi’s bench coach, Tony Pena, said Sunday. “The players start to show everybody that they are wrong.”
Girardi and Pena can speak from experience, in the days before they became Yankees management. They can speak with authority, for each man owns a Manager of the Year trophy for guiding teams that dramatically surpassed projections.
Girardi’s 2006 Marlins, an extremely young and lowly paid group featuring an in-his-prime Miguel Cabrera, finished a respectable 78-84 and fought their way into the mid-September National League wild-card race after starting the season at a ghastly 11-31. Pena’s 2003 Royals, a ragtag squad featuring an in-his-prime Carlos Beltran, led the American League Central for a healthy portion of the season before slipping to 83-79.
These Yankees aren’t as youthful as Girardi’s Marlins, nor do they employ as many journeymen as Pena’s Royals. Most notably, this club still deploys a big-market payroll of about $195 million. Nevertheless, we all know the Yankees’ deal at this point: They’re trying to stay afloat competitively while developing their own talent and getting under the luxury-tax threshold next winter. On the Yankees’ scale, this goes down as a virtual rebuilding year.
While acknowledging this Yankees team carries a far greater number of veterans than his one Marlins team (the Fish fired him after the ’06 season due to conflicts with ownership), Girardi said, “We have young guys that are playing some key parts in the order. [There are] high expectations [for them].”
When it comes to high expectations, however, no one in the AL East can come close to the Red Sox, who have traded many of their top prospects in the last year and a half to boost their major league club with Chris Sale, Craig Kimbrel, Drew Pomeranz and the currently injured relievers Carson Smith and Tyler Thornburg. In addition, they doled out $217 million to the currently injured ace David Price. They are very much all-in, just as the Yankees aren’t. Which is why the Yankees (11-7) must hold the tiniest measure of satisfaction, even if they’d never admit it, that they begin this series a half-game up on the Sawx (11-8).
So the Yankees can enjoy introducing Aaron Judge to the Green Monster. They can test the Luis Severino reboot, with the right-hander set to start Tuesday’s opener. They can try to get Greg Bird going against Boston’s Tuesday starter Rick Porcello, who held Bird hitless in six 2015 meetings.
“I think for young players, so much of it is for them to understand, ‘I can play at this level,’ ” Girardi said. “… That’s what I thought in the first 30 to 40 games of the Marlins. We had rookies everywhere. And they weren’t sure. And they were kind of looking over their shoulder. Once they get by that, they realize, ‘You know what? I do belong here.’ They can take off.”
“That helps a lot of younger players: The mentality that you can surprise a lot of people,” Pena said. “That [Royals] team, in 2003, they thought they could do really good.
“Who knows where we’re going to be?” Pena added. “But I like where we’re at.”
Why wouldn’t he? Not often do the Yankees enter enemy territory with so little to lose and so much to gain, with their adversaries in the exact opposite position.