Curtis Granderson returned and Travis Hafner sat with a sore shoulder that will cost him at least a few games. This is the Yankee season: One step forward, one step into an MRI tube.
The official club handshake should be the left fist-to-left fist bump exchanged yesterday between Granderson and Francisco Cervelli. The two made an initial movement toward a traditional shake and then recalibrated since Cervelli still is wearing a cast to protect his fractured right hand and Granderson is just now returning from a broken right forearm.
It showed quick thought, ingenuity and adaptability – pretty symbolic of this organization, too.
We tend not to salute the Yankees for such qualities for the same reason you would not praise Ryan Gosling’s success in a single’s bar: It feels wrong to congratulate the overdog.
But the Bulls, rightfully, have drawn praise for making it this far in the NBA playoffs with makeshift lineups, and the Yankees — even with their huge payrolls — deserve the same for how they have handled the first quarter of this season, often with lineups that seem insufficient for a split-squad game in Dunedin.
Even with Granderson back, but Hafner out, the lineup still was as much Nix, Nelson and Romine as anything familiar from the Yankees’ mighty past. Still, they rallied once Felix Hernandez was removed to win yet again, 4-3 over Seattle.
The Yankees hope was to survive and advance while a stable of injured players healed. But now with the first piece of the cavalry back in Granderson, it is obvious they actually thrived and enhanced — at least their reputation as a can-do organization.
Credit the players for not surrendering to all the injuries and lowered expectations. Applaud Joe Girardi and his staff for creating a winning atmosphere and deploying the available bodies well.
But we also should recognize a front office for consistently finding useful-or-better pieces — for diving into the baseball dumpsters and emerging with, if not gems, certainly useful-or-better cogs.
Look, if it were just one year in which the Yankees made small gambles on Russell Martin, Andruw Jones, Eric Chavez, Freddy Garcia, Bartolo Colon, Luis Ayala and Cory Wade, then we could say any team could get lucky. And if they followed that up with Raul Ibanez, Dewayne Wise, Jayson Nix, Ichiro Suzuki, Cody Eppley, Clay Rapada and Derek Lowe, then maybe we could talk about the fortune of lightning striking twice.
But what do we make of another year? Of Hafner, Vernon Wells and Lyle Overbay, who had two more huge at-bats and RBIs last night? Of Shawn Kelley and Vidal Nuno?
Are we still going to call the Yankees lucky? That this is all about being able to invest big dollars? If it were just simply spending big then SoCal baseball would not be a wasteland, right Angels and Dodgers?
No one wants to give it to the Yankees because of the payroll — the perception that any Tom, Dick or Cashman could run baseball ops backed by Steinbrenner wallets. In reality, the Yankees have a well-run baseball operation.
The Yankees have become adept at churning through secondary markets to augment their well-paid star base. Brian Cashman preaches improving even by one or two percent if the finances work, and the Yankees baseball ops department has gotten better and better at identifying the types that can fit and succeed here.
The Yankees have made the majors’ second-most waiver claims since the close of last year’s regular season. They will make a small trade because they see something in Chris Stewart’s defense. They will sign an independent league player like Nuno. They will not impatiently give up on an Adam Warren based on one poor start last year.
When Yankees injuries mounted and the coming season looked bleaker late in spring, Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos told me he would not downgrade them. He noted the Yankees had made the playoffs 14 times in Cashman’s 15 seasons as GM and, “so I am going to bet on Brian Cashman. He knows how to solve problems.”
Yes, you will find plenty of rival executives who will cite the financial edges, even in say giving Hafner a few more dollars than others might. But there also is grudging respect within the game that the Yankees are relentless and skilled when it comes to deepening their talent reservoir.
“Do they have big advantages, yes they do,” one rival general manager said. “But you can have advantages and squander them. They have become an organization that doesn’t panic, that sees the big picture and maximizes its resources. They are what scares smaller markets — the huge market that is run smartly and rather efficiently.”