3/28/2008

Top Prospects: New York Yankees

Can the Mighty Yankees Be Rebuilders?

Imagine you're a baseball fan in the 90's. In a dream, you can see into the future. Imagine learning that the mighty Yankees, that massive baseball machine in the Bronx that swallows money and spits out championships, hadn't won the World Series for more than ten years. Imagine that your Yankees had watched as the Boston Red Sox, that most hated of teams, rolled over the Yanks twice on the way to world championships.

And then imagine learning that to fix this problem, your team, with the deepest payroll in baseball, those free-agent moneybags Yankees that you love, were entering 2008 counting on not just one rookie pitcher, but THREE, in order to get back on top.

You'd probably wake up screaming. And yet here we are...

Everyone knows Joba, and real fans admired the progress Hughes made last year, but nobody ever remembers young ace Ian Kennedy, who has great stuff and who should benefit from the lower attention level.

The Yankees, the biggest, baddest, most moneyed team in all of baseball, are (it's hard to even type the word)... rebuilding. And they're even following a Red Sox style plan to get there: spending money to draft and keep the best prospects, using free agency and expensive veterans only as backups and hole-pluggers, and growing in strength from the inside out.

It's way too soon to know if this will work in the Bronx, or if the multiheaded Steinbrenner hydra will even have the patience to follow through... but the pieces they're putting in place are certainly fascinating.

In addition to media darling Joba Chamberlain, who will enter the season as a rookie despite collecting about 75 back-page headlines last season, the Yankees will be running out the overlooked young star Phil Hughes (who broke out last year) every five days, not to mention the completely-forgotten-about Ian Kennedy.

Sure, they still have some scary bats in A-Rod, Abreu, Jeter and Matsui, but it's on the backs of Chamberlain-Hughes-Kennedy that these Yankees will rise or fall. If they can stomach some down times -- and that's a big IF in the city that never lets managers sleep -- they'll have a very good team for the future.

If they can hold it together, more help will be arriving in the years to come, too. Thanks to the new approach of not trading away the farm for the latest big names and big contracts, the Yankees have managed to hold onto some of baseball's very best prospects, including wonder-catcher Jesus Montero, outfielders Jose Tabata and Austin Jackson, and the seven-foot tall tower of potential Andrew Brackman.

There are some good questions about whether the Yankees will be able to compete in 2008 and 2009, but one thing is for sure: for the first time in memory, they have a team that's getting better by design, rather than by checkbook. If they can stay on track, this will be a great team to watch in the years to come.

The Yankees have more prospects worth watching than any other team in baseball right now, and if you can get your head around that modern truism, cruise over to our list of Top Yankees Prospects for 2008.