Yankees: A lesson learned from the Mets that’s worth heeding

The Yankees watched their crosstown rivals make it to the World Series just two short years ago. Since then, every single Mets starter has lost significant time due to injury. The Yankees need to take notice with their young pitchers – or else.

The Yankees and their fans are hoping that this team will be playing baseball in October. And if the Yankees can make it deep into the playoffs or possibly even the World Series, River Avenue will become the Mecca of baseball, just as Waveland Avenue was last season outside Wrigley.

But there’s an Achilles Heel attached to playing in a World Series that no one likes to talk about. The Cleveland Indians are just waking up from it, and the Chicago Cubs are still feeling its effects. In a word, the extra games played are taxing on all players, but most especially on pitchers.

The New York Mets haven’t been right since they lost to the Royals in 2015. Every Mets starter since then has lost significant time to injuries that many believe are traceable to the extra innings thrown in stressful situations by their young staff.

Mets manager Terry Collins explains his team’s current plight:

Video courtesy of SNY

Steven Matz was 24 in 2015, the same age Jordan Montgomery is now. Matt Harvey was 26 back then, a year older than Luis Cessa is now. Luis Severino is only 23 now, four years younger than Jacob deGrom was in 2015. And Chance Adams, who figures to be a part of the Yankees rotation sooner rather than later, is only 22, the same age Noah Syndergaard was back then.

Innings matter and innings pitched under stress like the ones during a pennant stretch run or during the playoffs, matter even more, especially when a team is dealing with young arms.

Breaking down the Yankees starters

And by the way, the headline is not meant to be a pun. One by one, we’ll start with:

Jordan Montgomery 

Montgomery has made 13 starts this season and has pitched 74 innings. Projected out over 29 starts over the regular season, he will have thrown 165 innings. His innings total last season, all in the minors, was only 139.

Luis Severino

Severino has made 14 starts totaling 87 innings in 2017. Projected to 30 starts over the course of the regular season, he will have 186 innings before the playoffs even begin. Last season, Severino logged 151 innings between the Yankees and minors.

Luis Cessa

Between the Yankees and minor leagues this season, Cessa has made 13 starts with 72 innings pitched. Projected over 25 starts, hit total innings will be 160. Last season, he logged 147 innings.

Chance Adams

Lest we are mistaken, the innings that Adams is logging in the minors count the same as the ones he would be pitching at Yankees Stadium. Adams has made 14 starts this season between AA and AAA, logging 82 innings. By season’s end, he will have 30 starts and 182 innings under his belt. In 2016, Adams pitched 127 innings

You see the pattern here

Assuming the team makes the playoffs, both Severino and Adams are a cinch to pitch 200 innings this year, while Montgomery and Cessa can easily reach 180 innings depending on how far the Yankees go. In today’s game, that’s like the 300 innings Sandy Koufax, Warren Spahn, and Bob Gibson used to throw before they even got out of bed in the morning.

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I’ve noticeably discounted Michael Pineda and Masahiro Tanaka because they have more experience in the big leagues and therefore it’s expected that they can handle the load. And if they can’t, it might not matter since Pineda is a free agent after this season and Tanaka has an opt-out clause which, at this point, the Yankees have to be hoping he exercises.

So, unless the organization has an idea about re-signing Pineda, both he and Tanaka can pitch until their arm falls off and no one will care.

Do the Yankees have a plan?

They’d better have a plan. Otherwise, they risk the same thing happening to them as was the case with the Mets when they went all-out for the sake of one-year at the expense of where they are today.

Yankees fans don’t want that. But then, the question becomes, just what do we want. And what does the Yankees organization want in 2017? And how far is the organization willing to go in achieving the goal they set for themselves?

We’ll never be privy to the inner workings of the Yankees, and we’ll certainly never know either what the goals are or what their plans are. All we’ll know is what we’ll see unfolding in the second half of the season.

Still, it’s worth asking the questions about the team’s use of their young pitchers from here on in. Because as we’ve learned from the Mets, whatever the Yankees decide now will have a great impact shortly, one way or the other.

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What happened to the team at Citi Field is not a Mets catastrophe; it’s one for all of baseball when we see these young arms flailing to recover what they once were on the pitcher’s mound. At all costs, the Yankees need to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them.