Yankees' minor-league system hints failure to develop a closer won't end anytime soon

Quibble, if you'd like to, about Yankees reliever Clay Holmes' luck and underlying metrics. Quibble on the opposite side, if it suits you, about Holmes' talent. Claim he lacks the intangibles to remain a closer, but can hack it in the eighth inning. Claim he's "never been good at all," no matter where you place him. There's no one more polarizing, no matter which fanbase you speak to, than the current closer, and there's no one more polarizing anywhere than the current closer for an organization that once employed Mariano Rivera.

Intangible weakness can never be factually proven, though 11 blown saves in a five-month span, coupled with eternal traffic on the bases and predictable failures to nail one-run leads shut, would seem to indicate that Holmes' FIP might not be the most relevant test of his closer mettle.

But would you like to replace him? At the moment, your options are Tommy Kahnle, Luke Weaver, and Jake Cousins, none of whom have any sort of experience doing exactly what Holmes has been accused of being unable to fulfill. One-run game in the ninth? Weaver, and his zero career saves, will make you just as skittish.

For all the Yankees' successes at turning middling relievers with one elite pitch into stars, they haven't been able to quantify that gut-wrenching feeling of being the last man on the mound, the one person standing between victory and defeat, attempting to wall off the onrush and shut the door. Finding a closer with the guts to do the job might be one of baseball's few remaining unsolved puzzles -- and you'll never know if you have one until the game's on the line.

Maybe that's why the Yankees don't even really seem to be trying to test mettle and develop closers, specifically. According to Donnie Collins, who's spent years covering the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, developing closers isn't something the Yankees are focused on. Browse the stats, and you'll see that's true -- Anthony Misiewicz's seven random saves lead the system this season. What are we supposed to do with that?

Yankees don't have a closer replacement for Clay Holmes -- and that's by design

For years, the Yankees have forsaken closers on the open market, given the financial premium for their services. This has always been lauded as wise by the chorus of stat-driven assessors who love to discourage expenditures, even if the person spending the money has it in gobs.

But after developing Mariano Rivera, the Yankees filled his injury gap with the acquisition of Rafael Soriano, which went quite well in 2012. They graduated David Robertson into his role after the high-sock slinger was forged in the fire as a setup man in 2009-2013. They got lucky that his transition was so seamless.

Afterward, they imported somebody else's proven closer multiple times, with both Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman. It hasn't really been an issue (though Chapman was ... an experience) until now. The Yankees have a bullpen of setup men (or worse), wracked by the realization that they forgot to develop a pipeline -- or perhaps they couldn't figure out how to and didn't care. Signing a closer won't be cheap this offseason, but it might be the only way to save this sinking (and Clay-Holmes-sinker-fueled) ship.