Yankees' late-night roster move calls Aaron Boone's offseason comments into question

Just how concerning was the Yankees' 5-3 loss to the Red Sox on Friday night in the Bronx? New York wasted very little time making changes in the aftermath, demoting catcher J.C. Escarra to Triple-A almost immediately following the final out. Ali Sanchez will take Escarra's place on the big-league roster beginning Saturday.

It's hard not to feel like this is the right move, given just how badly Escarra has struggled at the plate this season. He's slashed an ugly .177/.235/.258 across 68 plate appearances with zero homers and just four extra-base hits. Sanchez is little more than a stopgap solution; he's a 29-year-old with a .454 OPS in 133 plate appearances over parts of four MLB seasons, and his .702 OPS in Scranton hardly inspires confidence. Then again, at least he hits right-handed and provide a real platoon partner for Austin Wells. And hey, he can't be worse.

Beyond the immediate roster ramifications, though, is what this says about Escarra more broadly — and the Yankees, who have showed an incredible amount of confidence in him stretching back years now. He's yet to repay any of it, and while New York seems finally set on moving on, it's concerning that it got to this point in the first place.

Yankees have hard questions to answer after J.C. Escarra demotion

"There's no doubt in my mind he's a top-half-of-the-league catcher." Those were Aaron Boone's words in spring training, by way of explaining why Escarra was essentially handed a spot on the Opening Day roster with little meaningful competition. Brian Cashman has seemed to agree with that assessment, or at least he's acted like it — both in his decision to deal other catching prospects below Escarra on the totem pole and in his unwillingness to find an option that might be a cleaner fit alongside Wells.

Maybe Escarra still has potential he's yet to unlock. Right now, though, it sure seems like this was a massive self-scouting failure on New York's part. Sure, Escarra is a gifted defender behind the plate, but is it really all that hard to find an all-glove, no-bat backup who can at least match up against left-handed pitchers a little better? The Yankees were clearly hanging onto Escarra because they thought he was something beyond the short side of a platoon, and yet he's still hitting below the Mendoza Line after his first two years in the Majors.

A backup catcher obviously isn't the most pressing problem facing this team right now. But the whole situation does seem to speak to this organization's tendency to, at times, overvalue their own homegrown talent. It would have been all too easy to flip Escarra for some minor piece over the winter and replace him with, say, Danny Jansen, who has hit lefties pretty consistently throughout his career.

But Boone and Cashman were convinced that they had developed a starter hiding in plain sight — and now their team is paying the consequences.

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