Yankees' new Director of International Scouting only makes their failure more baffling

The New York Yankees, at the forefront of global branding for the better part of a century since baseball first crossed borders, have never traditionally needed a leg up in the international market. After an offseason's worth of fumbling, though, they certainly could use a stabilizing boost in the world of amateur international free agency.

In order to get their groove back in one of the few areas where a team this successful can collect prospect talent freely (well, freely with a capped bonus pool), they've turned to ... someone internal.

The Yankees dismissed longtime scouting director Donny Rowland at the expiration of his contract back in November, and somehow, everything they'd built disintegrated immediately. The Yankees made a number of high-profile scouting mistakes during Rowland's tenure; Jasson Domínguez is essentially their only big-bonus success, and even that success is relative. It seemed like a good thing to bring change to the operation. Instead, all that's happened so far is the Yankees losing a consensus top-five prospect in the game from both the 2026 (Wandy Asigen, now a Met) and 2027 (Mairon De La Rosa, now a Mariner) cycles.

This did not make sense at all. Were the Yankees really so aghast at Rowland's scouting — which many publications are aligned on! — that they'd rather not participate in the process instead of dole out ~$4 million pre-agreements? Was there something sketchy going on behind the scenes, where MLB demanded they divest to prevent a large-scale investigation/suspension? These prospects — and the agents who represent them — couldn't really have loved Rowland this much, could they?!

Apparently, they could've. On Tuesday, the Yankees hired Mario Garza to replace Rowland — or, rather, promoted him. Garza has spent essentially his entire career with the Yankees. He's as internal as internal gets.

Yankees replace Director of International Scouting with an internal hire after so much drama

If MLB was about to drop a hammer on Rowland and the Yankees, this wouldn't have been the move. If the Yankees wanted to make a change to their evaluation process, this definitely wouldn't have been the move; Garza was the team's director of Latin American operations from 2017-2019.

As it stands, the Yankees spent two months hemorrhaging talent while seeking a changing of the guard, than changed that guard by promoting someone they already had in their braintrust to a different position of power ... all in an effort to salvage a cascading pile of disintegrating relationships?

Maybe we were being too generous in assuming that Rowland had to have triggered some sort of massive scandal for this all to make sense. Maybe the Yankees really are that incompetent, and had no idea the damage they'd cause by making a change. As it stands, they've lost two years of talent from one of the very few prospect pools they can access without getting lucky at the back of the first round/nailing a comp pick. Hope the time lost was worth it. Hope Garza is an historically good whisperer. God forbid the Yankees ask someone who hasn't already been in the building for their opinion on anything.