The Futility Infielder

This week's Hit List is up at Baseball Prospectus, with the Marlins retaking the top spot, followed by the surprising Orioles and then the Dodgers, who spent two weeks at number one. The Yankees, who continue to struggle, are down at number 23 after finishing with their first losing April record since 1991, back when Bernie Williams was a rookie. For the week, Alex Rodriguez hit .429/.520/1.190 with 5 homers, while the rest of the Yanks managed a punchless .233/.297/.301 line with one homer, and scored as many runs on A-Rod's big night (12) as they did in the other five games all week. Pathetic.

I was at Sunday's debacle and watched the Yanks blow a 6-3 lead, courtesy of their inability to put batters away. The Blue Jays pounded out 16 hits while the Yanks could manage only three strikeouts. Reliever Paul Quantrill, who came on with the bases loaded and nobody out in the sixth, let two batters escape 0-2 counts to reach base, keying a bases-clearing rally from which the Yanks never recovered. Mike Stanton gave up another pair of runs thanks in part to the Jays' aggressive baserunning on Williams. Ol' Chicken Arm, never a good thrower in the best of times, is suffering from tendinitis in his right elbow as well as his chronic shoulder woes, and for his part is pretty candid about his condition: "It's not an issue with throwing. ... I could never really throw. It's not keeping me from playing. ... I can play. I'm just trying to play through it."

Williams' struggles in the field and at the plate (.247/.324/.312) are part of a larger set of woes that hasn't gone unnoticed by Yankee brass, and after last night's game the hammer dropped. Today's New York Times reveals that big changes are coming as of Tuesday night's game: Williams is out as the regular centerfielder, with leftfielder Hideki Matsui sliding over to the position he played in Japan. Moving to left is second baseman Tony Womack, who's never played the position but has 125 games in rightfield, most of them in 1999. Replacing Womack at second base is Robinson Cano, a 22-year old prospect who's hitting .333/.368/.574 at Triple-A Columbus.

The Yanks will also make some moves on the pitching front. Reliever Steve Karsay, who's thrown a total of 12.2 innings over the past two-plus seasons, will be designated for assignment, meaning he's going to be waived, likely claimed, and then traded for a delicious combination of peanuts and bubblegum, with the Yanks footing about $6 million worth of damage and whoever acquires him paying only the prorated minimum. That move is to make room for reliever Tanyon Sturtze, who comes off of the disabled list later this week. Sturtze won't arrive in time to take a spot start for Randy Johnson, who tweaked his groin (no jokes, please) in his last start and will be held out of Wednesday's game. Instead that role will go to 24-year-old Double-A lefty Sean Henn, who's 2-1 with an 0.71 ERA thus far, and it means that, for at least one turn, the Yanks now have two rookies (including Chien Ming-Wang, who was solid in his debut on Saturday) replacing very expensive cogs in the rotation in Johnson and Jaret Wright.

These moves are a lot to digest, even for those of us who saw this coming with the Yankees' poorly conceived offseason moves, particularly their failure to sign 28-year-old Carlos Beltran to ease Williams out of centerfield. The kicker is that even after eschewing Beltran, the Yanks failed miserably at coming up with a workable Plan B. They traded last year's "heir apparent" centerfielder, Kenny Lofton (who's actually older than Wiliams), to the Phillies for Felix Rodriguez (who's either languishing in their crowded bullpen or else already in the Federal Witness Protection program, having pitched only one-third of an inning in the last nine days) and the only other centerfelder on the roster (besides Matsui) is Bubba Crosby, who hit .151/.196/.302 in limited duty last year.

Basically, the thrust of these moves is to:

• limit the damage playing time of Williams, Jason Giambi (.224/.395/.373), Tino Martinez (.239/.338/.358), and eventually Ruben Sierra (.269/.296/.692 -- all of those hits for extra bases) in that they can field only one DH and one first baseman. Players like Gary Sheffield (who struggled through shoulder problems last year and who's earned the nickname of "Magellan" for his circuitous routes to flyballs) and Jorge Posada might be nice to keep fresh in the DH spot once in awhile as well, but the Yanks now have the deepest DH slot in the league and no real backup rightfielder, since Crosby's really around as part of the Make-a-Wish foundation and should be limited to pinch-running duty and fetching Bernie herbal tea at best.

• find out whether they can get lucky with Cano, who's a very limited prospect. BP's PECOTA system projects him at .254/.297/.389, with enough upside to be a legitimate major-leaguer... when he's 24 (a weighted mean EQA of .256 for 2007, with .260 being league-average).

• turn YES into the Tony Womack Channel. Womack seems like an amenable sort, but he's got a surgically rebuilt throwing arm, and as a cornerman, his bat is just one more spot where the Yankee offense will lose ground. The Yanks would do better to limit his exposure as well, rather than turning him into the fulcrum of these moves.

Back at the winter meetings in Anaheim, Joe Sheehan kept harping that the Yanks would be below average offensively at four positions -- second base, centerfield, DH, and first base -- and these moves touch every one of those positions; with the slight upgrades at CF and DH, the Yanks are at best treading water at second (where Womack is hitting a rather empty .282/.330/.329), and receding in left.

But I don't think this will do a great job of solving the Yanks biggest problem, which is their wheezing outfield defense. The team's Defensive Efficiency Ratio, the percentage of balls in play that they turn into outs, stands at .651, the worst in the major leagues by a staggering 20 points, and a good 44 points below league average. Looked at another way, that's the difference between a .305 hitter and a .350 hitter, and it's a cost of having a pitching staff that can't dominate hitters, as I complained in relation to pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre last week.

It's been suggested by some that the Yanks would have been better off simply swapping Williams and Matsui in the field, but I'm skeptical that would solve anything. Leftfield in Yankee Stadium is abnormally large, and it requires the ability to cover almost as much ground as centerifeld does in most parks. Add to that the requirements of Williams to learn to track balls (never his strong suit) which are coming at him with more of a spin -- severely hooking or slicing rather than hit more or less straight -- and to manage the foul line and wall and for Matsui to hurdle the language barrier with two outfielders instead of one, and you've got a potentially harrowing situation that brings to mind an air traffic controller strike. Here's what injury expert Will Carroll had to say on BP's internal mailing list:

The oddball thing is that the Yankees did drill quite a bit with Matsui in CF during spring training. That's not unusual, he was the clear backup. What's going to be the interesting part is that he'll have Womack on one side, who doesn't have any experience that I can tell. There's a significant short term increase in injury risk on a position move, usually due to change in conditions. Given the walls and locations in Yankee are pretty safe in left, the rest of the possibilities lie in miscommunication leading to collision. Womack taking out Matsui, Jeter or Rodriguez would lie directly in the middle of comedy and tragedy.

Yikes. While it's not entirely clear whether this whole scenario will take or whether it's an intermediate stage preceding a more major trade (the Mets' Mike Cameron, currently on the DL and former Yankee prospect Wily Mo Pena, now fighting for time in a crowded Cincy outfield, are two names often mentioned), the move out of centerfield for Williams marks the passing of an era, and for his part, he's handling the demotion with dignity and grace, saying, "At this point, all everyone wants is for us to win games. Pride ... all that stuff ... that's out the window. My job now becomes to make myself available to play." True class.

In case anybody's wondering, Bernie does have a legit Hall of Fame case according to the JAWS system, with a career WARP of 100.4, a peak of 46.8 and an overall score of 73.6. That's a few points below the average Hall centerfielder (108.8/46.5/77.6) based on career length, but with four World Series rings and the pinstripe legacy behind him, he's probably got enough juice to get in.

Back to the Yankees, this team, as I've harped before, was poorly constructed in the offseason, but its cracks are showing up even more quickly than even I would have suspected. It might be a bit early to haul out the title of a recent book as a punchline diagnosis -- Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning -- but it's clear that change is in the air up at 161st Street. I hope it's not too late, but with the Orioles off to a hot 17-8 start and leading the AL East, the dawn of a new era -- one with the Yanks making tee times in October -- may be upon us.

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I finally received my copy of The Juice yesterday. In honor of it, I raised a bottle of my favorite baseball-themed performance-enhancing beverage, Brooklyn Pennant Ale '55, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the sole Brooklyn Dodgers championship and is part of a great line of beers from a great local brewery. According to the packaging, $1 from every case will be donatied by the brewery towards a mayoral fund to build a monument to Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese out at Coney Island. I'm flying the flag.