Desperately Seeking Wilson

I’m nor­mally a fan of the XM Base­ball morn­ing show with Buck Mar­tinez (who will be for­ever ruined to me thanks to Triple Play ’99) and the other guy, but they were pulling some things out of their ass this morn­ing. They were doing some seem­ingly “on the fly” dis­cus­sion of last year’s dead­line trades (I say “seem­ingly” because they plugged it sev­eral times as com­ing up dur­ing the show, but the prep work involved seemed to be a trans­ac­tion list from last July) and made accu­rate com­ments on what trades have worked (boy, the Nation­als really bent over the Reds on that Kearns/Majewski deal), but usu­ally missed the mark on why (Ryan Wag­ner is pitch­ing “well” for the Nats [5.74 ERA in 14 games before season-ending surgery], Bill Bray is get­ting ham­mered for the Reds [hasn’t pitched this sea­son due to injury]).

Any­way, then they start men­tion­ing a pos­si­ble deal brew­ing between the Dodgers and Yanks with Scott Proc­tor get­ting shipped over to the Dodgers for Wil­son Betemit. Buck men­tions that he doesn’t know why the Yan­kees would do this deal.

For those of you new here, that’s Scott Proc­tor — Scott Proc­tor of the 1.430 WHIP. Scott Proc­tor who has pitched 130 games in the last sea­son and a half. Scott Proc­tor who burned his uni­form because teams hit .313 against him in June.

It’s not that Proc­tor is a bad pitcher; he’d prob­a­bly be much bet­ter on a team not run by the Tor­re­bot. But if there’s one thing the Yanks have to offer right now, it’s relief pitch­ing. The Yanks are car­ry­ing 13 pitch­ers right now at the major league level, and have Chris Brit­ton in AAA ready at a moment’s notice. Plus, there are other options deeper on the Scran­ton ros­ter, like Jim Brower (1.77 ERA in 29 games) and Char­lie Man­ning (47 K in 41.3 innings), not to men­tion Sean Henn, or using a guy like Matt DeSalvo or Chase Wright in a long relief role. The dropoff wouldn’t be that huge.

In con­trast, you have Wil­son Betemit (who I men­tioned in yesterday’s arti­cle), who has an OPS more than 200 points higher than the man he’d be replac­ing, Miguel Cairo. Add to that Betemit’s abil­ity to actu­ally play three infield posi­tions, in con­trast to Cairo’s “I can play 2nd, kinda, and maybe left field and first base?“

How­ever the biggest thing that acquir­ing Betemit would bring to the Yan­kees is giv­ing the team an Alex Rodriguez safety net if Rodriguez decides to play hard­ball and ter­mi­nates his con­tract. As it stands right now, the Yan­kees would have absolutely no one to take Rodriguez’s place if he left, putting the Yanks at in poor nego­ti­a­tion stance. While Betemit isn’t an ideal third base­man, he isn’t a hor­rific option at third (not like a not-ready Eric Dun­can or scram­bling to get an Aaron Boone or Rus­sell Branyan) and allows it to work both ways — if Rodriguez does leave, the Yanks have a third base­man. If he doesn’t, the Yanks have some­one on the bench who can play all the infield posi­tions, have a lit­tle pop in his bat, and is only 25 years old.

Make the deal, Brian — don’t lis­ten to Buck.

IN OTHER YANKEE NEWS: Rob Neyer in his blog (ESPN Insider sub­scrip­tion required) tells a good story about how the Yan­kees found Edwar Ramirez using the uncom­pli­cated process of see­ing really good sta­tis­tics and con­firm­ing that he wasn’t a men­tal case before pick­ing him up — sight unseen — to fill out their single-A ros­ter. Now he’s in the majors, great story, etc.

It is a great story, and Ramirez’s num­bers have been mind-boggling, with 33 strike­outs in 16 innings at AA Tren­ton and 47 strike­outs in 27 innings at AAA Scran­ton, which got him a callup to the majors. The downer for the story is that Ramirez is still in the Yan­kee orga­ni­za­tion, so he’s been used twice in the 13 games he’s been with the major league club. Over the course of a full sea­son, that’d mean that Ramirez would get in all of 25 games. In com­par­i­son, the before­men­tioned Proc­tor is on a pace for 83 (on top of his 83 last sea­son), Luis Viz­caino is set for 83 games, 74 for Mike Myers, and 72 for Brian Bruney and Kyle Farnsworth.

Why? Tor­re­bot does not com­pute Edwar Ramirez. He was allowed to be used in a blowout vic­tory to clean up the ninth inning (eight run lead), and struck out the side. Three games later, Tor­re­bot allowed Ramirez to be used in a game that wasn’t com­pletely in hand, with only a three run lead and a run­ner on base. Ramirez didn’t strike out every bat­ter he faced that time, allow­ing the run­ner to score and walk­ing another, giv­ing up a hit (a DOUBLE, of all things), and hit­ting a bat­ter. SYNTAX ERROR for Tor­re­bot, and Ramirez hasn’t been used since.

I men­tioned on one of my mes­sage boards that Ramirez wasn’t going to get called up despite his num­bers because of Torre. I momen­tar­ily for­got that Torre wasn’t the team’s GM and didn’t con­trol who got called up and who didn’t. Torre can’t stop peo­ple from being called up, but he sure as hell doesn’t have to use them if he doesn’t want to.