New York Yankees News: All Is Not Lost In The Pitching Department

Much ink has been spilled about the "failure" of the Yankees this offseason, their failure to keep up with the Joneses of the AL East and their inability to land any of their trade/free agent targets.  Coupled with the probable loss of Andy Pettitte, it's not difficult to imagine what the headlines will say if the Yankees are below .500 by the time mid-April rolls around (yes, mid-April; none of us seem to have much more patience than that). 

Thankfully, however, teams aren't built around superstars, not even $200 million juggernauts that are entitled to playoff berths each season, and the success or failure of a team often revolves around the lesser names on the roster.  And so if we take this viewpoint, I'll call it the addition by subtraction approach, the Yankees appear to be in reasonable shape for 2011, which is about the best that any team can hope for in January (even Boston).

Chad Gaudin, Dustin Moseley, Javier Vazquez, and Chan Ho Park, who were "worth" -1.5 WAR in 2010, will not pitch for the Yankees in 2011.  That quartet was so bad that they offset most of the good work done by Andy Pettitte (129 IP, 2.3 WAR), and the bigger point is that the Yankees only got about .8 WAR out of the 435 innings that these five pitchers combined to throw. In other words, the bar has not been set very high.

From that angle, it's almost surprising how a team that won 95 games could do so while getting so little for nearly one third of their innings.  Granted, replacing those 435 innings in 2011 won't exactly be easy, but it's not impossible, and it's not inconceivable to start piecing together scenarios that could work.  Right off the bat, full seasons of Phil Hughes and Rafael Soriano plus another 100 innings from Ivan Nova should get the Yankees halfway there.  Throw in a Kevin Millwood signing, a midseason trade, or a midseason callup for David Phelps, Hector Noesi, etc., and the puzzle pieces begin to fit. 

I'm not suggesting that any of this is a guarantee, only that the Yankees are likely to replace half of those innings very capably and pretty easily.  The other half?  Well, most teams have question marks concerning the last 200 innings from their pitching staffs, and the only teams that don't - Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco - are just an injury or bad season of BABIP away from joining that conversation.