As discussed yesterday, Francisco Cervelli's broken foot will impact the Yankees catching situation, but I'm not sure the impact is as big as you might think.
Cervelli, despite the love he gets from fans, was never going to be more than the second-string catcher for the Yankees this season, at least barring some sort of total disaster involving Russell Martin, Jorge Posada and Jesus Montero all going down on the same plane or something like that. Even then, he'd probably be little more than a placeholder.
Having to replace your second-string catcher shouldn't really a big deal, and the fact that it seems to be has more to do with a general lack of newsworthy stories out of Yankees camp. I don't expect that this will have much of an impact on what the Yankees do with Jesus Montero or even Austin Romine once the team heads north at the end of this month. I'd like to see them get creative with these roster spots and forge some sort of rotation where Posada catches one day per week and DH's three or four, Montero catches three days a week and DHs one or two, and Martin fills in the gaps at catcher. However, "creative" is sort of antithetical to Joe Girardi's managing style, so we'll see.
- Chalk this one up to nightmares that thankfully never happened.
- River Avenue Blues profiles Nick Swisher for 2011 and ends with a pretty interesting graph comparing Swish to another great Yankees rightfielder who was acquired under similar circumstances.
- Despite some less than ideal circumstances surrounding his departure, Johnny Damon has nothing but good things to say about his time with the Yankees.
- NoMaas lines up the rotations and bullpens for the AL East's big three and comes to an unsurprising conclusion...