Yankees Update

Yanks Trade For Marte & Nady
I always have a brush with Damaso Marte at some point in the season when a reliever goes down and/or I need to get my WHIP down. He's a a useful pitcher for strike outs and rate stats. I recently jetisoned him in favor of another pitcher but most seasons, I pick him up for a small period if but to collect on Holds or improve rate stats. In his good years, his K/BBis great, and his HR/9 is reasonably good. Unsurprisingly, the Yankees went out and landed him and Xavier Nady in a trade with the Pirates.

Xavier Nady is another player that I always flirt with at some point in the season. He has bursts of great hitting and then long patches of mediocre hitting, Having decided Pittsburg was not his thing, he started this season on fire, and made himself trade bait. It's sort of weird these players are around to be traded like this because they're both very useful pieces. Perhaps the question is, why did the Pirates have them when they don't need them? Whatever the case, Nady is having a career year with an OPS+ of 142.

The big caveat with Nady is that his BABIP is at a career high, and way above the average. This makes me nervous in the long run. His RC/27 is largely based on his BA of .330. He is to all intents and purposes, a League average hitter with a career OPS+ of 102 - which is a valuable commodity in of itself - but not terribly exciting. The really interesting thing about his last 3 years is that his LD% has been climbing steadily, which may be accounting for his spike in BABIP. His ISO is .200 the last two seasons so he has some pop. He's a valuable bat to pick up for the Yankees.

For such bounty, the Yankees gave up Jose Tabata, Russ Ohlendorf, George Kontos, Phil Coke. The interesting names in there are Tabata and Ohlendorf. Tabata was the Yankees' No.1 Position prospect coming into the season, but has been disappointing. He also developed some attitude/behaviour issues which probably hastened the exit. He still has potential, but the Yankees had to give up something good.

Ohlendorf of course came to the Yankees in the second Randy Johnson trade; which is to say, the echoes of the disastrous 2004 off-season are still reverberating in the organization. While Randy Johnson pursues his 300wins out in Arizona, the Yankees have somehow converted parts of that trade into more usable pieces.

UPDATE: The pieces going have been adjusted. It's now Karstens and McCutchen instead of Coke and Kontos. It's good for Karstens because he's really caught in the gridlock of RHPs in the Yankee system. Steve Goldman would be happy the 'scary fly-ball guy' is elsewhere.