Culture
Maybe the Yankees should have traded for Jack Flaherty. These starters are struggling
NEW YORK — Nearly 3,000 miles away, Jack Flaherty will make his second start for the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night. After reviewing his medical records, the New York Yankees backed out of a preliminary trade agreement for Flaherty with the Detroit Tigers.
When asked after the trade deadline, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman did not specifically comment on Flaherty’s medicals, stating only that he could not match the ask of what the Tigers wanted.
“At the end of the day, I would’ve brought Jack Flaherty in if I could’ve matched up,” Cashman said. “I had difficulty matching up, and that was the reason I don’t have him.”
An argument could be made that trading for Flaherty, who has the seventh-best ERA in MLB, would have been worth the risk for the Yankees. It’s impossible to make direct comparisons between what the Dodgers traded and what the Yankees might have offered after they backed off their agreement, but let’s do so for analysis purposes.
The Dodgers traded catcher/first baseman Thayron Liranzo, an offensive-minded prospect in A ball, and Trey Sweeney, a former Yankees infield prospect. Roderick Arias and Jorbit Vivas seem like the safest equivalents. Arias has struggled this season with the Low-A Tampa Tarpons, carrying a 32.4 percent strikeout rate, but he could develop into a strong major leaguer in a few years if he reaches his potential. Vivas might be on the Yankees’ Opening Day roster in 2025 as the starting second baseman.
The American League is wide open this year. Getting a top-of-the-rotation starter in Flaherty could have cemented the Yankees as the overwhelming favorite heading into October. Instead, the Yankees’ starting rotation is filled with question marks. Since June 1, only the Miami Marlins and Colorado Rockies have a worse starting pitching ERA. After Nestor Cortes’ Thursday night dud in which he gave up six runs to the Los Angeles Angels, the Yankees’ starters have combined for a 5.48 ERA since June 1.
How you doin’? 😉#RepTheHalo pic.twitter.com/u5eovtRZlf
— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) August 8, 2024
Yankees manager Aaron Boone says he’s unconcerned with how poorly his rotation has pitched in the last two months.
“Our guys are more than capable,” Boone said. “More help is on the way with guys coming back from injury. We have everything we need.”
Even with the Yankees removing themselves from the Flaherty sweepstakes, not adding another starter feels like a miss. Cortes has allowed 24 runs over his last five starts, the most for any pitcher since July 11. Marcus Stroman’s 6.32 is the fourth-worst ERA since June 1. Carlos Rodón’s 5.83 ERA is the 11th worst since the start of June. That doesn’t even get into Luis Gil’s career-high workload coming off Tommy John surgery and Gerrit Cole, the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner, not looking sharp just yet.
But outside of Flaherty, there weren’t many appealing starting pitchers traded. The Houston Astros overpaid for Yusei Kikuchi, the second-best starter who got moved. James Paxton, Frankie Montas, Martín Pérez, Michael Lorenzen, Erick Fedde and Zach Eflin were other notable starters traded, but each profiles as a depth option rather than an impactful acquisition.
Once the Yankees didn’t get Flaherty, it made sense for them to not pursue any of the second-tier options because Clarke Schmidt, who was pitching like one of MLB’s best starters before his lat injury, could be back in the rotation by the end of the month. Schmidt threw his first live batting practice Tuesday and is expected to throw another Saturday. If that goes well, the Yankees could send him on a rehab assignment beginning next week. If everyone stays healthy from now until Schmidt’s return, the Yankees may have to make a decision on whom he should replace in the rotation. Cortes and Stroman are the two likeliest candidates to get bounced.
“I don’t feel like Nestor is that far off,” Boone said. “It just comes down to finishing off execution. Stro, we have to get rolling a little bit.
“We have the guys to go out there. It’s just getting a few guys going and getting to that next level of execution.”
4 of the 20 worst starting pitcher ERAs in MLB since June 1 (min. 40 IP) are by Yankee pitchers: Stroman, Rodon, Cortes, Cole.
No other team has more than 2 pitchers in that group. https://t.co/j3Aoq9MCSU
— Katie Sharp (@SharpStats17) August 9, 2024
Stroman had his start date pushed back from Thursday to Sunday as he works on his mechanics, which he felt were out of sync in his last outing. Stroman said Thursday afternoon that he believes he’s “figured some things out,” but he wouldn’t specify what he may have tweaked. Stroman has a career-worst walk percentage, strikeout percentage and ground-ball percentage. Since Stuff+ and Location+ debuted in 2021, Stroman is running career lows in both categories, too.
With how they’ve performed lately, it’s possible both Stroman and Cortes could find themselves out of the Yankees’ playoff rotation. Their best four starters right now are Cole, Rodón, Gil and Schmidt, if he bounces back fine from his lat injury. The Yankees could use Cortes out of the bullpen as another left-hander because the only other lefty option is ground-ball specialist Tim Hill. But thinking about the playoff starting rotation configuration seems like a moot point if Cole can’t return to being a legitimate ace.
“Anytime we give the ball to Gerrit, we expect good things,” Boone said. “He’s spoiled us with that.”
The Yankees need Cole to return to the form he showed in 2023, or at least come close to it. If he can’t be that pitcher this season, the starting rotation won’t be strong enough to carry them through October. That’s why taking a risk on Flaherty, who will be a free agent at the end of the season, would have felt worthwhile in a year with high stakes, especially with Juan Soto in pinstripes for only one guaranteed season.
(Photo of Nestor Cortes handing the ball to manager Aaron Boone after getting pulled Thursday: Wendell Cruz / USA Today)
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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