Andrew Miller was fantastic in 2014. Andrew Miller is in the conversation for best left-handed reliever in all of baseball in 2014. Andrew Miller helps any team he is a part of.
Andrew Miller is also one of the worst investments in all of baseball.
You will not see me trying to dispute his greatness in 2014 - the numbers speak for themselves. He is a pure power lefty who can get all hitters out, not just a token lefty. His K/9 and K/BB ratios weren't simply great - they were insane. In 2014, Miller was simply one of the biggest bargains in the game.
In 2015, he will be one of the most overpaid players in the game.
In some ways, Miller is like Dellin Betances. A pitcher with a history of command/control problems who suddenly discovers it in 2014. (Let us just say that if both regress back to the types of pitchers they were prior to 2014, we may as well buy out all of the Pepto Bismal in stock. It won't be pretty - to be exact, it will be downright ugly, with Houdini (David Robertson) likely not around to bail them out.)
But just for the sake of argument, let us say that 2014 was the beginning of Miller's rebirth - and he will be able to pitch like that for the majority of this contract.
It is still a bad deal.
Let us look at a few reasons why:
1. Unlike SS, the Yankees have internal options for the role Miller is going to be given. No, Jacob Lindgren, Tyler Webb, and James Pazos are not household names, and may never be. But Lindgren was a second-round pick in 2014 who many thought could make his big league debut as soon as last summer. The Yankees (rightfully so) decided not to do that - but he should be ready sometime in 2015. Webb and Pezos are not likely to ever pitch like Miller did in 2014, but they wouldn't need to - they are young relievers under team control for many years who have the potential to be good enough. Relief pitching is so fickle by nature with a very small margin for error. Even though we likely won't see Webb and Pezos put up a season like Miller just did, we also may not see Miller ever put up a season like he just did. It isn't like he has a history of success. Also, the Yankees are loaded with right-handed relief options as well. The bottom line is that relief pitching is one area that the Yankees develop very well. Spending money on Miller to reinforce something that doesn't need reinforcing is just not smart.
2. If Robertson doesn't come back, the Yankees downgraded their biggest 2013 strength. As good as Miller was in 2014, he doesn't have the history of success that Robertson has, and even if he may have been a better reliever in 2014 (debatable), it wasn't by much. Allowing Robertson to come back to close keeps Dellin Betances in a true "fireman's" role, allowing the Yankees to use him pretty much at any time to get a big out. As a "closer", he would be relegated to 9th inning duty only (no, that isn't a rule - but name the manager that is willing to use their closer as anything but the "9th inning guy"). As the bullpen stands right now, it is Betances-Miller-Warren-Wilson (acquired for Cervelli)-Kelley and some combination of two other guys (they have a lot of internal options to choose from and just resigned Esmil Rogers as well). With Robertson, it would have been Robertson-Betances-Warren-Wilson-Kelley + 2 other guys. The latter is certainly a better bullpen than the former in my opinion - for the simple reason that Robertson is, as we speak, the one more likely to repeat past performance.
3. It means that the Yankees are trying to win in a way that teams simply cannot consistently win.
Building a team from bullpen - down doesn't work. Why? Because the bullpen is simply not the most important part of the team. It is certainly more important now than it was even ten years ago, as more and more teams watch the workloads of their starters and try to shorten games with shutdown bullpens. But as important as the bullpen is, it still is no substitute for a strong starting staff or a strong offense. Let me ask the most basic of questions: Would you rather have 5-0 leads with an average bullpen or 1-0 leads with a tremendous bullpen? If you say the latter, I hope you are not a baseball executive.
4. Which leads to........the Yankees simply have more pressing needs.
I will be honest - I hate giving out big contracts to relievers, though I would have accepted signing Robertson because he came from the Yankees' farm system and has been excellent for many years. That said, if the Yankees had a great offensive team with a good enough starting staff and wanted to splurge on Andrew Miler to complement David Robertson, I would have cringed but wouldn't have gone crazy over it. But none of that applies to the 2015 Yankees. The offense may improve (hard for it to get worse), but it seems unlikely it will go from decisively below average to decisively above average with essentially the same cast of characters plus Didi, the skeleton of Alex Rodriguez, and maybe Robert Refsnyder. Is it possible that they will get the type of year from McCann in 2015 that they wanted in 2014? Of course. He did hit well late in the season. Beltran? Yes, it is possible that now that his surgery is taken care of that that he will bounce back into a productive player. But this is where baseball fans can get into a lot of trouble: They begin to assume all of the good will likely occur. The reality is, given the age of the offense, that the bad is much more likely to occur than the good. Having a shutdown bullpen is nice...when everything else is clicking. Not everything else is clicking, and the Yankees are no more likely to make the playoffs now than they were before the day started. As I stated in my other post, I have warmed up to the trade they made a bit. But I won't warm up on this move because it was completely unnecessary.
All of that said, it is still a young offseason and the starting pitching on the market has still not moved, which will allow the Yankees to jump in and sign a few pitchers to fill in the voids on the starting staff. But that offense - oh, that offense. Nothing they are doing will currently save that, and they are so handcuffed with bad contracts on the offensive side of the ball that it makes upgrading that much more difficult. How can they look into a useful bat like Brandon Moss, when they don't have a place to put him in the lineup? They currently have a mediocre lineup that they are unable to upgrade because of contractual commitments. Perhaps this is why they decided to spend on the bullpen. It still isn't smart.
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