Yankees Tackle Each Other in Exciting Season Finale Battle!

It’s a Monday in March, and you know what that means: it’s time for another edition of Pinstripe Alley’s Making the Team Meter! The third week of March is typically a major milestone, as we are now officially closer to Opening Day than we are to the first spring training game. As such, this is typically the week that teams take an axe to their spring training roster, and the Opening Day squad begins to slowly take shape.

Thanks to the World Baseball Classic, however, the Yankees have taken their time trimming down the roster, as they have worked to make sure that they have kept enough players in the big league camp to get through the spring schedule. Despite this relative lack of cuts, we can look at usage, individual performance, and comments by Aaron Boone and Brian Cashman to get a sense as to how these few roster battles are shaping up, and begin to more firmly project the anticipated Opening Day roster — although, as will be clear shortly, comments from the organization might actually increase the uncertainty, rather than help us gain an insight into what the team is thinking. As always, in case you need it, I’ve included the key below as a refresher.

I’d also like to remind you that, like last week, players who were cut or removed from the injured list prior to last Monday will not appear on these lists, while those cut in the last seven days will. As always, let’s start with the pitchers: In a spring where injury news has been fortunately few and far between, the majority of the pitching staff looks, in theory, rather set. Max Fried, Cam Schlittler, Ryan Weathers, Will Warren, and Luis Gil represent the team’s five starters.

David Bednar, Camilo Doval, Fernando Cruz, and Tim Hill will be the team’s quartet of high-leverage relievers, while Ryan Yarbrough and Paul Blackburn will at least open the year as multi-inning relievers capable of starting if needed. Even if Weathers and Gil have looked inconsistent on the mound so far this spring, nothing that we have seen has truly changed this projection, which leaves just two bullpen spots up for grabs. And yet, early during yesterday afternoon’s broadcast on the YES Network, Michael Kay, David Cone, and Meredith Marakovitz threw a wrench into these projections by highlighting the number of off-days the Yankees have during the first month of the season.