While I was trapped in a small room and chained to BP07, the Yankees made three moves which directly impact their 25-man roster for the coming season. Among the comments to my previous post were a few requests for me to weigh in on those three moves, which, having been so gently prodded, I intend to do. I need to shake off some rust and get back in fighting shape here, so I’ll start with the least significant of the three, the decision to re-sign infielder Miguel Cairo for $750,000 for the coming season.
One can infer my initial reaction from what I wrote about Cairo in my infield post mortem back in November:
The Yankees got something of a career year out of Cairo in 2004, then botched resigning him, leading to the eminently regrettable Tony Womack deal. Cairo fell back to replacement level as a Met in 2005, but Brian Cashman, perhaps overeager to right the previous offseasons’s supposed wrong, rather than considering Cairo a bullet dodged, gave him a million-dollar contract for 2006. Cairo rewarded Cashman’s good deed by repeating his Met performance almost exactly. Here’s hoping the Yankees have learned their lesson.
That lesson, of course, being: Cairo’s 2005 was a fluke, move on. Sadly, that lesson has gone unheeded.
Lamenting the state of the Yankee bench in recent years, I took a look at the Yankee reserves over the entire Joe Torre era, which now consists of eleven full seasons. Here are the Yankees’ primary middle infield reserves over that period:
