The New York Yankees made a series of moves ahead of their game on Monday night against the Mets.
They placed starting pitcher CC Sabathia on the 10-day disabled list with knee inflammation. Sabathia has been awesome all year, but particularly is the last couple of starts, in which he has racked up 19 strikeouts in 11.2 innings.
It’s the same knee that has plagues Sabathia for a couple years, now, in the back half of his career. We saw him making a play where he went to his knees in his most recent start, and he says that the knee was bothering him after the start. I’d bet it happened on that play.
CC also just turned 38 towards the end of last month. The big fella can’t pitch as much as he used to, so getting him a little extra rest and sitting him out as a precaution is fairly reasonable as they prepare for September and the playoffs
The Yankees also have a pair of off days next week. Because of those, Sabathia will likely just be skipping one start. If it weren’t for the off days, they would probably have left him on the roster or he would have had to miss two starts. Now they can use his roster spot to fill other needs in the time being.
Manager Aaron Boone said after the game that Luis Cessa would make a start against the Tampa Bay Rays in CC’s place. Cessa is probably the guy people least wanted to see in that spot. There was speculation it would be Sonny Gray, who would be on regular rest for when CC’s spot came around again, which I think people would have accepted, although not been thrilled about it.
There were also hopefuls out there saying that Chance Adams would make another start or some extreme hopefuls that thought we’d see the debut of Justus Sheffield. More on that soon!
The Yankees also cleared another spot by sending Luke Voit down to Triple-A. He has been pretty bad at the MLB-level, so they sent him down to maybe see if he can get hot before coming back up in September and making some sort of contribution.
As for what they have done with the two MLB spots cleared by Sabathia and Voit, the Yankees called up clubhouse favorite Ronald Torreyes and newly-acquired/reacquired reliever George Kontos.
Torreyes has been hot in the minors lately, and is one of the best players in baseball in filling the bench utility guy role. The Yankees also seem to be planning to keep using Neil Walker in right field in Aaron Judge’s absence, so they needed another infielder. Toe could also play right field if they decided they wanted to do such a thing.
Kontos was called up. He actually did pretty well in his first game back in pinstripes Monday night, tossing 1.2 scoreless innings.
Kontos had to be added to the 40-man roster before the game, so the Yankees finally transferred lefty Jordan Montgomery to the 60-day disabled list. Montgomery has been out for the season to undergo Tommy John surgery for a while, now. However, they waited to move him to the 60-day disabled list because there is a weird clause in the DL-rules that says players placed on the 60-day DL must be replaced on the 40-man roster immediately, and, since he’s gone for the year anyway, they decided to wait to see how they want to utilize that 40-man spot If they hadn’t done that, they would have had to designate someone for assignment.
This is why Sheffield is unlikely to be called up to make the spot start in Sabathia’s place. They no longer have an easy 40-man roster fix in order to make room for him. If they want to call him up, they will have to designate someone for assignment, likely one of Shane Robinson, George Kontos, or AJ Cole, if I were guessing. They likely wouldn’t have used him even if they didn’t have to do a roster crunch to make it happen, so they won’t risk losing someone forever in order to have him make a spot start that they don’t want him to make. It’s pretty clear that they want Sheffield to be called up and then stay up forever in a pretty specific role, not make one start and be sent down, then maybe called back up in September in a different role.
The TL;DR here would be: CC and Voit are out, Kontos and Torreyes are up, Cessa is starting in CC’s place.
Featured Image via Flickr/Arturo Pardavila III
