It can be hard to know which players to keep, and which players to dump, if you're running a major-league baseball team. (Those are the only options; keep or dump. Players who are not kept are all dumped.) But the wisdom of crowds has never led anybody astray, so the New York Daily News has asked its readers whom to keep and whom to dump. There are a lot of Yankees that the crowd would like to dump:
- Curtis Granderson (59 percent say dump), because presumably Brett Gardner (80 percent keep!) can play center field just as well. Granderson has produced an average of 3.4 WARP as a Yankee, but he had only three base hits in the postseason for the Yankees, unlike Gardner.
- Alex Rodriguez (84 percent), obviously. No worries. Eric Chavez could certainly hold up as a full-time non-platoon third baseman for a year.
- Eric Chavez (55 percent). No worries, Eduardo Nunez (69 percent keep!) is under contract, and hit .227/.256/.288 this year. In Triple-A.
- Nick Swisher (81 percent). He will be replaced by Chris Dickerson, whom Daily News readers voted to keep.
- Andruw Jones (93 percent), easily the player with the most dump votes and, we probably all agree, the player most responsible for the Yankees' ALCS sweep.
- Chris Stewart (60 percent), who was on the postseason roster but did not play until the final two innings of the final game.
- Freddy Garcia (89 percent), the second-most dump votes.
- Joba Chamberlain (59 percent), Derek Lowe (72 percent), Cory Wade (68 percent)
- Casey McGehee (84 percent), okay.
- Kevin Long (73 percent), the hitting instructor.
- And Steve Pearce (83 percent), who is on the Baltimore Orioles and has been since September.
Hiroki Kuroda, at 91 percent "keep", is the most popular Yankee right now. David Robertson is next. Twenty-four percent would like to dump Robinson Cano.
Just perfect.
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Btw nice to see that Girardi is at 65% keep.
If anyone is to blame its Girardi, Cashman and the gods. Cashman is to blame for not seeking any upgrade beyond the Ichiro trade that fell into his lap. And a team constructed to rely on HR's to score - which doesn't really bode well in October when situational hitting matters far more. Girardi is to blame for blame for benching ARod when he had good number against Verlander, and we are talking recent numbers from this year. No matter what, as a Yankees fan, I find it despicable that they laid the entire team's failure at ARod's feet. They hung him out to dry when the whole team couldn't hit, and there were others that were hitting far worse and were not benched. The gods get blamed here for random chance, because how else you explain a team wide slump of such proportions?