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The road to recovery for New York Yankees pitcher Nathan Eovaldi has begun after he underwent surgery on his right arm.

Continue for updates. 

Eovaldi Has Tommy John Surgery

Friday, Aug. 19

Per Joel Sherman of the New York Post, the Yankees announced Eovaldi had Tommy John surgery and underwent a procedure to repair his right flexor tendon. 

The 26-year-old Eovaldi last pitched on Aug. 10 against the Boston Red Sox, lasting just one inning in a start before experiencing elbow discomfort. He was placed on the disabled list almost immediately before it was later announced he would require surgery to repair his pitching arm. 

Eovaldi has battled injuries in the past, missing most of last September with elbow inflammation. He previously had Tommy John surgery during his junior year of high school in 2007, one year before the Los Angeles Dodgers drafted him in the 11th round. 

The right-hander is a fascinating pitcher. He has the overpowering stuff to be dominant, with a fastball that has averaged 97.1 mph this season, per FanGraphs, yet the performance hasn’t matched the talent, as he has a 4.76 ERA in 2016. 

Eovaldi’s upside makes him one of New York’s most valuable assets. The Yankees also lack depth in their starting rotation. The group has remained healthy so far this year, with the exception of CC Sabathia’s stint on the disabled list.

New York’s front office has already started looking toward the future by trading Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller and Carlos Beltran. Eovaldi will likely not be ready to pitch again until 2018, so the team will have ample opportunity to evaluate all of its pitching options before having to make a decision about how to use him. 

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For some teams, questing for a World Series trophy requires sticking with whatever’s working.

The Toronto Blue Jays don’t have that luxury.

Things are mostly good for the reigning AL East champs. Their 68-52 record puts them a game ahead of the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox in this year’s race. They’re 57-38 since opening with a thud in April. Neither the Orioles nor the Red Sox have that kind of momentum.

The prime mover in the Blue Jays’ 2015 success was their offense, which is still going strong with the third-most runs in the American League this season. But with a 3.73 ERA that leads the AL—Cleveland is second at 3.80—Toronto’s starting pitching has been even better. The usual wisdom says not to fix it if it ain’t broke.

The Blue Jays, though, have been determined to try to fix it so that it doesn’t break.

Such is the point of moving from a five-man rotation to a six-man rotation. It was either that or transition Aaron Sanchez, a youngster with a 2.84 ERA, to the bullpen to preserve a right arm that’s already thrown a career-high 152.1 innings.

But since that would have required replacing Sanchez with new arrival Francisco Liriano, a veteran with a 5.46 ERA, it’s understandable that general manager Ross Atkins came down on the side of “nope.”

“The biggest thing is input from different people after something was more concrete, or closer to it, and the fact that Francisco Liriano was so open to everything,” Atkins said, per Gregor Chisholm of MLB.com. “Then the more we thought about the potential of a six-man rotation not just benefiting Aaron but benefiting the others in the rotation at this point in the season.”

Because the comparisons are unavoidable, this is a case of the Blue Jays being more like the 2015 New York Mets with Matt Harvey than the 2012 Washington Nationals with Stephen Strasburg. Rather than let Sanchez pitch until he maxes out his innings and then shut him down, the Blue Jays are spacing out his innings in hopes that he’ll still have some bullets left for the postseason.

To boot, the Blue Jays don’t have to worry about the Tommy John factor. They’re merely cognizant of the fact Sanchez has already pitched 19 more innings than he ever has as a pro. They don’t want to wear him out. The man himself seems to want the same thing.

“You got to look long term with this,” he said in late July, according to Brendan Kennedy of the Toronto Star. “I’m not just here to pitch in 2016. I’m here to pitch five, six, seven [years], however long it is.”

Nobody’s saying this is a foolproof plan. Not even Atkins, who said “there’s no perfect answer, there’s no absolute” to the Sanchez conundrum, according to Shi Davidi of Sportsnet.

The obvious drawback is that a six-man rotation means the Blue Jays will be limiting the exposure of not only Sanchez but also of J.A. Happ, Marco Estrada and Marcus Stroman. Happ also has a 2.96 ERA. Estrada is at 3.20. Stroman has pitched to a 3.27 ERA in eight starts since July 1.

If anyone is wringing his or her hands over how having a wrench thrown into their routines might mess with Toronto’s starters, it’s not just you.

“If you had a bad start, that would be hard to sit on for five days and then go out and pitch on the sixth day,” former Blue Jays All-Star Roy Halladay said, according to Ryan Wolstat of the Toronto Sun. “That, for me, would be the tough part, having a short, two-, three-, four-inning start and then thinking, ‘Man, I’ve got to wait this much longer to get out there again.'”

However, any and all hand-wringing may be much ado about nothing. 

It’s not easy to study six-man rotations directly—there haven’t been many of them, and they don’t tend to last—but Russell Carleton investigated the effect of extra rest at Fox Sports.

His findings: “I looked at strikeouts and walks and home runs and singles and a few other outcomes. Pitchers pitching with extra rest don’t actually show any extra ability. They don’t suffer for it either. They just kinda pitch like we would normally expect.”

As long as extra rest doesn’t have a negative effect, that bodes well for Toronto’s six-man rotation. 

And there’s more! Although Carleton posited a six-man rotation “wouldn’t necessarily make pitchers less susceptible to the injury bug,” Rob Arthur suggested otherwise at FiveThirtyEight. From 2006 through 2014, he found that 1.7 percent of pitchers who started on three days’ rest reported an injury within two weeks. On the normal four days’ rest, the rate dropped to 1.0 percent. On five days’ rest, the rate dropped to 0.8 percent.

This bodes even better for the Blue Jays’ experiment. It would be one thing if they were spreading out a collection of starters who were all in their physical prime. Instead, the picture looks like this:

• Aaron Sanchez: a 24-year-old who is already in uncharted innings territory.
• Marcus Stroman: an undersized 25-year-old who is on track to exceed his high of 166.1 innings.
• J.A. Happ: a 33-year-old who has never topped 172 innings.
• Marco Estrada: a 33-year-old who’s maxed out at 181 innings and who’s been limited to 132.1 innings this season by a bad back.
• Francisco Liriano: a 32-year-old who hasn’t topped 190 innings since 2010, in part because of occasional health woes.
• R.A. Dickey: a knuckleballer who has been durable but who is also 41 years old.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect test subject for a six-man rotation. These guys have gotten the Blue Jays this far. But for that to last, they may need the breather they’re getting.

Whether this experiment will work is still a matter of “if.” Hence the use of the word “experiment.” If each team had enough talented pitchers for a six-man rotation and there was tried-and-true evidence of its effectiveness, they’d be the norm. Until then, six-man rotations will remain oddities that inspire more curiosity than conclusions.

But there isn’t much to suggest six-man rotations are inherently dangerous. And in the case of the Blue Jays, it could be just the thing to preserve not only their best pitcher but also all of their pitchers. If it works, they’ll waltz into the postseason with a strong offense and strong pitching.

It never hurts to have either of those things in October. Having both can only help.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked. All stats and records up to date heading into Wednesday’s games. 

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Someone is going to win the 2016 American League Cy Young Award. That much we know.

After that, things get messy.

The Junior Circuit is flush with very good starting pitchers, solid starting pitchers and serviceable starting pitchers. But there isn’t that guy—the one with consistently dominant results and eye-popping stats across the board.

Notice we said “starting pitcher.” Paging Zach Britton.

It has been more than two decades since an AL reliever won the Cy Young. The Oakland Athletics‘ Dennis Eckersley did it in 1992 and grabbed an MVP trophy as well.

Now, the Baltimore Orioles‘ Britton has a chance to break the streak.

He might not be the unequivocal front-runner, simply because it’s so unusual for bullpen arms to score any hardware. (We’re not counting consolation prizes such as the now-defunct Rolaids Relief Man Award.)

At the moment, however, Britton’s case is compelling. 

Entering play Tuesday, he owns an absurd 0.54 ERA. He’s struck out 59 in 50 innings while yielding 16 walks and 25 hits. He’s surrendered one home run all season, and opponents are hitting .145 against him.

He even has a shot at breaking Eric Gagne’s all-time single-season saves streak of 55. Britton is a perfect 37-for-37 in saves so far with 45 games remaining. When Gagne set the mark with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2003, he became the last reliever to win a Cy Young.

Even if Britton doesn’t catch Gagne, he’s enjoying a season for the ages. 

He’s doing it, as FanGraphs’ Corinne Landrey noted Aug. 11, with a diabolically straightforward approach:

Britton has built upon the extraordinarily successful formula he’s developed in recent years: destroying opponents with an entirely unfair mid-90s sinker. He’s using the pitch more than 90% of the time for the third consecutive season and the whiff and ground-ball rates illustrate why. According to the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, Britton’s sinker is generating a league-leading 40.3% whiff/swing rate — Jeurys Familia‘s sinker is a distant second at 28.3% whiff/swing — while the ground-ball rate on the pitch also leads the league at 80%.

“He just doesn’t give in,” manager Buck Showalter said of his ninth-inning weapon on Aug. 4, per Jon Meoli of the Baltimore Sun. “He knows who he is.”

OK, here’s where we unfurl the wet blanket. If you go by wins above replacement, Britton faces an uphill battle.

Britton’s 1.8 fWAR is tied for No. 34 on the AL leaderboard. It’s the nature of the stat. Starters log more innings. They have more chances to do things that help their teams win games. 

However, Britton isn’t even the top reliever by fWAR. The New York Yankees‘ Dellin Betances (2.7), Houston Astros‘ Chris Devenski (1.9) and Cleveland Indians‘ Andrew Miller (1.8) have him matched or beaten.

Of course, WAR isn’t the only measure of a player’s value. And it’s certainly not always predictive in awards races.

According to ESPN.com‘s MLB Cy Young Predictor—which is based on a formula created by Rob Neyer and famed statistician Bill James—Britton is the second-most likely candidate to claim the prize, behind the Toronto Blue Jays‘ J.A. Happ.

Here’s a look at the eight AL starters who made ESPN.com’s top 10 (in ranking order) and their stats so far:

Chris Sale and Corey Kluber boast the highest strikeout totals. Kluber, in particular, jumps out as the fWAR leader and a guy who’s pitching for a postseason contender. Aaron Sanchez, Happ and Cole Hamels sport sub-3.00 ERAs. And Steven Wright has the knuckleball novelty factor.

Again, though, there isn’t any starter who’s in the midst of a monster season—no one who’s set to blow past 200 innings with a minuscule ERA. Fair or not, those are the benchmarks voters often use.

In a way, with so many starters bunched together in that strong-to-solid range, Britton could benefit from being a reliever. At least it distinguishes him from the pack. And the O’s are in the playoff mix.

This race will be won or lost on what happens in the season’s final month-plus. If Kluber, Sale or anyone else reels off a crazy streak of shutdown starts and mixes in a no-hitter, that could be the difference.

Likewise, all it will take is one or two rough outings to blow up Britton’s ERA and his award chances. So far, though, rough outings haven’t been in his lexicon.

Someone is going to win the AL Cy Young. For the first time since the dawn of the Bill Clinton administration, that someone could hail from the bullpen.

All statistics current as of Aug. 15 and courtesy of FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.

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In the American League MVP race, one undersized dynamo is now being hotly pursued by another undersized dynamo.

The latter is Mookie Betts, who you’ve probably noticed in your news feed recently. It’s well and good he singled and made a goofy catch in the Boston Red Sox‘s 3-2 win over the Cleveland Indians on Monday. But that’s not as cool as what Betts did in Sunday’s 16-2 drubbing of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

In that one, Betts went yard not once, not twice, but thrice. As proof, I submit these moving pictures:

That was Betts’ second three-homer game of 2016. Among Red Sox hitters, only he and Ted Williams have trodden that ground. Good company. Betts also became the first Red Sox player to collect three homers and eight RBI in a game since Bill Mueller in 2003. Less good company, but still cool.

“I mean, I was just swinging at good pitches and was finally able to just swing the bat right,” Betts said afterward, via Tim Britton of the Providence Journal. “The last couple of days, I hadn’t been swinging it right and hadn’t been swinging at good pitches. I had just been late. So today I came in early and got back in that little groove.”

Betts can be as modest as he wants, but his numbers entitle him to as much arrogance as he wants. Through 114 games, he’s batting .313 with a .914 OPS, 26 home runs and 18 stolen bases. To boot, there’s no ignoring the 23-year-old’s defense in right field. Defensive runs saved and ultimate zone rating both place him as an elite defender. He’s right up there with Jason Heyward and Adam Eaton.

In a related story, this is why Googling “Mookie Betts MVP” will return a large number of recent posts.

Betts indeed deserves his place in that conversation. If his surface-level statistics aren’t evidence enough, there’s always the go-to statistic in modern MVP discussions: wins above replacement.

Entering play Monday, Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs agreed on the American League’s top four players in that department: 

Of course, WAR is merely a guideline for which players should be considered for MVP. If it was as simple as giving the award to the dude with the highest WAR, Mike Trout would be on track for his fifth-straight AL MVP. 

There are other things at work in MVP discussions. The award gravitates toward players with big offensive numbers, especially if they’re in service to winning teams. If said player is the glue that holds said winning team together, even better.

This is why, as R.J. Anderson argued at CBSSports.com, Jose Altuve is the man to beat for the AL MVP today. He’s hitting an AL-best (and patently absurd) .362. He also leads in on-base percentage (.427) and hits (167). Further, he has a career-high 19 homers to go with 26 steals on the side. Without all this, a mediocre 61-57 Houston Astros team would be downright bad.

We’re not here to take anything away from Altuve. If the season did end today, his award would be well-earned. Maybe he’s no Mike Trout, but he bears all the usual features of an MVP. More power to him.

But if anyone can loom large enough down the stretch to overtake the 5’6″ Altuve, why not the 5’9″ Betts?

There’s a pretty good case to be made for Betts now, after all. His excellent production has been in service of a 65-52 Red Sox team that, though only a tad better than the Astros, is on track to emerge from a brutal AL East race with a ticket to the postseason. 

And while Betts has been helping the cause all season, he’s now flat-out leading the charge. Not counting Monday, he’s a .374 hitter with a 1.113 OPS and 10 home runs in 35 games since July 1. He’s been as hot as anyone. That includes Altuve, who’s hit .373 with a .991 OPS since July 1.

This is nothing Betts hasn’t done before. It’s reminiscent of last season, when a slow start gave way to a red-hot finish around mid-June. But this time, Betts’ hot hitting comes with a slightly different flavor.

As Brooks Baseball shows, these were his power zones before July:

Betts, a right-handed hitter, was mostly dangerous against middle-in pitches. That’s to be expected. He’s not the kind of hitter who can reach out and poke balls over the fence to right field. His M.O. was to use his lightning-quick wrists to turn on pitches and blast them to left field. If a pitcher kept the ball away, he was generally safe from Betts’ power.

But since July, Betts’ power zones look like this:

Suddenly, that outer part of the plate doesn’t look like much of a safe space. As he demonstrated by pulling one of Zack Greinke’s breaking balls over the Green Monster on Sunday, Betts is suddenly capable of reaching out and punishing pitches away from him. It’s a new trick, and it hasn’t robbed him of his tried-and-true trick of punishing inside pitches.

With this taken care of, you now have to dive pretty deep to find flaws in Betts’ game. Maybe he can’t stay this hot, but him staying some level of hot for the rest of the season is in the cards.

For the Red Sox, that could be the difference between finishing their run to October and falling short. They didn’t need Betts to carry the load in the first half. Literally everyone was hitting then. It’s been a different story in the second half. The Red Sox’s offense has been less dominant, in large part because mainstays like David Ortiz, Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley Jr. have gone cool.

Due to Trout’s general existence and Altuve’s seemingly endless supply of hits, there’s a good chance Betts won’t finish 2016 as the American League’s best player. But if he stays hot and boosts the Red Sox into the postseason, it’ll be hard to argue he’s not the American League’s most valuable player.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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The Boston Red Sox (65-52) bring a four-game winning streak into the first game of a two-game series with the Baltimore Orioles (66-51) on Tuesday at Camden Yards.

The Orioles lead the Red Sox by one game for second place in the American League East, and they are listed as small -108 favorites (bet $108 to win $100) at sportsbooks monitored by Odds Shark with veteran Yovani Gallardo (4-4, 5.17 ERA) on the hill.

Baltimore is just 15-15 since the MLB All-Star break and opens a key eight-game homestand with this game against a Boston team that has gone 16-14 during the same stretch.

Gallardo is 1-3 in the second half for the Orioles with two no-decisions, both of which eventually resulted in wins. This will be Gallardo’s first home start since July 25, when he allowed two runs and five hits in 6.2 innings of a 3-2 victory against the Colorado Rockies.

Gallardo was a tough-luck loser last time out on the road against the Oakland Athletics, giving up only one run and four hits in six innings of a 1-0 defeat.

The Red Sox will look to 23-year-old southpaw Eduardo Rodriguez (2-5, 5.43 ERA) to try to get them their fifth win in a row after a fairly solid month. Since getting pounded for nine runs and 11 hits in 2.2 innings of a 13-7 road loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, Rodriguez has surrendered three runs or fewer in each of his last six appearances.

Rodriguez’s last victory came on July 16 against the New York Yankees, as he has gone 0-2 with three no-decisions in his past five outings. He pitched great versus the Yankees in his last start on Thursday, allowing one run and three hits in seven innings of an eventual 4-2 loss.

Boston has lost four of the previous five meetings with Baltimore after winning three straight in the series, according to the Odds Shark MLB Database. In the 10 meetings overall this year, the over has a slight edge at 5-4-1.

The Red Sox closed last season with three consecutive shutouts of the Orioles, all of which went under the total.

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The New York Yankees waved the white flag at the trade deadline. They shifted into sell mode, abandoned all hope of making the playoffs this season and trained their gaze squarely on the future.

Yeah…about that.

The future is indeed bright in the Bronx. After all their wheeling and dealing, the Yankees boast the No. 1 farm system in baseball, per Bleacher Report’s Joel Reuter. And with a Brink’s truck of expiring contracts coming off the books, they should have ample cash to burn in the potentially loaded 2018-19 free-agent class.

But reports of the Yankees’ 2016 demise were, if not greatly, at least somewhat exaggerated. As wild as it sounds, they could still crash the postseason dance.

If they do, it’ll be largely on the strength of the youth movement, which began in earnest Saturday.

One day after controversial slugger Alex Rodriguez took his curtain call, the Yankees called up youngsters Aaron Judge and Tyler Austin and inserted them into the lineup.

In a moment that would’ve been cut from a Hollywood script for being too unbelievable, the pair became the first rookies in MLB history to swat back-to-back home runs in their first big league at-bats.

New York went on to defeat the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday 8-4, and now it sits at 60-56, 3.5 games off the pace for the second wild-card spot.

We’ll talk more about that in a moment, but let’s pause to appreciate what Austin and Judge accomplished. There’s the historic component of their homers, sure, and that unmistakable new-era smell, as Jon Heyman of Today’s Knuckleball noted:

But there’s also the fact that Austin took over at first base, a position previously held by veteran Mark Teixeira, who announced he’ll retire at season’s end. Judge, meanwhile, manned right field in place of Carlos Beltran, who was dealt to the Texas Rangers at the deadline.

Out with the old, in with the new.

The 24-year-old Judge—the Yankees’ No. 4 prospect, per Reuter—was hitting .270 with 19 home runs in 93 games at Triple-A. Austin, also age 24, didn’t even crack Reuter‘s top 10 in New York’s newly loaded system. But he owned a .294 average with 17 homers in 107 games between Double-A and Triple-A.

Now, both have been introduced to a tough but instantly appreciative New York fanbase. There will be slumps and bumps in the road, as there always are, but it’s impossible to conjure a better career kick-off.

Skipper Joe Girardi saw plenty to appreciate, per MLB.com’s Nick Suss:

[The Judge home run] gets you excited. But you also look at the athleticism. The play he makes going back, the play he makes going forward, how he stayed on balls today. I think about Tyler’s first at-bat where he gets down in the count two strikes and battles and battles and hits a home run. But besides the hit, I thought they were really good at-bats. And that’s probably more important.

Add rookie catcher Gary Sanchez, who has gone 10-for-36 with three doubles and a homer since he donned the pinstripes, and there’s a full-blown renewal going on at East 161st Street.

Surely more kids will follow, especially when rosters expand Sept. 1, though top names such as outfielder Clint Frazier and infielders Gleyber Torres and Jorge Mateo may be a year or more away.

Whatever happens this year, the Yankees are undoubtedly looking at what pieces can help them down the road, either on the field or as trade chips.

But let’s return to that AL playoff chase, and New York’s chances of staying in it. 

FanGraphs projects an 83-79 finish for the Yanks, good for fourth place in the AL East. Considering that they jettisoned two of the best relievers in baseball in left-handers Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller along with Beltran, a proven October performer, that seems reasonable.

The East, though, is flush with flawed contenders. 

The Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox have potent offenses but serious questions in their starting rotations. The Toronto Blue Jays just placed basher Jose Bautista on the 15-day disabled list with a sprained left knee. 

In fact, the Junior Circuit in general is a muddled mess.

Out West, the Texas Rangers added pieces—including Beltran and All-Star catcher Jonathan Lucroy—at the deadline, but their plus-six run differential is easily the worst of any playoff contender.

In the AL Central, the Cleveland Indians have come back to Earth, with their vaunted starting pitching wobbling and word that outfielder Michel Brantley will undergo season-ending shoulder surgery, per the Associated Press (via ESPN.com).

That’s not to say the Yankees have an easy road to late October. They trail the first-place Jays by 5.5 games, and they’d have to leapfrog the Houston Astros, Seattle Mariners and Detroit Tigers before they could challenge the Red Sox and Orioles for a wild-card berth.

It’s a long(ish) shot, in other words. But with 46 games remaining, stranger things have happened.

The Yankees have a shutdown bullpen anchor in Dellin Betances, who has fanned an eye-popping 102 hitters in 56.1 innings. They still have a legitimate ace in Masahiro Tanaka. 

And now, they have an influx of fresh blood. 

It’s way, way too early to anoint Austin, Judge, Sanchez and any other minor league whippersnappers as stretch-run saviors. They’ll have to be, however, to rescue an offense that ranks in the bottom third in runs scored and OPS. Plus, there’s ample uncertainty in the starting five behind Tanaka.

Suddenly, though, the Yankees have gone from an aging franchise struggling under the weight of albatross contracts and recent disappointment to a club with that certain something.

Call it hope, call it youth, call it je ne sais quoi. But it’s tangible, if not quantifiable.

At the very least, the next month-plus will be interesting in Yankee land. At the most, it could spark one of the unlikeliest playoff pushes in team history.

The Yankees ostensibly waved the white flag at the deadline. Now, it might be time to stash it for a while.

All statistics current as of Aug. 13 and courtesy of MLB.com and Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.

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One day after getting a king’s send-off at Yankee Stadium, Alex Rodriguez is no longer a New York Yankees player.

Per Bryan Hoch of MLB.com, the Yankees released Rodriguez prior to Saturday’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays.

The move was expected and part of a plan New York put in place when Rodriguez and the team announced Friday would be his final game.

On Sunday, Hoch reported Rodriguez would play his last game for the Yankees and then be unconditionally released before serving as a special advisor through Dec. 31, 2017.

Included in Hoch’s report was a statement from New York managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner:

After spending several days discussing this plan with Alex, I am pleased that he will remain a part of our organization moving forward and transition into a role in which I know he can flourish. We have an exciting group of talented young players at every level of our system. Our job as an organization is to utilize every resource possible to allow them to reach their potential, and I expect Alex to directly contribute to their growth and success.

As the Yankees played Friday night, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported the team would call up Tyler Austin from Triple-A to take Rodriguez’s spot on the 25-man roster.

Per the team’s public relations department, in addition to bringing Austin up, New York also added Aaron Judge to the roster.

The week leading up to Rodriguez’s farewell was a mess, with Yankees manager Joe Girardi continuing to sit the three-time American League MVP after saying Sunday, “If he wants to play in every game, I’ll find a way.” Rodriguez started Thursday against the Boston Red Sox and again Friday against the Rays.

In his final game, Rodriguez went 1-for-4 with an RBI double in the first inning. He also moved from designated hitter to third base at the start of the ninth inning, though he was removed after Yankees closer Dellin Betances struck out Mikie Mahtook to start the inning. Rodriguez then enjoyed one last ovation from the New York crowd.

If it was the end of Rodriguez’s career, he got a nice send-off considering how quickly everything came together.

Rodriguez is no longer the superstar who was on the short list of best players in Major League Baseball, but there is no denying the impact he had on the sport for 22 years. He wasn’t always liked, but his talent was incredible, and he was often a joy to watch.

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NEW YORK — With most guys, the retirement announcement comes before the ceremony.

No, not with most guys. With everyone.

Everyone but Alex Rodriguez.

It’s always complicated with him, so of course it was complicated on the night that should mark the end of a brilliant if also monumentally flawed career. Of course the skies roared with thunder Friday, just as Yankee Stadium public address announcer Paul Olden said, “Alex, you’ve spent 12 of your 22 seasons with the Yankees.”

“It was certainly, like, biblical,” Rodriguez himself said later. “You can’t make that up. I guess we went out with a bang.”

Great line, and if you’d like, you can take it as a hint. You can take a hint from him saying “it’s going to be tough to top that.”

Or maybe you can take the biggest hint of all from the last thing he said in his press conference after the New York Yankees‘ 6-3 win over the Tampa Bay Rays: “I saw [rookie catcher] Gary Sanchez have a [big] series in Boston and I looked at him and said, ‘I can’t do that anymore.’ And I was happy about it. I’m at peace.”

Is it possible A-Rod knows he’s done as a player, that no matter what he has said over the last few weeks he knows he’s not good enough anymore? Or is this going-away game going to look even stranger when it’s followed in a few weeks by his comeback game in Miami or Chicago or who knows where?

Just remember, he still hasn’t said he’s retired.

He showed in his first at-bat Friday that he can still get it done if all the conditions are right. He lined a run-scoring double to right-center off Rays starter Chris Archer, and it went all the way to the wall. It even came off a 96 mph fastball, with Katie Sharp of RiverAveBlues.com quickly tweeting how unusual that was:

The fact is Rodriguez struggles with major league fastballs these days. The fact is he can’t play in the field, even if he did make an emotional return to third base for one batter in the ninth inning Friday.

Sure, he’s only four home runs away from 700, and it’s tough to leave so close to an historic milestone. But Al Kaline and Andres Galarraga both retired with exactly 399 home runs, so it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented.

Perhaps A-Rod’s refusal to answer the retirement question is simply an acknowledgement he can’t be sure another team will want him. Or maybe he just wasn’t sure if he wanted this to be the end.

The uncertainty is perfect A-Rod, and so was Friday night.

It went beyond the thunder and lightning during the Yankees’ understated pregame ceremony. There was also the oddity that Mariano Rivera was the only one of his ex-teammates who was invited to take part, even though many others will be in town for the Yankees’ 1996 reunion Saturday afternoon.

The sellout crowd didn’t seem to mind, because it was clear from the start it only cared about Rodriguez. The fans booed manager Joe Girardi’s name during the pregame lineup announcement, then cheered at the news that A-Rod was batting third for the first time in more than a month.

The Girardi-Rodriguez relationship has become a big storyline all week, as Rodriguez admitted that he wanted to play all three games in Boston and that the manager told him no (A-Rod pinch-hit Wednesday and started Thursday). Girardi also turned down his request to play third base Friday.

The tension clearly bothered Girardi, and he seemed determined to make Friday the best A-Rod day possible.

“Some people think I wanted to make negative decisions,” Girardi said after the game. “That’s not the case. I have a huge heart.”

With that, the sometimes stoic and often combative manager broke down in tears.

“If this is the last time he plays, I wanted it to be something he’d never forget,” Girardi said.

But even that vow wasn’t iron-clad. Despite their trade-deadline sell-off, the Yankees remain on the fringe of the American League wild-card race (3.5 games behind the Boston Red Sox for the final playoff spot).

Because of that, Girardi said he would only play Rodriguez in the field Friday night if the Yankees led by three runs or more. Aaron Hicks’ seventh-inning home run gave them a three-run lead.

He told Rodriguez of the plan, and said it was A-Rod’s wish that it only be for one batter. So after Starlin Castro made the final out of the bottom of the eighth, Rodriguez took the field for the ninth. And after Dellin Betances struck out Mikie Mahtook for the first out, Ronald Torreyes replaced him at third base.

Rodriguez didn’t leave the field immediately, first going over to hug his teammates, then stopping in front of the dugout to salute the fans who had serenaded him all night.

It looked, for all the world, like a star saying goodbye for good.

“With all the things I’ve been through, and to have an ending like that tonight, I don’t know what else I can ask for,” Rodriguez said later.

Take that as another hint if you wish. Write in his final career numbers, the 3,115 career hits and the 548 doubles and 2,086 RBI, to go with those 696 home runs.

Just write them in pencil, at least for now.

Remember, too, that as the Yankees and Rays waited out a half-hour rain delay before Friday’s game could begin, Billy Joel’s song “Miami 2017” played over the sound system.

Take that as a hint. Or take it as just one more perfectly odd A-Rod moment on what may or may not have been the last night we’ll ever see him play.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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There’s not a lot of joy to be derived from the New York Yankees‘ present.

Their 58-56 record is far from an Atlanta Braves-level disaster, but it marks the fourth year in a row they’ve been mired in mediocrity. And for the first time in a long time, they’ve accepted they need to make things worse to get better. When New York moved Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller and Carlos Beltran at the August 1 trade deadline, its first rebuild in over two decades was on.

There is, however, some joy to be derived from the Yankees’ present. At least they now have Gary Sanchez. We knew the 23-year-old was an elite catching prospect when the club called him up last week. Now we know he can do things like this:

Sanchez’s first home run was the exclamation point on his coming-out party. It was one of four hits he collected in a 9-4 romp over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, and it had the Yankees a’buzzin‘.

“We’ve liked the way this kid has swung the bats for years,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said, per Craig Forde of MLB.com. “I think he’s done a good job catching. To have his first homer, and he had some big hits tonight, was really nice to see.”

Fun fact: Girardi‘s not kidding about the “for years” part.

A thunderous bat that produced a .799 OPS and 99 home runs in the minors makes Sanchez arguably the top catching prospect in baseball, but it was in 2011 that he first appeared on top-100 lists. 

As a junior member of a farm system Baseball America ranked at No. 5 in MLB, it was easy then to imagine Sanchez as the finishing touch of a new Yankees core that would already feature Jesus Montero, Dellin Betances, Manny Banuelos, Eduardo Nunez and Slade Heathcott.

Obviously, that didn’t pan out. That could be why New York is taking no chances with its latest attempt to build a winner from the ground up.

The team’s farm system was stuck in neutral just a few months ago. Nobody thought much of the system in 2014 and 2015, and they were singing the same old song going into 2016. Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus and ESPN.com all put the Yankees’ farm system in the middle of the pack.

It only took about one week in late July and early August to change this. When Chapman, Miller and Beltran went out the door, 10 prospects came in. Included among them were two elites, shortstop Gleyber Torres and outfielder Clint Frazier, and other well-regarded names like left-hander Justus Sheffield, right-hander Dillon Tate and outfielder Billy McKinney.

Keith Law of ESPN.com and Jim Callis of MLB.com have both elevated the Yankees system to among the top three in baseball, with Callis offering this note: “They may come in No. 2 in our rankings, but the Yanks do have the deepest system in the game.”

That doesn’t strain the limits of believability. After all, Sanchez is just one of seven young Yankees in MLB.com’s current top 100:

Not pictured here are McKinney and Tate, who popped up on preseason top-100 lists and may do so again if they put rough 2016 seasons behind them.

Elsewhere in the system is right-hander James Kaprielian, who made it into Baseball America‘s midseason top 100. Tyler Austin, a first baseman/third baseman/outfielder, isn’t on any top-100 lists. But with a 1.061 OPS at Triple-A, he has to be on the Yankees’ radar. The same must be true of Aaron Judge, whose .844 OPS at Triple-A is a substantial improvement over what he did in a reality-check 2015 season (.680 OPS in Triple-A).

If Judge and Austin join Sanchez in The Show in the coming weeks, New York’s future will come further into focus. So it will go in 2017 and 2018. Of all the names mentioned above, the only one who doesn’t figure to be ready for the majors within the next two years is Blake Rutherford, whom the Yankees just drafted out of high school in June.

Oh, and don’t forget the other young talent the Yankees have.

Betances, 28, is set to close games for years to come. It’s too soon for anyone to give up on right-hander Luis Severino, 22, who was an elite prospect just last season. Slugging first baseman Greg Bird, 23, will be healthy next year after missing 2016 due to a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Rob Refsnyder, 25, could blossom into a useful utility player. Torres and Jorge Mateo may have higher ceilings, but Didi Gregorius and Starlin Castro are A) effective and B) only 26.

Exactly how the Yankees should handle all their young talent is a matter for another day, or one that can be left up to them. All that’s clear now is they have a lot of it, and they have a lot of it at the perfect time.

Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira are just about finished in New York. CC Sabathia will be finished after 2017. Brett Gardner, Brian McCann and Chase Headley are likely gone after 2018. These departures mark the opening of a window. Like they did with Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera in the early and mid-1990s, the Yankees can lay the foundation for a new dynasty.

And at low costs, to boot. Then whatever the Yankees don’t have after 2018, they’ll be able to buy.

Between Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Jose Fernandez and many others, the 2018-2019 class of free agents will be L-O-A-D-E-D. It was apparent last winter the Yankees were setting their sights on all that talent.

After recent events, one imagines a shopping spree that winter could do for the Yankees what the Chicago Cubs‘ shopping spree this past winter did for them: take a young team that already had a lot of potential and use a few blank checks to fill in the blanks.

It may not be until then that the Yankees are ready to contend for championships again. They’re only in a position to take whatever bright spots they can get the rest of the way this year. In 2017 and 2018, there’s bound to be growing pains.

But to build an empire, you have to start somewhere. We know where the last Yankees empire started. Years from now, we may be able to say their next empire started with Sanchez.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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Aaron Sanchez has one of the best ERAs in the American League, and his Toronto Blue Jays have one of the best records in baseball.

And all anyone wants to talk about is whether the Jays should keep starting him.

On the surface, the discussion is nuts. This isn’t to say the Blue Jays are crazy to look for ways to protect a kid who just turned 24 and is just starting to fulfill his potential as a first-round draft pick in 2010. The Jays weren’t necessarily wrong when they hatched a plan to move Sanchez to the bullpen at midseason. They’re not necessarily wrong now either, as they experiment with a six-man rotation designed to answer their big Sanchez question.

“It’s not for you or me to say what the Blue Jays should or shouldn’t do,” said Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and a career full of studies related to the pitching arm and how to protect it.

The problem with that, of course, is we all want to have a say—just as we did when the Washington Nationals shut down Stephen Strasburg in 2012 or when the New York Mets didn’t shut Matt Harvey down a year ago. We want to learn from those decisions, even though there’s no way to really know if the Strasburg shutdown kept him healthy (and helped make him one of MLB‘s best) or if Harvey’s continued play had anything to do with the injury that did shut him down this summer.

Sanchez is different, because unlike Strasburg and Harvey, he’s not coming back from Tommy John surgery. But Sanchez is also similar. He’s a young pitcher heading for a big innings jump on a team with World Series aspirations, and that team is debating how much he should pitch.

The Strasburg question only mattered to us because he was so good and his playoff-bound team depended on him. The Harvey question mattered to us for the same reason.

We hadn’t faced the issue at that level before. Not because teams didn’t shut pitchers down (they did), but because either the pitchers weren’t overwhelmingly good at the time or their teams weren’t. When the Nationals shut down Jordan Zimmermann in 2011, they were 22.5 games out of first place in the NL East.

The Blue Jays took over the AL East Wednesday. Sanchez, with his 2.85 ERA and 11-2 record, is a big part of the reason they’re that good.

The problem is that before this year, Sanchez had never pitched more than 133.1 innings in a season. He’s already at 145.1 this year. If he pitched every fifth game the rest of the way and continued to average 6.6 innings per start, he’d be well over 200 innings before the playoffs began.

There’s plenty of debate over how risky a big innings boost is for a young pitcher who doesn’t have any other obvious warning signs (previous injury, fatigue, velocity drop, etc.). Whatever the risk is, though, the Blue Jays want to mitigate it.

“I did make one absolute statement, this guy is not going to pitch 220 innings this year, he’s not going to pitch 230 innings,” Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro told MLB Network Radio (via Shi Davidi of Sportsnet.ca) last week.

The original plan—one the Blue Jays had been quite open about since spring training—was that at some point during the season, they would move Sanchez to the bullpen. Relievers don’t pitch as many innings as starters, and Sanchez was effective out of the pen last year, so it seemed like a way to let him keep contributing without overdoing his innings.

The Sanchez-to-the-pen plan played into the Jays’ July trading strategy—they acquired starting pitcher Francisco Liriano from the Pittsburgh Pirates just before the Aug. 1 deadline. That acquisition turned the Sanchez question into one that required an immediate answer. Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins joined the team in Houston on Aug. 4 to provide it.

The answer, at least for now: Sanchez stays in the rotation. The Jays use a six-man rotation, and if they keep it through the end of the season, Sanchez will likely drop from 10 more starts to eight. Meanwhile, they keep a close watch for signs of fatigue and also consider skipping starts.

“The most likely scenario is that he stays in the rotation for some time to come,” Atkins said, according to Gregor Chisholm of MLB.com.

That seems perfectly reasonable given what we know now. The problem is that we know so little.

Fleisig said that while studies have been done on usage risks to high school pitchers, there hasn’t yet been enough research of the effects on professional pitchers.

“I wish I had a better answer,” he said. “But the good news is that we are working on it.”

Fleisig was referring to a five-year study being conducted in cooperation with MLB and the MLB Players Association. They began with pitchers chosen in the 2014-16 drafts, doing MRI imaging, physical exams and biomechanical analysis of pitching mechanics, and closely monitoring their usage and health. The plan is to determine how all of these factors together predict risk of injury in professional pitchers.

Until then, we have opinions and what amount to educated guesses. We have another team in another pennant race trying to keep another young pitcher healthy for the future while also trying to win now.

I wish I had a better answer, too.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.

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