Wang Needs To Fix Things In The Minors

Columns — By Ian Collier on April 18, 2009 4:53 pm

You don’t need me to tell you that the Yankees have a very thin margin for error this season. The American League East is a monster. There are three teams, Yankees included, that project to win over 90 games. The two teams at the bottom of the East would likely compete for the playoffs in arguably three other divisions – the AL Central, AL West, and NL West. It would surprise no one if the division or the wild card came down to fewer than three or four games. Which merely goes to underline the importance of making the best possible personnel decisions and quickly identifying when things need to be fixed.

Chien-Ming Wang needs to be fixed.

He has looked as mind-numbingly awful and clueless as I’ve ever seen any Major League pitcher look over a span of three games. His stats are awe-inspiring, and I mean this in the worst possible way. Three starts. Six innings pitched. Twenty-three hits. Twenty-three earned runs. Six walks. Two strikeouts. He would need to reel off 17 consecutive scoreless innings just to get his ERA to 9.00. These stats are utterly unbelievable. For the second consecutive start today he failed to get out of the second inning, leaving an overworked bullpen without a long reliever to soak up 8 innings of garbage time baseball.

With the margin for error in the East being what it is, the Yankees simply cannot afford to run Wang out there in the Major Leagues until he rights himself. Whether it’s mental, physical, or mechanical, it needs to be corrected, and the Yankees don’t have the luxury of giving their former ace all the time he needs to work it out on the Major League level. He needs some time in Scranton, where he can just as easily be slaughtered by AAA players without destroying the Major League bullpen and adversely affecting the Yankees playoff hopes with each miserable effort.

I’m not completely heartless; I feel for Chien-Ming Wang. He’s been a very, very good and valuable pitcher for the Yankees for some time now. His ability hasn’t altogether vanished, not at the age of 29. It’s there, it just needs to be unlocked. It can’t feel good for him to go out and be positively demolished. And having him pitch in real games to real hitters is obviously an important step for him in this process, particularly since we heard all week how brilliant his side sessions have been. However, the Yankees are not an organization in a position to throw games away, no matter what month these games are played in.

Tags: Chien-Ming Wang