Damon Oppenheimer reveals Yankees’ draft strategy after pitcher-heavy approach
NY Post
After the Yankees picked college pitchers with their first seven selections of the MLB amateur draft, it seemed fair to wonder whether the organization was trying to make up for some of the pitching depth it lost in recent trades in an attempt to improve the major league roster.
Damon Oppenheimer, the team’s longtime vice president and director of amateur scouting insisted that wasn’t the case.
But he did acknowledge Thursday during a Zoom call that the Yankees do look at pitchers as easier to get to the big-league level.
“I think the strategy for us is to try to take the best available,’’ Oppenheimer said. “It could have been a couple of position players. We’ve done a lot of research on what gets to the big leagues and pitching, you can develop and get it there. You need a lot of pitching to hold up over time. Nowadays, it’s so hard to hit, why not attack something that’s hard?”
And he added it was more a product of how the draft fell that the Yankees ended up taking 19 college players out of the 20 drafted.
“It could have been four high school guys in our top 10,’’ Oppenheimer said. “It just flips this way for you.”
With the Yankees on an impressive run of mostly correct decisions, there’s some reason to leave them alone and just let the best team in the American League continue to roll. But they did raise serious doubt and leave room for suggestions (and even ridicule) following maybe the most inexplicable decision of this season, or any season.
The Giants have never been 0-2 under Brian Daboll, until now. They were 2-0 and flying high in 2022 and 1-1 after a rousing comeback in Arizona in 2023. So, this represents a low point as far as early-season difficulties for Daboll and the Giants. They had no business beating the Vikings in the opener and no business losing to the Commanders in Week 2. But here they are.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Harrison Butker kept making a lonely walk to midfield after each quarter Sunday to check on the direction of the wind, which tends to swirl inside Arrowhead Stadium. He did it one last time during the 2-minute warning, when his Chiefs were trailing the Bengals by two and trying to give him a winning field-goal attempt.