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I often think of history as a noose wrapped around a ray of sunlight. The past can illuminate the present, but it can also strangle hope for the future. So it is with the history of the New York Yankees.

The last time the Yankees traded away an impact player in their major league roster at the non-waiver deadline was 1989, when they shipped Rickey Henderson back to Oakland. Since then, they have been buyers, even when their chances for October contention were slim. Because George Steinbrenner demanded it. Because the payroll demanded it. Because the fans and the media demanded it. Because the pinstripes demanded it.

Of course, the great irony about recent Yankees history is that it took an early-90s rebuild during Steinbrenner’s suspension from baseball to bring the franchise back to its halcyon days. While The Boss was suspended, GM Gene Michael drafted and signed the Core Four. He gave Bernie Williams his major league debut. He traded for Paul O’Neill. I don’t need to tell you what happened after that.

Fast-forward 25 years and the Yankees are staring that moment in the face again. They loaded up on veteran free agents in the last decade the way that they did in Steinbrenner’s heyday. Then Hal Steinbrenner took over, and things didn’t really change. Alex Rodriguez got his bananas extension. CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira were signed to massive long-term deals. Carlos Beltrán and Jacoby Ellsbury joined up a few years after that. When it came to free agency, the new boss sure felt like the old boss.

That kind of deal-making didn’t really work for the Yankees in the 1980s, and it became clear, once a lot of these players began to age, that it wasn’t going to work now. Revenue sharing and the luxury tax disincentivized the Yankees from spending, but it didn’t stop them from doing it. They now have the second-highest payroll in baseball, are paying a 50 percent luxury tax rate, and haven’t played a full postseason series since 2012. They haven’t won a pennant since 2009. The Yankees’ financial flexibility vanished in the last few years, along with their postseason dominance.

What’s more, parity is at an all-time high in baseball. Outspending your opponents doesn’t automatically buy you a title anymore. It probably never did in the free agency era. But the perceived glitz and glamour of America’s biggest media market continued to drive Hal Steinbrenner’s decision making, the way that it did for his father.

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The hard truth one must face is that the Yankees will once again miss the postseason for the third time in four years. The team came out of the All-Star break with a losing record for the first time since 1995. They are 5.5 games back of the second wild card berth. Baseball Prospectus currently puts their playoff odds at 4.3 percent. There was no win-now circumstance that would allow the team to play in October this year while also contending in the years to come. This was the time to tear the thing down and start again.

They luckily had assets to move, too. Beltrán, Nova and Mark Teixeira were scheduled to come off the books in November. Teixeira has been sub-replacement level in 2016, but the 39-year-old Beltrán has come out of nowhere and hit for a 134 wRC+ / .301 TAv. Nova’s 4.09 Deserved Run Average in 97.3 innings is league average, but the thin starting pitcher market this July has turned him into an asset.

And then, of course, there is the bullpen. Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller are mind-melting pitchers, but they are only valuable to you if you’re trying to preserve a small lead late in the game. The Yankees didn’t give them many opportunities to show off their skills this season. The bullpen market was insane this year, and Cashman would have been a fool to hold onto those two pieces.

The prospects Cashman got back now confirms the Yankees as having one of the best farm systems in all of baseball, with five consensus top-50 prospects all now playing for Yankees affiliates—six if you throw an injured Greg Bird into the mix. Shortstop Gleyber Torres was the marquee piece coming from the Cubs in the Chapman deal, while outfielder Clint Frazier headlined the package Cleveland offered for Andrew Miller.  Frazier has bat speed and power for days, while Torres is a four-tool player who could take over second or third base. Both of these guys project as everyday major leaguers with significant value.

But that’s not all the farm system contains. The funny thing about those early Hal Steinbrenner years was that Cashman was slowly working on putting a new core in place. A few months before A-Rod and company hoisted the World Series trophy in 2009, Cashman signed 16-year-old catcher Gary Sánchez out of the Dominican Republic. Two years later, he drafted Bird. Seven months after that, Cashman signed Dominican shortstop Jorge Mateo. The year after that, the team drafted Aaron Judge.

Look at that group now. Sánchez is in line to be the backstop of the future. After hitting for crazy power in a brief major league stint last year, Bird is ready to take over first base from Teixeira, once Bird is healthy and Teixeira’s contract runs out. Judge now has right field open to him, since Beltrán is off to Arlington. Mateo could be moved to second base or stay at shortstop when he’s ready.

There may appear to be a logjam in the middle infield, but fear not! If Didi Gregorius continues his hot hitting, the team may want to keep him at short or move him to second base, at which time either Torres or Mateo may be surplus to requirements. Should Cashman decide to trade either one, he’d get another haul, and potentially an impact major-leaguer. A deal like that is win-win.

Most importantly, Cashman now has six position players to build around while he sheds payroll and looks ahead to future free agent classes. Once Teixeira is gone this fall, with Rodriguez and Sabathia to follow suit next year, the Yankees’ payroll will become much more manageable, leaving room to go after the Class of 2018—Bryce Harper, José Fernández, Manny Machado, Matt Harvey, Clayton Kershaw, and Josh Donaldson potentially among them. Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan tweeted a potential 2019 Yankees roster. Wipe the drool off your face.

2019 Yankees?

Sanchez 2
Bird 3
Mateo 4
Machado 5
Torres 6
Ellsbury 7
Frazier 8
Harper 9
Judge DH

SP: Fernandez, Tanaka, Sheff, Kap, Tate

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) August 1, 2016

This probably won’t come to pass. Harper might sign an extension with the Nationals, or the Dodgers might offer a bigger contract to Fernández. Not all of the Yankees’ prospects are guaranteed to pan out, either. The point is that the roster as currently constructed was only ever going to hover around .500. The luxury tax prevented the team from throwing money at aging free agents. Selling was the only way to build a contender again.

There’s only one deal you can fault Cashman for doing, and that is Chapman. Once Chapman’s domestic violence incident came to light in December, his trade value plummeted, and Cashman swooped in to get him from the Reds for nothing. Anyone who was paying attention knew that he was going to flip him in July for a massive profit. In other words, Cashman used an incident where Chapman “allegedly” choked his girlfriend and fired eight gunshots into his garage to get Gleyber Torres without giving up any other prospects. It was a cynical, craven, and slimy move. But that’s “the cost of doing business,” right?

Cashman’s exploitative actions will soon be forgotten, however. The Yankees are bursting at the seams with great prospects, and their payroll is slowly being whittled away. No matter what happens in the next few years, the Yankees will be a force to be reckoned with once more. History will shine brightly on the Bronx again. When Bryce Harper and Clint Frazier jump in the dogpile after the team wins their third World Series in a row in 2021, remember how they got there.

Photo: Brad Penner / USA Today Sports

The first thing to note that should make Yankees fans feel better about Pineda is the defense playing behind him. As I noted last month in my assessment of Luis Severino, Yankees defenders have been bad with the gloves by every advanced measure we have. Pineda’s ridiculously high .397 BABIP and below-average 67% strand rate speak to the defense’s inability to gobble up balls in play.

Bad defense aside, though, Pineda’s batted ball profiled does seem to be trending in the wrong direction. Statcast can tell us a couple of illuminating things. Notice the below table of Pineda’s average exit velocities and launch angles from 2015 and 2016, paired with the league average:

He’s getting hit harder and higher across the board compared to last season. We see that in his rates too, with the fly balls up and the ground balls down in 2016.  The jury’s out on the degree to which launch angle is a skill—generating ground balls seems to be. Suppressing line drives, however, is basically random. We do know that exit velocity is a skill that stabilizes quickly, so things don’t look too good for Pineda, especially since that increased launch angle means that balls are leaving the park at a 1.68 HR/9 rate, way up from last year’s 1.18 mark.

All of this data shows how Pineda is being beaten, but why is he being beaten? If his velocity and mechanics are more or less stable, does it really come down to hanging a few sliders from the stretch, as Sarris suggests? The pitch is indeed crossing the plate about seven inches higher with runners on base as opposed to when the bags are empty, but overall, Pineda’s not leaving the pitch up any more than he did last year.

Are hitters doing anything differently on those sliders that are left up in the lower part of the zone? Last year, they slugged .547 on such pitches; this year, they’re slugging .579. It seems like it’s not the slider that is the singular cause for Pineda’s woes.

Could it be the fastball? When the fastball gets hit, it gets hit hard, especially when Pineda leaves the pitch up, either because it’s not cutting enough or he can’t get it to move at all. That middle-middle zone is getting pummeled, as a 106-mph home run from Evan Longoria demonstrated two weeks ago:

Austin Romine wanted that fastball down and away. The ball just leaked over the plate and was torched. But other than the home runs, the fastball has been getting the same amount of whiffs as it did last year. So it seems like the mistakes are just getting punished in a way they weren’t in 2015.

You could argue that command or pitch mix is the reason for hitters tattooing more of Pineda’s offerings than they did last year. But given the strikeout and walk rates, that case is tougher to make. It really seems like when Pineda misses, he’s missing badly. That might shake loose, but then again, maybe it won’t. This was supposed to be the year Pineda moved past the injuries and reclaimed the promise of that great rookie season with the Mariners. Instead, he’s become one of the great mysteries of the 2016 season.

Photo: Kim Klement/USA Today Sports

Severino’s most recent start against the Orioles was ugly: two home runs to a white-hot Mark Trumbo, a flubbed defensive play, and four runs surrendered in only six innings of work. All told, he’s rocking a 6.31 ERA across five starts in 25 2/3 innings, and his cFIP (a BP stat that is most predictive publicly available pitching metric) currently sits at 85, tied for 25th among pitches with at least 20 innings pitched this year. Yes, the Yankees defense has been terrible, but Severino’s DRA still sits at a horrendous 5.85, one of the worst in baseball.

Yankees GM Brian Cashman even suggested that Severino could be sent down to AAA Scranton-Wilkes Barre to make the necessary adjustments. For the star pitching prospect in the Yankees farm system, things seem dire.

But are they?

Here’s a quick-and-dirty look at Severino’s underlying stats this year compared to both his numbers last year, and to this season’s league averages among starters.

If you said these were the numbers of a 22-year-old prospect who was called up to the majors last August and had clocked five starts so far this year, I would tell you the guy was probably going to be fine. A sky-high BABIP paired with league-average exit velocity, better-than-average hard-hit rates, better-than-average production against him, and a laughably low left-on-base rate tells me this pitcher has been unlucky more than anything else in his first few outings. Throw in the great ground ball rate, and there’s no real cause for panic.

But let’s add in another wrinkle to really drive this home. The Yankees have been one of the worst defensive teams in baseball. Whether you want to use Defensive Efficiency, its park-adjusted sibling, Defensive Runs Saved, or positionally adjusted Ultimate Zone Rating, the Yankees have been straight up bad with the gloves. It’s costing Severino outs, and are forcing in runs when Severino does make a mistake. It’s the same problem pitchers like Corey Kluber and Chris Sale had to deal with last year—despite electric stuff and sterling FIPs, the ERA looks garish thanks to the poor defense behind them.

This is by no means an argument that Severino is perfect, mind you. He’s a 22-year-old starting pitcher with only 88 big league innings under his belt. He’s got a lot of learning to do. One red flag from 2016 so far is his strikeout rate. He’s preventing walks to the tune of only 4.3%, which is excellent, and much improved from his 8.6% figure last year. His strikeout rate, however, have plummeted from 22% last season to 13.8% this year, one of the worst in baseball among starters. Judging from his heat maps, it seems like he’s suppressing free passes because more balls are going over the plate and in play, which are also leading to fewer punchouts. Indeed, he’s allowing way more contact in 2016 than he did last season.

Here are his pitch location rates for 2015 and 2016, starting with the former.

Yankees manager Joe Girardi recently said that Severino’s location has suffered, and this would appear to corroborate it. More pitches are being left up in the zone, where hitters are doing the most damage. Indeed, when Severino’s slider has been left hanging, it’s been absolutely punished, as you can see here:

It’s a clear miss. Brian McCann wanted that ball down, and instead it sails up. Mark Canha launched it 384 feet, coming more than 101 miles per hour off the bat.

It’s not just his slider that he’s leaving up. He’s struggling to keep his four-seam fastball out of the danger zone. Here, McCann calls for the four-seamer on the outside edge, and it leaks over the plate for Mark Trumbo to annihilate to the left field stands.

There’s a small theme to those two clips: Severino is facing right-handed batters in both of them. He posted a pretty standard platoon split for a righty pitcher last season, but so far, he’s weirdly got a reverse split going, striking out more lefties and giving up more power to righties. It’s early days, so that may just be a fluke, but it’s interesting.

“Early days” is the operative phrase here. Is all of this data enough to demote Severino? For a 22-year-old with a 4.3% walk rate and only 10 extra-base hits surrendered against 116 batters faced, I should think not. There’s plenty Severino and pitching coach Larry Rothschild need to work on to wrangle his command. Severino is a young arm with a ton of potential. It would be unfair to deny him the chance to make adjustments against big league pitching, especially given the fact that his defense has let him down repeatedly.

And if Severino were to be sent down, who takes his place? The Yankees aren’t exactly swimming in quality arms, especially considering that C.C. Sabathia has to go out there every five days and try not to throw the game away. Bringing Iván Nova out of the bullpen isn’t an upgrade. A trade this early in the season seems ludicrous, and the team is desperate to hold onto its prospects. There aren’t too many on the farm ready for the jump, either. Brady Lail might be the closest, but he’s walked 12 at AA Trenton so far this year, and could use more seasoning.

There’s a clear plan of attack for Luis Severino. If he can tighten up his command, keep the ball out of the fat part of the zone, and get his K rate up, he’s going to be fine. He’s proven that he can hang in the big leagues. Five starts shouldn’t make or break his development. It’s time for Cashman, Girardi and Rothschild to start trusting their young stud, and let him go to work.

Lead photo: Noah K. Murray / USA Today Sports