Yankees Sign LaTroy Hawkins

Well, this is kind of odd in that as far as I can tell, MLB.com is the first to report that LaTroy Hawkins has officially signed with the Yankees for 1 year at $3.75M. There had been whispers of it on Fox and ESPN throughout the day, but I refused to acknowledge the POTENTIAL signing of a reliever as blogworthy. Now that it's official, I suppose I'll throw in my 2 cents.

I'm fine with this deal. He'll be 35 entering 2008, but that's virtually insignificant on a 1-year deal. He also was untyped as a free agent, so the Yankees give up nothing. I imagine this also means they will be letting Vizcaino go, which means second round and supplemental picks for us. It also lets the Yankees avoid being tied down to a 3-4 year deal on a reliever which is apparently what Vizcaino wanted. In that regard, I'll say Hawkins was the better choice.

The Troy had a good year with the Rockies, posting a very good ERA+ of 140. In 55.3 innings, he only struck out 29, but also only walked 16 resulting in a solid 1.23 WHIP. He's been fairly consistent over the past several seasons, only once having had an ERA over 4 since 2001. Mr. Hawkins also counts himself among those elite pitchers who have struck out 3 batters on 9 pitches.

I doubt that he'll be an immediate savior, but if he can produce something near what Vizcaino did last season(perhaps minus the extreme streaky manner in which Luis did it), then I'll be happy. No one guy can pick up an entire relief staff, that's why it's called a bullpen...because it's a pen...of bulls....yeah, anyway.

So, I assume the pen's shaping up to have some combination of Mo, Hawkins, Farnsworth, Ohlendorf, and Abu Ghraib. On the lefty front, I'd probably give Igawa a chance in relief, though I really have no idea what the front office's plans for him are(nor do they, if I had to guess)and I've put my two cents in on Ron Mahay already. So, how does this pen look? Going from left to right we have Mo(fine), Hawkins(hopefully fine), Farnsworth(oh dear), and then two kids who look to have a lot of potential, but about 20 innings of combined major league experience. Luckily for us, the bullpen tends to be the place where major league experience can matter the least and, if the guy has enough ability, can even work to his advantage. So, on paper it doesn't look like anything overly impressive, but it's hard to gauge a team's bullpen out of spring training(never mind the fact that it's only December). Look at all the relievers the Orioles signed last offseason and it helped them negative. Then, there was the Red Sox who most thought would be relying on their offense and out from the depths comes Okajima and Delcarmen to lead into Papelbon. And Gagne sucked. The bullpen is a great place for dependables to disappoint and stars to emerge. I wouldn't cry if we entered the season with a pen that looked something like what I've laid out here. As seems to be becoming the motto with our team in general(especially the pitching): time will tell.