Actual baseball.

"Only Aroldis Chapman and the mother of his child know what happened last fall when Chapman allegedly roughed up this young woman and fired off some shots in his garage and eventually had her hiding in the bushes outside their home.

Nobody knows how Major League Baseball, because of new penalties relating to domestic violence, will deal with Chapman, and whether he will start his Yankee career suspended."

Excellent investigative journalism. "Nobody knows anything, before or after reading my column."


"But what we know for sure about Mr. Chapman is this:

In a pretty short amount of time, we have now gone from Mariano Rivera to him."

Of all the projected cataclysms that faced the mid-2010s Yankees, the replacement of Mariano Rivera has gone ridiculously smoothly.

Remember Rafael Soriano? 42 saves in 2012. 2.26 ERA. David Robertson 39 saves and 3.08 ERA in 2014. Miller, of course, was great last year, with support from Betances and others.

So Chapman will be the fourth primary closer for the Yankees since 2011 who is not Mariano Rivera. So far, so good.


Before I get to strategic baseball discussions that fans care about, let me fully address Chapman's potential character problems: Shrug.


Now on to actual baseball:

1) The Yankee bullpen was already their strength. I think it's sometimes wise to enhance a strength rather than focus on fixing a deficiency.

2) Most observers agree that Girardi's biggest strength is bullpen management. Cashman likely had this in mind when he made this decision to align his team's roster strengths with his manager's strengths.

3) It's time to change the game. Six-man rotations, 25 starts, 5 or 6 innings per start, stay fresh for September and the playoffs.

I know the old school will mock the idea of 150 innings, but it's not so much a matter of toughness or injury avoidance, it's a matter of effectiveness.

The Mets also have an effective model with a deep starting staff. But think about how hard it is to assemble a team like that and how tenuous their success is, even with lots of youth and depth. You expect starting pitchers to go on the DL nowadays.

Relief pitchers are fungible (like that word?).

The league is going to move in this direction, anyways. The Yankees ought to beat everybody else to the punch.