Yesterday we broke down the first of two trades Brian Cashman made during the summer of 2001 to overhaul his team’s middle relief corps, and now it’s time to move on to the second.
July 1st: Acquired Mark Wohlers from Cincinnati for minor league Ricardo Aramboles
Of course, whenever Yankee fans hear the name Mark Wohlers they all think back to one moment: 1996 World Series, Game Four, eighth inning, Yanks down by three, Jim Leyritz at the plate. Wohlers gives up that game-tying three-run homer and the Yankees go on the to win the game and eventually the series. That one homer literally changed the course of Yankee franchise history, because if they lose that game and go down three games to one in the series, who knows what happens after that.
Anyway, Wohlers came over from the Reds five years later, still sporting the same high-90’s gas that won him Atlanta’s closing job in the mid-90’s. His performance in Cincinnati was solid but hardly spectacular, a 3.94 ERA with 21 strikeouts and five unintentional walks in 32 innings as Danny Graves’ primary set-up man. Like Witasick, Wohlers got a crack at some high leverage work after the deal.
In his first game with the Yanks, Wohlers threw a scoreless ninth inning against Tampa with the Yanks up by five. Next time out he entered the seventh inning of a two run game with a man on first and two outs against the Orioles, striking out Larry Bigbie to escape the jam. A walk and a single put two men on in the eight, at which point Joe Torre turned to Mariano Rivera for the five out save. Mo allowed one of the inherited runners to score but eventually nailed it down.
Wohlers stranded two inherited runners in the eight inning the next day, but allowed two to come around to score in the ninth, cutting the Yanks lead to 6-3. Mo came in and finished the game off. Wohlers was shaky, and had pretty much lost Torre’s faith when he allowed a total of eight runs across two innings in two consecutive appearances in mid-July. That was the last time he’d see setup work, instead relegated to traditional middle relief and mop-up duty. Wohlers pitched well enough in that role, throwing up a 2.45 ERA with 29 strikeouts in 29.1 innings after that eight-run meltdown in July. From July 20th to September 30th, he never entered a game with the Yankees leading by fewer than five runs.
The Yankees carried Wohlers on their various playoff rosters but he wasn’t used much. In fact he only appeared in one game that postseason, Game Three of the ALCS when the Mariners torched Orlando Hernandez and Mike Stanton for eight runs in five-and-a-third innings. Wohlers took over for Stanton with a man on third and one out in the sixth, and the first batter he faced (Bret Boone) took him deep. He allowed two more runs to score in the seventh before giving the ball over to Witasick. The Yanks lost that game 14-3, and Wohlers wouldn’t throw another pitch until Spring Training.
As for the Reds, well they got basically nothing out of Aramboles. He never reached the big leagues, appearing in just four games above Double-A. His back story is somewhat interesting though; he originally signed with the Marlins in 1996 but the deal was voided when it turned out he was just 14-years-old. The Yanks swooped in and signed him two years later and he gradually climbed the minor league ladder (Tommy John surgery cost him a big chunk of the 1999 season, however). Aramboles was a solid yet unspectacular pitching prospect easily overlooked in a stacked farm system (yes, the Yanks’ system was one of the very best in the game back then), sporting a 3.82 ERA with 7.12 K/9 and 2.24 BB/9 in 92.1 innings at the time of the trade. He was just 19-years-old and barely out of A-ball however, so there was reason for optimism.
Anyway, Aramboles suffered another elbow injury in 2002, then missed the entire 2003 season after tearing his labrum. His return in 2004 wasn’t pretty, and he’s now been out of affiliated baseball for more than half-a-decade. The Reds got just 158.2 minor league innings out of him after the deal.
It’s tough to call this one a win for the the Yankees but it kinda sorta was. Wohlers gave them 0.1 bWAR in 31 appearances while the Reds got nothing out of Aramboles and didn’t even receive much in the way of payroll relief; Wohlers was only making $500,000 that year. He didn’t give them that setup righthander they were looking for, but Wohlers was pigeon-holed into a role where he didn’t cost them any games during the majority of his tenure in pinstripes. All he did was soak up innings in low-leverage spots at a low cost. Not a trade to write home about, but certainly not a disaster.