At this point, it’s accepted that every team needs a bucketful of starting pitchers to make it through the MLB regular season. Every club enters the year with its shiny five-man rotation that it hopes can survive the rigors of a 162-game schedule, but without fail, injuries and ineffectiveness strike. The adage now is that teams need several quality starters to navigate a full campaign.
Yet while every team wishes it could have a dozen excellent starters on hand at all times, it’s obviously not realistic to actually enter the season with a seven or eight-man rotation. While it’d be great if the Yankees could simply add Dallas Keuchel, Yusei Kikuchi, and Gio Gonzalez to a rotation that already features five starters, it’s not feasible to actually sign a bunch of quality veteran starters and expect a handful of them to be okay with accepting a diminished role while waiting for open rotation slots to pop up.