Trouble for The Hated Yankees? Not so much

News arrives that Derek Jeter is hurt, and will miss a small amount of time. There is already discussion out there (hat tip to Jeff Passan at Yahoo) that maybe A-Rod should take over at short if La Derek needs to miss some time.

Wise Yankee Watcher Mick Doherty over at Da Box says that Wilson Betemit is listed on most depth charts as the backup shortstop. (And furthermore uses his own experience of watching A-Rod in Dallas to point out that A-Rod wasn't that great a shortstop to begin with, five years ago.)

But I'd point out that if Jeter were out for a while, you can't play Betemit at short. Alex may not have been great, but Betemit is terrible. He's got slow feet and his arm isn't shortstop quality because of a slow release. You'd be loads better off playing A-Rod at short and letting Ensberg and Betemit platoon at third base, where between then they would probably give production not too far off Derek Jeter's. Betemit/Ensberg is a hell of a platoon offensively and Alberto Gonzalez probably isn't major-league ready yet (if he will ever be). I agree that it's politically a difficult move, politically implausible if Jeter is only out for a couple of days.

If he's out for weeks, I think that equation changes. What's amazing is that after a couple of years of being Benchless Wonders (for a while easrly last year, the Yankees had what must have been the worst major league bench in the history of Christendom), the Yankees have realized the errors of their ways and now have a pretty robust group of backups. A Betemit/Ensberg platoon is far better than what 10-15 teams in baseball have starting at third, and is better than what a lot of teams have starting at first.