#What Aaron Boone’s ‘creative’ Yankees pitching plan looks like

Twice on Tuesday, when discussing his starting pitching supply, Aaron Boone used the word “creative.”

You know what that means: Make sure you have “Deployment of an opener” on your 2020 Yankees bingo card.

Actually, you might as well throw Deivi Garcia, Michael King, Jonathan Loaisiga and Clarke Schmidt on there, too. If we’ve learned anything with spring training 2.0 not even a week old, it’s to prepare for all scenarios this coming season. The Yankees know this better than anyone after seeing Masahiro Tanaka go down less than an hour into this camp.

Fortunately for Boone and company, their bingo card, while taking a few hits already, still features more intrigue than concern.

“Obviously, to start the season, you’re going to have 30 players, so you’re going to have more pitching to choose from,” the Yankees’ manager said on a Zoom call. “So there may be days in there where you do get a little creative, where it’s a bullpen day, or you try and maximize your roster as best as possible and put guys in positions to where they can really impact the game on a given day.”

Relief of the non-bullpen kind continues to dominate the Yankees’ feelings about Tanaka, so scary was the Giancarlo Stanton line drive he took to his head on Saturday. Yet the veteran right-hander remains on concussion watch, and with the season starting on July 23, it feels optimistic to project him to start during the first turn.

“The reality is he’s doing well. He’s responding well,” Boone said. “But we also want to be incredibly careful with this and make sure he’s checking all the boxes while he’s in concussion protocol.”

Hence J.A. Happ, whom the Yankees contemplated trading last offseason due to surplus arms, could start the third game of the season, following new guy Gerrit Cole and James Paxton and preceding Jordan Montgomery. The fifth spot stands as open until Tanaka returns to the mound.

“We haven’t dove in that much [regarding a fifth starter],” Boone said. “We feel like our depth of pitchers from the 12th and 13th pitcher on a team to … our 15th and 16th [to] our 20th, 21st, 22nd pitchers, we feel like are potentially capable of getting important outs for us.”

The Yankees utilized an opener 18 times last year, with Chad Green making 15 of those starts. For a 60-game season, the equivalent would be six or seven times. Let’s bet the over thanks to the unpredictability of this season. Tuesday saw two more significant pitchers (Oakland’s Jesus Luzardo and the Red Sox’s Eduardo Rodriguez) test positive for COVID-19, joining Yankees Luis Cessa and DJ LeMahieu among many others. Awful. If they actually play, it’s going to be crazy.

At least the Yankees offer some interesting candidates to prevail among the craziness. Schmidt, the 16th-overall selection of the 2017 draft, impressed in his intrasquad effort Monday.

“Clarke made me look silly,” Luke Voit said Tuesday.

King, who enjoyed a breakout 2018 before right elbow woes sidelined him for much of last year, opposed a season-ready-looking Cole in Tuesday night’s intrasquad game at Yankee Stadium and tossed a pair of shutout innings, allowing a hit and walk and striking out Aaron Hicks, Voit and Gio Urshela. The Hicks K, he said, came on a four-seamer he has been developing to throw away to lefty hitters.

“I felt great out there,” King said. “It’s nice to be out there competing and facing such a good lineup. It was fun to test myself a little bit.” Boone said he could envision using King in multiple roles.

Garcia pitched his way to last year’s Futures Game. And we’ve seen hints of what Loaisiga (who arrived late and hasn’t joined the workouts to date) can offer when healthy.

The opener? While last year’s American League Championship Series loss to the Astros offered a testament to the benefits of stud starters over bullpenning, the modern strategy would be more palatable amidst a 60-game sprint in 67 days, especially with a 30-man roster the first two weeks. as Boone referenced) and 28 the subsequent two weeks.

In these conditions, all teams must be creative pitching-wise to win the title. So don’t fear the opener. Just hope the Yankees’ raw material rewards Boone’s creativity.