Davidoff: Yanks making good use of scouting reports

The plan called for the lights to stay on late at Yankee Stadium last night. Brian Cashman and his scouting staff intended to huddle, and watch the Rangers beat the Rays in their winner-takes-all American League Division Series contest and map out their plan of attack.

Then Joe Girardi and his coaches will report to a meeting this morning to absorb all of the information at hand and disseminate it to their players as they see fit.

The bad news for Yankees opponents is, just as they use their financial might to purchase better playing talent, they have dramatically upgraded their scouting setup from the Joe Torre years. So the Yankees might not just be outplaying teams. They're also out-scouting them - or, at least, doing a better job of executing the information they receive.

Take two isolated incidents from the Yankees' ALDS sweep of the Twins as examples:

1) Remember the disputed ball call on Carl Pavano's pitch to Lance Berkman in Game 2, which Twins manager Ron Gardenhire eventually protested so adamantly that he was ejected by plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt?

That pitch was a sinker. Pavano followed with a low changeup that Berkman golfed over the head of Twins centerfielder Denard Span.

Of course, if you watched Berkman these last few months, you surely could see how much his bat speed had slowed. And how your best chance to get him out was to bust him inside on a fastball.

2) That same game when Jim Thome, hitting against Mariano Rivera, hit a pop fly to very short leftfield, Brett Gardner was positioned perfectly to catch it.

"Brett Gardner was playing like he was in Williamsport," a scout from another club joked, referring to the Little League World Series.

"It didn't have anything to do with the scouting reports on how he was swinging the bat," Gardner countered. "That's just usually how I play when Mo's on the mound. He's going to get in on most lefthanders, saw them off and jam them.

"In that exact situation, up by three runs with two outs, if he hits it over my head, I could care less."

Fair enough. But rest assured that, if Gardner's positioning didn't match up with the scouting reports on Thome - who suffered an abdominal injury in September - outfielders coach Rob Thomson would've set him straight.

Thomson and Girardi, both then working under Torre, impressed the Yankees' front office with their enthusiasm about the wealth of information available. This was 2005, the same time that Cashman began to assert real authority over the baseball operations department.

By the end of 2006, Cashman had dismissed the Yankees' longtime advance scouts, Chuck Cottier and Wade Taylor, and revamped the scouting department under Billy Eppler, now the senior director of pro personnel. Michael Fishman, the director of quantitative analysis, became an important figure, offering a wealth of statistics to go with the scouts' first-hand observations.

Torre used to invite Gene Michael - who headed the Yankees' postseason preparations for many years - to address the team as a whole, and that led to some productive discussions. Girardi, true to his controlling ways, prefers to relay the information to his players.

"Our players watch video all the time," Girardi said. "Their at-bats against a certain pitcher. They'll watch pickoff moves. They'll watch a lot of different things. And I think it's extremely important. Our advance scouts do a very good job."

The new report should be ready by the time Gardner and his teammates report for today's workout. No plan is foolproof, but the Yankees are smart enough to capitalize on every advantage possible.