Which brings us to the Yankees, who last year were thrown off the f----g balcony.
If you think about it, the fact that the Yankees made it into last September still contending for the post-season - even that fake one-game playoff - was a miracle. We entered 2013 looking anemic from Hal Steinbrenner's (now aborted) plan to shrink the payroll to $189 million. Then we faced our ice storm of bad events:
1. Granderson breaks hand.
2. Teixeira strains wrist.
3. Jeter can't run.
4. Youkilis hurts back.
5. Sabathia is terrible.
6. The A-Rod charges.
7. Cervelli breaks something, who cares what?
8. Pineda never does nothing.
9. The farm system produces squat.
Seriously, last Jan 31, if we knew those things were going to happen, we would have sold our winter rats and moved to Atlanta. How - I still wonder - did we avoid a Knicks-like meltdown? Well, here's why:
1. Robbie Cano, great player.
2. Mariano Rivera, pure magic.
3. Brett Gardner, stepped up.
4. Bullpen, spare parts performed.
5. Timely hitting, by the nobodies (looking at you, Lyle Overbay)
6. Girardi, he held the team together. No fights. (Still don't know how.)
OK... stick with me now: What have the Yankees done about last year's explosions in the mineshaft?
1. Loss of Grandy. HOO-RAY. Ellsbury, Gardner, Soriano and Beltran are notoriously brittle. But we have the depth.
2. Tex. UH-OH. He has yet to even test his wrist. And in interviews, he's talking like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.
3. Jeter. UH-OH. Complete unknown. We have a backup fielder. If he can't play SS, he's our 900-pound gorilla.
4. Youkilis. Gone. Better off knowing from the get-go. A wash.
5. Sabathia. HOO-RAY (I think). We signed new ace, Tanaka. Plus, new Jenny Craig CC might come back.
6. A-Rod shadow. No distractions. But we won't have him in August. A wash.
7. Cervelli. HOO-RAY. We have McCann, and Cervelli & Romine. (Somebody's got to go.)
8. Pineda. He'll be back. So what? A wash.
9. Farm system. UH-OH. Still weak. Suspended in amber.
And what of last year's successes?
1. Cano. UH-OH. Nobody to replace him. This is actually two UH-OHs.
2. Mariano. UH-OH. Wondering how many Houdini 9th innings I can take.
3. Gardner. HOO-RAY. We still have him. Unless we trade him.
4. Bullpen. UH-OH. Gahhhhh. Under complete reconstruction.
5. Timely hitting - HOO-RAY. McCann, Ellsbury and Beltran added.
6. Girardi. HOO-RAY. In November, he flirted with Chicago. We were smart to keep him.
I count seven UH-OHs and five HOO-RAYs.
A lot still to happen. But right now - we haven't had any unexpected ice storms - but we're stuck in traffic, and we're not going anywhere.
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6 comments:
anybody except me looking forward to Betances becoming an awesome bridge to DRob? It is time for him to shit or get off the pot, as my gramma used to say.
The MLB Network Show Clubhouse Confidential--which features sabremetric analysis--yesterday featured Clay Davenport, who pioneered, with Nate Silver, Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system for projecting player and team performance. On this show Davenport revealed his projections for 2014. Here are his projected win totals for the AL East:
Tampa Bay 90
Boston 86
New York 85
Toronto 78
Baltimore 77
The BP PECOTA system has the best predictive track record, which really means "least worst"--it is, of course, subject to the same huge errors as seat-of-the-pants sportswriters predictions, just fewer of them. 85 seems like a wildly optimistic figure for the Yankees. Davenport himself said that he has no confidence that any of the Yankee infielders will perform well--he originally had the team at 80 wins, but bumped them to 85 after the acquisition of Tanaka.
My own seat-of-the-pants projection is 70 wins: no infield, no bullpen, two-thirds of the rotation will tank. But I bow to the omniscience of Davenport's computer, which foretells a Yankee team on the plus side of disaster but well shy of a pennant.
Perhaps el duque should be offering a daily prayer with his normal postings.
Does the PECOTA system include a Yankee JuJu correction factor? We won 85 games last year and delayed the Yankee Apocalypse until September. That, my fellow Yankee junkies, should not have happened.
Any predictive analysis that fails to take Yankee JuJu into consideration will underestimate this team's real potential.
Yeah, I wonder what their prediction was for last year's team. And that would've been before all the injuries.
If last year's walking disaster of a team won 85, and this guy's system says 85 this year, there's something seriously wrong somewhere. But I've always thought 95% of that Sabremetric stuff is for the birds. Math guys jerking off, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Ya' gotta hand it to John M.--he's ignorant, and PROUD OF IT. That "math stuff" is not any different from what baseball management and reporter dolts have been doing for decades--batting averages, ERAs, RBIs, won-lost totals, etc.--the whole panolply of traditional stats--are all "math stuff." But that's all misplaced "math stuff," that doesn't target the most revealing aspects of player performance. So more evolved formulae, such as FIP, OPS, WAR, consideration of park factors, etc., etc., have been developed to provide more insight into the key variables that determine success on the field, both individually and collectively.
John M. is more comfortable with the cruder instruments of old, clinging desperately to his hand-crank adding machine and spitting on his progeny's Intel processors.
To him and like-minded baseball philistines, I would suggest a thorough reading of the book Baseball Between the Numbers. You can't possibly know what you don't know until you expand your mind a bit.
Double pump the breaks?
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