Apr
01
Talking more Yankees baseball with The Times
ByYesterday afternoon, I linked to Part 1 of The Times’ Bats blog Yankees preview featuring yours truly with Cliff Corcoran and Steve Lombardi. Today, Justin Sablich posted Part 2 of his Q-and-A with the three of us. In this installment, we talk about the media circus that is A-Rod, the players on the Yanks generating the most buzz, the looming AL East showdown with the Red Sox and the Yanks’ chances at repeating. Check it out.
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The Mason Williams Watch
from the comments:
But when was the last time Burnett, Cano, Granderson, Joba, Hughes or Johnson put together a solid season?
and also
We Yankee Haters are praying for the Gods of Baseball to do their duty and send this team to the bottom or at least the middle of the standings.
I do not understand how the Gods of Baseball can destroy the Mets for their treatment of Willie and forgive the Yankees their treatment of Joe.
W h a t ???
then again, this is from the comments, too:
Steve Lombardi – patron saint of pessimists.
The man could find something wrong with everything in the world.
And I love that picture of Mo and Andy. It’s like Mariano’s teaching Andy his magical telekinesis powers.
…I love that picture of Mo and Andy
Bexy…do we need the firehose again?
“when was the last time Burnett, Cano, Granderson, Joba, Hughes or Johnson put together a solid season?”
Ummm, like, last year?
Reply FAIL.
yeah, if Cano’s season last year wasn’t a “solid season”, even with the RISP woes, I don’t know what was
Yup.
Kabak:
I think this may be changing…
In fact, I hope so.
I’m pretty burnt out on that, too.
At this point, we have to see them pitch. Maybe after a series or two it’ll start back up
Ugh. I hope not. I’m Job-n-Phil’ed out.
:: sigh ::
* Joba
Job is accurate
As in, the Biblical Job?
Heh. Agreed.
Ben I totally agree with your points. If something does go wrong, it’ll likely be some combination of Jeter/Andy/Jorge/Mo totally falling off a cliff or getting hurt long-term. The team would still be downright nasty, but any one of those guys going down for the season or dropping off precipitously in production could be enough to catapult the Sox or Rays in front of us, as both are extremely talented clubs as well.
I do think, though, that despite all of the “ifs” that Lombardi lists (all of which have applied to every single club in the history of baseball – he basically said “well history suggests they’ll do this, but if they don’t, then we don’t know how they’ll do”…no shit), we have a better idea of how the yankees will perform right now than anyone does the Sox or Rays.
I think the yanks’ roster is about as strong as a roster can reasonably be constructed (that is to say, under some form of budgetary constraint and/or not in some kind of perfect storm of 28 year old superstars hitting FA the same year all of your older players’ contracts come off the books), but I think both the Rays and Sox COULD be just as good, but there’s a lot more chance going on there.
Which of course sounds like it could apply to every team, but what I mean is, would anyone be that surprised if the sox’s offense didn’t hold up and their defense & pitching wasn’t quite enough to come back from it and they ended up winning 90 games? Probably not. But at the same time, nobody would be surprised if they got solid years out of Beltre and Ortiz (by solid for ortiz i mean 30 HRs and a .390 OBP) and they ended up winning 100 games. So without anything drastic happening to their club in terms of injuries, there’s about a 10 game swing of probable records.
For the Rays, it widens. They could have two legitimate aces as early as this year in Garza and Price, with Shields a very strong #2/1A-type starter, and Davis and Neimann both may be able to give them 200 innings at a <4.00 ERA this year. Then on the offensive side, if Upton bounces back, Zobrist and Bartlett hold steady, and Jennings gets called up and performs offensively, they've got a potential 900 run offense, and that's not even talking about their defense, which I think will be the best in baseball this year. If all of that goes right, this could be a 100+ win team as well. But on the other hand, you don't know that ANY of that will go that way, and if none of it does, they could be an 80 win team again. So that's a 20 win swing of probable records.
The yankees, on the other hand, have enough power and patience throughout their lineup to essentially guarantee that they're at least a 930ish run team, have a terrific bullpen, and their rotation will almost certainly eat up tons of innings. Sure someone could get hurt or have a down year, but the only real red flag guys are Jeter, Jorge, Mo, and Pettitte, of whom it really seems like only Jorge and Pettitte represent real risks, and while Jorge is a great hitter, he's still our #6 hitter, and Pettitte is our de facto #4 starter. In other words, the depth on this team should make up for anything other than an unreasonable amount of bad luck. So basically, they probably won't win more than 100-102ish games, but they also probably won't win fewer than 95.
All of these teams have pretty much equal upside, but I think the yankees have a lot less downside than the other two, all things considered.
(Note – win totals may get skewed by the ridiculous level of intradivisional competition; if all three of those teams perform to their max. upside, and the O's play around .500, I don't think anybody's winning more than 95 games in this division. That said, I don't think any 2nd place team in the AL Central or West is going to win more than 88 or so, so I still think the wildcard's coming out of the east)
Pete-
Good points. A couple things, though:
• I think I might be surprised if Ortiz hits 30 hr.
• regarding anyone winning 95 games in the A.L. East:
Are you taking into account domination of Interleague games–we play the West, right?–and inter-division play?
Ach– I see you did look at that.
My bad.
But you still think no one in the East’s winning 95?
Interleague schedule:
Yankees get: @Mets, Astros, Phillies, Mets, @Diamondbacks, @Dodgers
Red Sox get: @Phillies, Phillies, Dodgers, @Rockies, @Giants
Rays get: @Astros, Marlins, @Braves, @Marlins, Padres, Diamondbacks
looks like the Sox have a tough interleague schedule, the Yankees have a moderate one, and the Rays have a pretty light one
Yup, so that could very well be the difference.
Also, how did we get the D-Bags, Doggers, r’Astros(sic)…and the Phillies?
Is this some new automatic-W.S.-replay, or is the “one Division per year, plus natural regional rivals” out the window, and I didn’t notice?
I thought I was pretty much the only one who called the Diamondbacks the D-Bags. (high five)
i meant IF all three of those teams play at their peak levels all season long. That’s 36 games right there that we can’t necessarily expect to go better than .500 in.
Ah.
Reading Fail on my part. I see it now.
Corcoran sure is high on the Red Sox, I don’t see it with that offense.
It looks like next year we have the same team, sans Andy. ARod, Jeter, Po and Mo will be one year older, with Mo and Po bordering on senility. I guess Joba replaces Andy and Melancon replaces Joba. It would seem like (providing he has a decent year) we need to resign Vaquez and another #3 or better starter may be a good idea.
If we are old this year, we are even older next year.