September 24, 2024

36 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Three Yankees HRs, including Judge’s 55th, seal sweep in Oakland”

  1. I know it’s true, but I find it extremely difficult to accept that playing the outfield would wear you down. Most of the time you just stand there. Occasionally you sprint for a bit.
    I look at Nadal-Djokovic five setters – it’s bat-shit insane.
    Much as I could care less about the NBA, and much as I love baseball, look at any NBA game.
    Most of the time, outfielders just stand there. If Nadal and Federer can do THAT into their late 30s, how can what outfielders do be a big deal for a professional athlete?

    In short, I have a hard time believing that’s Judge’s problem. I really think it’s something else. But I also have hope that maybe he’s coming out of whatever it is (preferably – was).

    1. Having never played high level athletics of any kind (it got in the way of my not having any girlfriends) I have no idea why an outfielder would get worn down. I did a quick search for it, but didn’t turn anything up.

      I often wonder about this. It may be as much mental as physical. The grind of competing at the highest level with the intense concentration that hitting requires might just be the bigger issue. That and the fact that it’s hard to get any lengthy rest. Managers are forever talking about how “banged up” players are at this time of year.

      I don’t get it, but I tend to accept it because everyone around baseball talks about it.

    2. I agree, even without the sprinting there is mental fatigue from maintaining hyperfocus for an hour and a half in the field every day over 6 months, particularly when it gets really hot outside. There’s a reason amphetamines were so widespread in 20th century MLB…

    4. I think it’s a *little* more than you’re giving it credit for. They’re moving around to reposition for every hitter, they go into some level of motion on every ball in play, they may have to run in to back up plays, etc.

      Or put it another way, they have several sprints at whatever their top speed is per game. Sprinters don’t do more than what, 3-4 sprints per day in a match? We don’t think of sprinters as having an easy sport.

      I agree that a 5-setter at Wimbledon is more grueling, but most tennis matches are three sets and they usually go 6-1, 6-0 or whatever. They’re not all tests of fitness.

    5. See, and I think you’re overplaying it. After a 3-set match players are often drenched with sweat. They can run more in one long point than an outfielder moves over some (some!) entire games.
      Basketball is the same. Hockey’s got to be right up there. They sweat like pigs. (Okay, I haven’t done the pig study, but you get the point.)
      Baseball players usually come out of a game without sweating at all, at least visibly. Repositioning yourself is not an effort. A bit of running here and there is nothing like those other sports.
      It’s not a knock. I like baseball BETTER than those other sports. But – I mean, come on. Whatever I love baseball for, it’s not for the grueling physical toll it takes on the players.
      (Pitchers’ arms being the obvious exception.)

  2. Also, Gil didn’t get clubbed today. This is as bad as he’s been in a long while, and it was pretty good. The inherited runner rule is ridiculous, we don’t have to credit it. How many Yankee starters have a better ERA for the year?
    I wouldn’t think of dropping Gil from the rotation, and I don’t think they are thinking of it.
    Cole, Schmidt, Gil, Rodon, in whatever order (but probably in that order, if I were doing the choosing). Who else would you even consider?

  3. Big Fan Rules for inherited runner:
    If the guy is on first and there are one or two outs and he scores, count it against the relief pitcher.
    Man on second 2 outs counts again relief pitcher.
    Everything else counts against the starter.

    1. I don’t know. Man on 3rd, no outs – even then, the relief pitcher actually let the run in. How about giving him a third of the responsibility for that run? Or a quarter of that run? But not NOTHING.

  4. Top 5 Hitters, career wRC+, minimum 4,000 PAs:
    1) Babe Ruth, 194
    2) Ted Williams, 187
    3) Aaron Judge, 173 (tie)
    3) Turkey Stearnes, 173 (tie)
    3) Barry Bonds, 173 (tie)

  6. So at this point in his career, Judge is tied with Barry Bonds for the highest wRC+ of anyone who played entirely post-integration. Wow. Please let him stay healthy.

    Also, if you mix up the last two names on that list, it kinda sounds like Bear Stearns Turkey Bonds, which I’m told may have been an underappreciated contributor to the financial crisis of 2008.

    1. See the problem was the way they sold pieces of the turkeys in tranches. Higher price lower risk for the drumstick, low price high risk for the kidneys. Totally decoupled from the value of the underlying bird.

    1. Then you never had bear turkey prepared properly. There’s a little place in the Great Smoky Mountains …

  8. Wait a second with this talk of “silliness”. If you’re going to recognize pre-integration AL/NL stats, then you ought also to recognize verified Negro Leagues stats, as a matter of historical record. Methodology is discussed here: https://www.seamheads.com/NegroLgs/
    If it’s “silliness” to compare current MLB players’ stats to those of Negro Leagues players, then it’s equal silliness to compare current players to pre-integration AL/NL statistics. If you are willing to ignore the records of Turkey Stearnes, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Smokey Williams, etc., then you should also be willing to ignore the records of Ruth, Gehrig, Wagner, Cobb, Anson, Lajoie, Speaker, etc, not to mention Young, Mathewson, and Walter Johnson; and the entire pre-1947 careers of legends such as DiMaggio, Williams, Feller, etc.

    Now, I don’t like throwing out data, and I don’t want to discard any of the historical record; and I’m not interested in whether Judge is better than Ruth. It’s not a useful exercise. Nobody is offering Babe Ruth a contract (though I’m sure Cashman would want the Babe’s cachectic, cancer-ridden corpse ahead of Dominguez on the depth chart). Instead, the joy of these kinds of comparisons is to help appreciate how awesome Judge is while I can still watch him play; and one of the things that helps to appreciate this is to note that in an integrated league (indeed, one with the most access ever to talented players from around the world), he’s as dominant as legendary players from 100 years ago when the leagues were divided and variance in performance was a lot greater.

    3. They’re using ridiculously small samples from the NeL. The NeL were always known for being pitching poor, with the best study I’ve seen saying they were AAA level, and sometimes worse. So the impact black pitchers had in MLB post 1947 was very minimum, immeasurably so I would suggest, thus that is a dead end argument of any impact on pre-1947 hitters.

    4. The problem with including the Negro league is that baseball reference has turned certain statistics into a joke. Lowest single season ERA? Some guy you never heard of who supposedly threw 28 innings of 0.63 in 1944. (Career ERA of over 4.) 28 innings? Is that all he pitched or did they miss all the box scores of games he gave up multiple runs?

      Second, I think it’s pretty well established that it was a hitters league. Much like we know Chuck Kline wasn’t as good as his basic numbers, we need to do something similar to those.

      Of course satchel Paige clearly an awesome pitcher – possibly the best of all time based on what he did in MLB as an old man. And I have no doubt that Josh Gibson and others would have been stars. I just can’t compare stats to mlb that had much better score keeping.

      And while you are right that pre-integration can’t be compared to post, 8 teams can’t be compared to 15, and day games to night games, and travel only on the East coast fo cross country trips, and better medical care to whatever they were doing back then. They didn’t even have penicillin!

    5. I’m a bit perplexed by the force with which the baby is thrown out with the bathwater, by how reflexively some people seem to disregard any data out of the Negro Leagues, and by the surfeit of strawmen with no relevance to the actual statistic Chris cited. Everyone knows that sample size is important, that no one statistical measurement is appropriate for all purposes, and that every statistic exists in a context that limits its generalizability. But with a little bit of thought and with consideration of all available data, it is often possible to draw at least some meaningful conclusions.

      Of course season length affects the interpretation of single-season records. There’s a lot more variance in both rate stats and counting stats during a shorter season – for instance 2020 vs 2024, or a typical Negro Leagues season ca. 1920-1950 (60-80 games) vs the 154-game season of that era of MLB. Likewise, counting stats are not particularly illuminating for comparing across leagues with different season length, let alone a league with incomplete historical records. But there is still some value to the aggregate data in the historical record. When looking at very large numbers of plate appearances – say, at least 4,000, as in the example Chris cited – many statistics stabilize, making more reliable the intra-league comparison inherent to wRC+. And so it becomes possible to say that considering all leagues and epochs, Judge’s career wRC+ ranks with the highest wRC+’s for a career of >4,000 PA’s – and indeed, that the amount by which he outperforms his direct competition approaches that by which the most productive pre-integration hitters outperformed their own direct competition, and equals that by which juiced Barry Bonds outperformed his own steroid-addled competition.

      I think it is misguided and wrong to overlook Negro Leaguers’ career achievements, and it is arbitrary (I dare not speculate on motive) to omit them from the record of professional baseball. History is history, data are data, and it isn’t right to just ignore them.

      With that said, if Babe Ruth had had access to penicillin in 1925, he could have recovered much more quickly from syphilis. But then he would also have had to go to the right doctor (unlike Mickey Mantle in September 1961).

    6. Mr. Jackson,
      Absolutely NeL statistics have meaning, and with careful consideration they’re fascinating.
      I don’t think anyone’s saying the statistics aren’t important or interesting. Nor do I think they’re suggesting that NeL players can’t be comparable to or better than famous pre-integration MLB players.
      Rather, I think they’re upset at the idea of taking *RAW* data from the NeL and just sticking it into the MLB record books. People are reacting to the notion of toppling batting record-holders by including statistics from the NeLs *WITHOUT* compensating for the specifics of the NeLs – and pointing out that the compensatatory calculations they’d require would be very significant.

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