May 19, 2024

39 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Judge early, Soto late: Superstar duo keys Yanks’ sweep”

  2. The Yankees are like a pinball caroming into wins. Can they stay up at the top of the table furiously bouncing from bumper to bumper as the record gets better? Will anyone under the age of 80 who stumbles across this blog stick around for my hopelessly dated metaphors?

  3. I watched Sorcerer based on, I think, Yankee Calla talking it up. My expectations were low, having watched and loved Wages of Fear. However it is a really great re-do. Edge of my seat as well as sharp edged but not leaden political commentary.

    1. I think you mixed that up. I was raving about Wages of Fear and how Clouzot created all that excitement without CGI and then someone mentioned Sorcerer, That was many Yankee losses ago. Incidentally there was a Netflix remake of the original that nobody ever heard about, 4.5 IMDB Users.

  4. Not sure I love that save rule. It waters down the save stat, doesn’t it? I imagine the point of the statistic is “pitching well when you know it’s closing out the game. Take away the psychology, and what’s the difference between a save and a hold?

    1. how many times a year can this happen? Doesn’t seem like it would make a difference. Holds are saves before the end od the game: you held a lead and passed it to someone else.

    2. Yes, it’s not a big deal.

      But theoretically:
      “Take away the psychology, and what’s the difference between a save and a hold?”
      That’s the point. Since the difference is obviously only about psychology, this situation should be counted as a hold, shouldn’t it?

  6. Following up from the game thr3ad re: relievers don’t care about letting inherited runners score:

    Why would we think this? These guys are all competitive and the one thing they’re always trying to do is not allow runs to score. Whether it goes on your line or not, that’s how you lose games! Anyway if anything it might be worse to fuck up somebody else’s pitching line than your own. Hard for me to imagine they’re gonna try harder because you threaten them with statistical punishment.

    1. I directly responded to this in the last thread. In short – yes, they’re all competitive, but that doesn’t mean that, with that competitiveness as a baseline, no situation affects them one way or another, so that all situations are exactly the same. With that competitiveness as a baseline, some situations will still seem more critical and some less.

  7. I’m surprised that I can’t easily find statistics on inherited runners.
    If, for example, it turned out (as I imagine it might) that inherited runners score materially more often than [runners in general-inherited runners], if it turned out that inherited runners score more often than non-inherited runners for the reliever (and also for the pitcher taken out), that wouldn’t change only our views on how to better calculate ERA it would change strategies for using pitchers.

    1. It’s definitely a tracked stat with an era normalized version somewhere. I’ll try to remember where I’ve seen it.

    2. Clay, thanks!

      It’s really several stats, though, right? Or – several stat comparisons. There are a number of takes that would help form a picture of this.

      And I want to point out that with this information, the numbers will actually answer the question raised already twice here – whether players are so competitive they effectively always play right at 100% of their ability (to me that sounds like “so robotically, inhumanly consistently competitive”), or whether, even with expectable athletic competitiveness, there will be material variation in players’ performance given changing levels of pressure.

    3. Baseball reference has it under reliever pitching. It tracks inherited runners, inherited runners scored and the percentage.

    4. But does that answer our questions?
      The two comparisons we want – at least, those that immediatly come to mind – are: (a) inherited runners scoring vs non-inherited runners scoring, in general, and presumably you’d have to take into account the configuration (how many runners, what bases, and how many outs), and (b) inherited runners scoring vs non-inherited runners scoring for the particular pitchers involved, reliever and relieved (and not just in one case).
      I’m not sure how the available numbers get us there.

    1. Imo the Yankees should let him walk with a QO offer.

      A team laden with mediocre to bad contracts and a stressed budget should not be giving out big contacts to relievers. Especially since the Yankees biggest strength over the past few years has been uncovering bp arms.

    2. Concur with Clay. In a world where relievers are always over valued and the Yankee churn out power arms like they have a machine down in AAA. I would trade Holmes in July to some upstart NL team and fleece them for a top-5 prospect.

    3. I have no problem with generally saving money on the bullpen, but I don’t mind paying for a closer. The Yankees have an excellent bullpen, but the back of it is still a step above the rest of it, and there’s no clear replacement for Holmes next season (unless Effross returns healthy).

    1. Oh good, so I haven’t been imagining that they seem to be facing better than normal pitchers.

      And that’s with them having faced a stretch of lesser pitchers recently (like the Milwaukee series). I bet it was higher earlier.

    2. Good call, Brian. You did say that, and I can’t say it was obvious to everybody.

    3. Some questions about the methodology – specifically, whether they are including current season games in the data set used to assign value to “stuff” (eg, what pitch-attributes create specific outcomes). Because if so, then it could be overfitted: does the opposing pitchers’ “stuff” just look good because of the Yankees’ propensity to GIDP? Do the Dodgers seem to have faced pitchers with below average “stuff” because the pitchers faced Betts, Ohtani, Freeman, etc? Since their “tjStuff+” metric is supposed to be “sticky”, they could probably rely just on past seasons’ data for the training, and hopefully that’s what they do.

  11. With regard to inherited runners – there needs to be stat for expected runs to score and actual allowed.
    A pitcher comes in with man on third loaded no outs should be expected to give up 0.9 runs (I just made that up so bear with me.) if he gets out of the inning he gets +.9; if he allows the run it’s -.1. Do that all season and we’ll have a good metric for “firemen” ( as opposed to closers).

    Now it’s not perfect since sometimes the team is willing to give up the run in exchange for the out (up by 2 vs up by 1) but I think it would all balance out.

    Someone must have done this already…

    1. That kind of thing has been calculated and done. But it’s based on a general notion of “the chances of a runner scoring from a given base with a given number of outs.” In general. In all cases.

      If it turned out that inherited runners are MORE likely to score in those cases than in other cases, and especially if that could be shown for the specific pitchers in question (that they allow those inherited runners to score more often than they usually allow runners to score in the same situations), that would tell us something more – and something more important, perhaps, than how best to record ERA (although correcting that would not be a bad thing).

  13. I would hope there’s enough anger at the Cheatstros that it won’t be a trap. The weather seems to say it may very well be a tarp series.

    1. I’m honestly impressed he’s starting rehab already.

      It’s funny, by the way, how quickly some of these injuries pass, without realizing that a shit ton of games occur during that time period. For instance, Berti doesn’t feel like he’s been out that long, but he’s already missed over 20 games!!

  15. Gary Phillips: Jasson Domínguez is getting close to playing in games. Aaron Boone said “middle of the month” and “inside two weeks.” He’ll probably only DH for the first 2 weeks. #Yankees

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