August 11, 2026

24 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Schlittler rebounds from rough start with dazzler, but help is too little, too late”

    1. It really does seem like the Yankee hitting will beat the Yankee pitching as often as the Yankee pitching will hold off the Yankee hitting, but Brian’s right – there’s no way this group of players should be anywhere near this bad, and that’s taking full account of who those players are.
      It’s nuts how bad almost every one is playing individually.
      And if you discount Rice’s little burst of offense, it’s surely been over TWO straight months.
      It’s beyond insane. One would think it couldn’t possibly continue. I’m totally convinced that it can, but logically it should be close to impossible.

    2. A 94-win team with him, a 76-win team without him; that is what the numbers show since 2021.

  2. Sometimes we say a guy makes his teammates better. It would be interesting to try and quantify that. Like, look at other infielders’ defense when the 1B is Goldy vs Rice; or at Jeter’s SS defense when the 3B was A-Rod vs anyone else; or, to Pete’s point, to look at every Yankee’s offensive and defensive WAR when Judge is IL’d vs not.

    Of course the intra-season comparisons wouldn’t get to the lasting effect that a new teammate can have – for instance I think Wade Boggs was probably super helpful to Bernie, Paulie, etc. Would have to do cross-season comparisons for that.

    1. I wonder how far you could take that. Maybe there are players who are more susceptible than others to having changes in the quality of rest of the lineup/the rest of the defense improve or diminish their performance. A bunch of integrals should be able to answer that, given the right dataset.

    2. Nifty approach. The major caveats with humongous data sets are the false discovery rate from simultaneously testing so many hypotheses (ie querying so many correlations) and also the risk of overfitting; but with properly adjusted significance thresholds and validation in independent data sets, might well be doable.
      For historical players, could train (develop hypotheses) on a subset of years and validate on the remainder.
      For current players, could validate prospectively.

    3. not to highjack, but this reminds me of an idea I’ve been bandying about, specifically how can you translate reputation to result in the case of the side chatter between batters or when someone returns to the dugout and gives the on deck hitter. outside of (and in addition to) anecdotal evidence, the soft skills of players fascinates me

    4. If you could quantify that… hell, if you could actually prove that the effect is there, that would be very cool.

    5. Didn’t someone say something to Bucky Dent right before he became known as F-n Bucky Dent? Good times.

    2. Ben Rice has a .147 batting average with 11 hits, 3 homers, 7 RBIs and 8 runs scored in 20 games in his last 20 games.

    3. “And had they won, it would have been because the Blue Jays didn’t know how the rules work.”
      What happened?

    2. I dismissed their early season success because I did not think their starting pitching would remain healthy or effective, and it has remained both.

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