September 16, 2024

50 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Yankees Choose to Kick Themselves in the Crotch, Will Continue Doing So Going Forward”

  1. Maybe the weirdest thing about the Holmes as a closer thing is that the Yankees have actively changed his repertoire/pitch usage this year to try to turn him into a better strikeout pitcher. Yeah, the new slider/sweeper is pretty good, but his sinker is still his best pitch, even if it makes him a more risky pitcher.

    Do they have a better option for closer? Kahnle? Weaver if he gets it back together? Even if Schmidt goes back to the BP when he returns, I don’t think he’s a closing option.

    1. Cousins has generally been quite good, and he IS a strikeout guy (12.6 K/9), so I think he should get a chance at the job. Not only that, but Cousins is signed longterm, too (under team control until 2029), so why not see what you have with the guy who can be here for multiple seasons?

  2. Closer by committee. They need help as Blake’s magic potion has run out for most of these guys.

    Last night was so disgustingly foreseeable I thought about putting a quick bet in.

  3. You may be a bad manager when your closer leads the league in blown saves and the guy in second place has about half as many and you keep using him as your closer.
    You may be a bad manager when your short stop doesn’t hit for weeks and you don’t sit him down for a few games. (Especially since after the ASB he came back hitting!)
    You may be a bad manager when you keep running out a Left fielder who can’t hit for weeks and months and there is likely a better solution (defensively for sure…) in the bench.
    You may be a bad manager when you keep benching players after a good game but not after a bad month.
    I can go on…but this is a major reason they won’t win a WS with this guy at the helm. This team has the talent to win; they have one of the best records in baseball despite an idiot making dumb in game decisions. But once the playoffs start they are doomed because every dumb decision is magnified.

  4. Leiter has a Yankee era of 6.48 and a BAA of 381. De Los Santos numbers are 14.21 and 419. Cash’s deadline moves.
    The Yankees are not a bad team but they’re not that good either.They’ve got mediocre to bad players at every position except RF,CF/DH,C which is why they go on these long streaks of not hitting. They had one good inning in 6 games against the White Sox and Detroit. Stanton, phenom, Vertigo, DJ/Rice are pretty much non factors offensively. phenom is 4/41 and 2 of his hits were infield hits. And to Boone there’s nothing wrong, he treats phenom like he did when Judge had a bad month,

  6. Went to Cooperstown yesterday. They have a display that’s supposed to be current for each team. In the Yankees slot they had a Judge jersey and a “Kraken 24” BP jersey.

    2. Attendance is good, ad rates are high, merch selling, stock price sold. By his metrics things are great.

    3. I think the issue is Hal and cashman have similar dispositions. they need a 3rd, more provocative, personality as a foil(s)

    4. Hal feels ‘comfortable’ with Cashman. Besides, it would be too much work to search for a young replacement GM.

  14. why is marinaccio in aaa when we have this terrible pen?

    even when he’s bad he’s better than the retreads. he might even be better than holmes.

    this franchise is not serious.

  15. If Holmes was even an average closer the yanks would be running away with the AL East.
    Is 83% that big a deal? Pretty sure just about every teams closer is 83%. That would mean 4 or 5 more wins. Sheesh this guy is really not good at closing. Forget the Indians guy who’s great; or some others . Just pick some random closer on say the nationals. He’s better than 83%. It’s unbelievable how bad he is at this and yet they keep using him.

    Yes this team is good – we’d all be really happy if we were 4 or 5 games up with the best record on mlb. Instead because of a terrible closer we may end up ac a wild card. Crazy.

    1. Yep, even as bad as this line up is, with a decent Holmes, not 10-blown-saves-Holmes, we’d be four-six games in front.

      The Yankees following the Green Bay Packers path, 30 years of Favre and Rodgers with 3 Super Bowl appearances and just 1 between 1998 and 2022), as the Yankees waste the best of Aaron Judge.

    1. How can anybody have that low a save percentage? Just pitch the kind of pitchers who pitched those other innings and GOT you to the save situation!
      Oh…

    2. are you making up numbers? and then writing them down? and then typing and posting them?

  18. Also, how long until a pattern of lucky hits and bad play behind a pitcher becomes predictive? Maybe Holmes’ pitches impart some particuarly awkward spin to a hit ball. (Or maybe his teammates hate him.)
    Either way, he allows way to many baserunners to be brought into late and close situations – let alone every damned late and close situation the team has.

  19. The save % thing is malarkey. Any blown lead by the 7th or 8th inning guy is a “blown save”, but those guys can never get saves, only holds. This drives the save% down, but is not that meaningful.
    Say a total leads 2-1 after 6. 7th inning guy gives up a run. Tie game blown save. They score taking a 3-2 lead. 8th inning guy gives up a run, blown save. They score taking a 4-3 lead which the closer closes out. A Win, with a save % of 33%.

    Now what if the 8th inning guy does his job? A win with a save % of 50%.

    What if they all do their jobs? It goes down as one save (and two holds) and then in to the next game.

    See the problem?

    1. Interesting… but why is it malarkey? You’re measuring how often then team blows late leads. That seems like a reasonable statistic to follow. The only conclusion you seem to be suggesting is that, overall, those numbers are likely to be lower than you’d expect before you understand how the stat works.
      The only question is whether the stat has predictive value. If it does, it’s a pretty important stat, and you wouldn’t want to be doing badly in that regard.

  20. Yes petwom – you are correct. It’s not total malarkey. it just doesn’t mean as much as one might think.
    Also big difference between
    Blowing a 7th inning lead and 9th inning lead with regard to win probability

    3. What do you mean? We’re all done now.
      Come on folks, nothing to see here, move along!

  22. Thank God I was in the country at a poetry thing over the weekend – those were a couple of truly miserable losses. Why does the team seem so bad when they’re actually near the top of the league? Well, how many losses like this have they had? And also, of course, they’ve been a lot worse than this record for a long time now, it’s still the fantastic start skewing the results… for now.

  23. At Patreon Soto is dead last on the team in % of ABs with runners on base at39.5% Wells and Judge are slightly over 50%, DJ and Vertigo at 46%

  24. As for Boone… I think it was Letterman who asked Tyson what it was like to walk into a room and know you could take anyone there. Boone’s just the opposite – what’s it like for him to walk into a room and any random jerk would be a better manager than he is? Forget the timing of pitching changes and pinch-hitting and all that. (I mean, don’t forget it, it’s unbelievable, but leave it aside for a moment.) Who among us doesn’t see clearly how gallingly stupid it is to keep running out Holmes to blow saves and the team’s morale? What bizarre obligation does Boone think he has to be “loyal” to something that’s losing them games, what is he proving and to whom? Who among us doesn’t see how gallingly stupid it is (maybe was, but I’m not counting our chickens) to keep running out Verdugo at leadoff when he’s simply failed there, and then just keeps on failing there – added to the fact that it’s not as if he was ever a guy you’d think of as a prototypical leadoff hitter?
    That random guy yelling at the game on TV at your local bar is a far, far better manager than Aaron Boone.

  25. Also, I want to give Brian a shout out for the title of this thread, and the Yankees, because, well, when you think about it, kicking yourself in the crotch is not an easy feat to accomplish.

    1. I know it is asking a lot (I totally get how they don’t deserve this at ALL), but I think they likely WILL play Wells in most of these games. But yes, it is a really bad look to sit him in the first game of this stretch. I can’t say, though, that I’m not a bit curious as to how Trevino will handle Gil.

  27. Stanton last 7 days 154/466
    Verdugo 133/367 Great Cash acquisition
    phenom 158/449 aided by 2 infield hits
    DJ 143/343 Finally coming in to form
    Gleyber 211/581 who’s merely been terrible but head and shoulders over the others

    1. The line-up has been awful, and yet had Holmes only blown 6 saves instead of 10, they’d be up 5 in the loss column.

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