Cashman To Blame Should Yankees Finish Out Of The Money

Corey Sipkin New York Post

I haven’t watched a ton of Major League Baseball this season—my annual pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium with my friend Jim isn’t until September 20–but I have seen the film “Moneyball” approximately 157 times.

The movie generally credits Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane with being the first to fully commit to “analytics”, statistics that dive deeper than the usual aggregate totals that had defined baseball performance for over 100 years, when constructing his roster for the 2002 season. Every team has since installed baseball analytics departments upon which they have relied to varying degrees, including the Yankees.

In Beane’s case, payroll constraints forced him to look at alternative methods. On the other side of the coin, that has never been a problem for New York. Yet Yankees GM Brian Cashman, who has been at the helm for 26 years despite zero World Series appearances since 2009, has been characterized, most recently by former minor leaguer Ben Ruta in a New York Post article, as being a slave to computer baseball. Ruta ripped the organization’s development culture, saying “There’s no baseball being taught there anymore.” Analytics are fine tools, he said, but fundamentals shouldn’t be dismissed in the process.

(Full disclosure: Ruta is a product of my town’s West Windsor Little League, of which I was a Board member. I remember watching Ruta as a 12-year old—boy, was he a fantastic ballplayer, with incredible athleticism.)

To me—and probably to anyone who has watched this team on even a cursory basis this season—you have to wonder what part of “Moneyball” Cashman is applying. It seems like his views on players boil down to the Neanderthal “Hit baseball FAR!”, like he was the old Phil Hartman “Saturday Night Live” character. Home runs or bust.

And the Yankees look like they have gone bust, falling below .500 with a 2-0 loss in Atlanta on Wednesday. They’re in last place in the AL East and 6.5 games out of a wild card slot.

From irate WFAN callers to social media trolls, everyone has a reason for this disaster. Manager Aaron Boone stinks, injuries, especially to superstar outfielder Aaron Judge, were too much to overcome… we’ve heard them all.

You don’t need a data science degree to conclude that the buck, though, stops with Cashman. This is his baby, and it’s malnourished.

Let’s start with his so-called analytics bent. You can’t go 15 minutes in “Moneyball” without hearing the phrase “gets on base.” Those A’s, according to the story, prioritized players with high on-base percentages as opposed to the old measuring sticks such as batting average and total home runs, RBIs, etc.

Does that sound like the 2023 Yankees? They rank 26th among MLB clubs with a measly .306 OBP after Wednesday’s 32 meek plate appearances yielded four hits and one walk. Want to use the more modern on-base plus slugging metric? OK, New York shoots up all the way to 22nd on the season.

They do have the 12th-most walks and, according to baseball-reference.com, only three other teams see more pitches per plate appearance, but that could be because they take more strikes per pitch than any team other than the Padres, per Fangraphs.com. Other than Judge, there’s no one in their regular lineup who can boast a 10% walk percentage.

Maybe Cashman can convince us to ignore his club’s god-awful .231 batting average (only the A’s are worse), but the bottom line, no matter how you approach things, is scoring runs. After all the Bronx Bombing to the tune of 163 homers, the Yankees are merely 23rd in runs per game. Considering what they spend on players, how is Cashman still on the job after such an epic fail?

It’s his fault that the Yankees seemed destined to finish out of the money.