The Yankees At The Break: The Numbers Are Lying
On one hand, it’s refreshing that the Yankees maintain a “Championship or bust” ethos. Among the New York metropolitan area pro sports teams, it is frustratingly rare, with the Knicks only recently joining the club. There are way too many executives around town who dare not even mention the word “playoffs” lest such “lofty” expectations prove to be their undoing.
Except when anything less than a World Series title is deemed a failure, how does this iconic franchise account for the last 16 years of failure? Only the drought between 1978 and World Series No. 27 in 1996 was longer over the last 100 years. Yet Brian Cashman is in his 28th season as General Manager; Aaron Boone is in year 8 as Manager.
The indomitable House of Steinbrenner has gone to mush, a slave to numbers, not results.
The Yankees (53-43), whose season started so promising despite the losses of ace starting pitcher Gerrit Cole and 2024 AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil before it began, are treading water at the All-Star break. After coughing up the AL East lead and falling two games back of Toronto, they’re only 3.5 games away from dropping out of the Wild Card picture.
Want to excuse it by pinning all the blame on the depleted starting pitching, which now has to ride out the season with Clarke Schmidt also on the IL after undergoing Tommy John surgery on his right elbow on July 11? Per FanGraphs, the Yankees’ starters have posted the seventh-best ERA in all of MLB this season. Considering all the adversity and rotation flux, it’s held up relatively well.
Only few believe it will continue to do so, even with Gil expected to come off the IL in August, no matter what metrics you follow. Same goes for the bullpen, which gets mismanaged by Boone every year. Overall, Yankees relievers have blown 10 saves this season, tied for the second fewest in MLB. But then you watched the usages for guys like Luke Weaver and Mark Leiter Jr. early in the season and you could have started a countdown, “3, 2, 1…IL.” Weaver was lights out before tweaking his hamstring at the end of May; after three weeks off, it seems like he’s lost his command, allowing 9 runs in 8-plus innings of work since his return to the mound.
The tendency in the modern era is to peruse a wide array of statistics when evaluating performance. While certainly useful, numbers don’t always accurately measure consistency, which is the prime determinant for baseball success when a season is 162 games long.
Just look at simple runs scored. The Yankees are killing it, leading the AL. In their last series against the Cubs, they scored 14 times in three games, a rate that would equate to a top 10 MLB offense. Unfortunately, 11 of those runs were plated in the opener, and New York was handily defeated in the last two games.
In other words, the Yankees routinely demolish bad pitching, scoring eight or more runs 20 times. With so many teams racing to the bottom so as to not spend money, the Bronx Bombers can get fat off of substandard arms. You give Giancarlo Stanton a 92-mph fastball or hang a breaking pitch over the plate, and he will tattoo it. Pitches coming in too hot or with movement and it’s almost a surefire whiff. Among 418 MLB batters with at least 75 plate appearances, Stanton is both 10th in average exit velocity and has the 24th-highest K percentage.
I’m just using Stanton, who has been limited to 21 games due to injuries (what else is new?), as an extreme example of the Bronx Bombers’ boom-and-bust identity. You can point to a host of others—almost all but Aaron Judge, frankly—as bandwagon hoppers. The Captain has a .368/.483/.768 average/OBP/slugging percentage split in Yankees wins and a .340/.434/.691 line in losses, per Baseball-Reference.com. A model of consistency, if not awesomeness.
And it might go wasted, again. Other than Paul Goldschmidt during the first quarter of the season and Cody Bellinger in the second quarter, Judge, 33, has been surrounded by a bunch of hacks who happen to go yard maybe once a week, giving them the appearance of being capable run producers when their season totals pop up on the Jumbotron.
Cashman built this team this way. He tried to channel the Billy Beane character in the film “Moneyball” by replacing star outfielder Juan Soto with two position players (Bellinger and Goldschmidt) and a pitcher (Max Fried) at the cost of a little above Soto’s 2025 salary. While those players have produced at or above expectations, the rest of the lineup mostly returned a slew of underachievers or never-was types. It is laughable if Cashman believed this was a Championship-level roster even with Cole.
When talking to reporters last week, Cashman said he would be going to “go to town” to improve the ballclub by the MLB Trade Deadline of July 31. But even he acknowledged his ultimate activity is TBD based on who ends up in the market. He desperately needs a third baseman, a starter (or two) and some bullpen help because only Fried and Carlos Rodon can get to a third time in an opposing batting order. How many prospects is Cashman willing to sacrifice to save the season anyway?
Before then, the Yankees will come off the All-Star break on Friday by embarking on a 13 games in 14 days swing in Atlanta and Toronto and then home versus Philadelphia and Tampa Bay. That’s not exactly a cupcake schedule.
It’s easy for fans to look at the Bombers’ AL-leading plus-111 run differential and attribute the approximately 8 wins below expected, according to a Washington Post analysis, to bad luck that can reverse itself in the season’s second half. From my perspective, it’s all these numbers that are misleading. If you don’t believe me, Google Branch Rickey.