Ominous Yankee Development
April 23, 2024
After 23 games, the N.Y. Yankees have fallen out of first place in their division for the first time. It’s still early times, with roughly seven-eighths of the regular season yet to be played, and the team’s overall 15-8 record is more than respectable. The pitching staff is outperforming expectations and is one of only three teams out of 30 in the major leagues to be allowing fewer than 3.0 earned runs per game so far. Among the fifteen games that have been won, the Yanks have scored 5.7 runs on average.
But a close look at the eight losses reveals a dark cloud. In half of those losses, the team scored no runs, whether earned or by benefit of an opponent’s fielding error. Two other losses involved games when the team scored two or fewer runs. Four shutouts in a span of 28 games extrapolates to an off-the-charts 28 shutouts over a whole regular season, which would be up from ten shutouts last year, twelve in 2022 and just 8 in 2021. It gets worse. In those four games in which no runs were scored, the team amassed just six hits once, four hits once, and 3 hits twice. So the shutouts do not appear to be unrepresentative because they are associated with an extreme paucity of hits, that is an average of just four in each of those games.
Although the team’s on-base average ranks seventh among the 30 teams, the hitting performance is far from consistent, and this dispersion has adverse implications if the team manages to advance to the post-season rounds. In post-season play, the pitching tends to be much more consistently good. Yankee hitting appears to be extremely opportunistic, taking advantage of pitching mistakes with great regularity. However, the high number of shutouts suggests that the team easily becomes overmatched when pitted against better-than-average pitching staffs, which is the norm in post-season play.
Copyright 2024, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
Tags: 2024 NY Yankees
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