Cashman Shopping for Yankees DH on Groupon

Yankees GM prank-calls Scott Boras by feigning interest in a decent player like Johnny Damon.

Hopefully Cashman and the Yankees are merely operating the way they do every years. If so, after spending all winter pleading poverty in various contexts, they'll pull off a stealth move and nab Yoenis Cespedes.

Jorge Posada Honored with a Fascinating Chart

In Jorge Posada's retirement press conference, Jorge commented on his abominable 2011 right-handed hitting stats:


   “For sure, something was wrong with my swing right-handed. I can still hit left-handed, there’s no question about it. I feel like I can. I felt like, toward the end, I wasn’t given a chance to do it to come out of the slump right-handed, but I felt good left-handed all year.”

Now, take a look at this chart:

Tigers Sign Newt Gingrich as Shortstop

Noted historian Newt Gingrich will anchor the rebuilt Tiger infield.

In related news, Mars Inc. seized an opportunity to cross-promote one of its dietary products and bought the stadium naming right, changing the name from Comerica Park to Snickers Field.

The Playoffs Are Not a Crapshoot

 "My job is to get us to the playoffs. Everything after that is f-ing luck." - Billy Beane, quoted in Moneyball.

Imagine 2 teams with slightly different strategies in terms of applying their superior financial resources; in other words, imagine 2 teams who have exactly the financial resources of the Yankees. One team's strategy is to use all its resources to win 110 games a year; let's call this team the Bosses. The second team's strategy is to hold back a bit and try to win 95 games a year, enough to make the playoffs; let's call them the Crapshoots. In this thought experiment, each season both teams win their target number of games, and meet each year in either the League Division or League Championship Series. The Bosses are always the top seed.

Red Sox 2011: The Celebration Cruise

Observe the similarity of the ship's slope to the slope in the following chart, which graphs the decline in the Red Sox' winning percentage from September 1 through the end of the season (games 136-162).

Roger Waters to Play "The Wall" at Yankee Stadium

The Wall comes to Monument Park on July 6.

"Leave them kids alone!"

Austerity Or Strategy?

Many observers have have attributed the Yankees' off-season decision-making to "austerity" - meaning that the Yankees' strategy as an organization has shifted from a win-all mentality to one of spending within a lower budget, with an eye towards getting under the salary cap in 2014.

This may be the case; but this may also be an urban legend originating in the baseball media's tendency towards groupthink.

Does Trading Montero Open a Door for Posada?

Now that Jesus Montero has been traded, the Yankees probably will obtain a DH. The most prominent names rumored have been Carlos Pena and Carlos Lee, but I am a tad skeptical. This is because given A-Rod's recent hip and knee issues and his age, it would be wise of the Yankees to have A-Rod DH at least twice per week, in order to keep him in the lineup both in 2012 and in future years. In addition, Girardi seems inclined to use the DH slot to give regulars a half-day off, so I would expect the "regular" DH to play 3-4 games a week at that slot. It seems unlikely that Pena and Lee are good matches for that type of role.

Posada is another matter, he proved last year that he has accepted a limited role. But you may ask, "didn't Posada just retire?"

The Residue of Design

Yesterday's post critiqued the theory postulating that because luck impacts postseason success, it's unnecessary to build the best team possible.

Let's try to evaluate using the facts of baseball history. There is no perfect method to do so; but one way to examine this is to look at MLB postseason history and see whether the teams with better records have beat the teams with losing records more often than not.

Does Building a Better Team Matter? Of Course It Does!

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." – George Steinbrenner  William Blake

It's already become a truism that baseball’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement contains financial incentives that will cause the Yankees to rein in spending. The jury is out on whether this talk of the Steinbrenners devolving into the Wilpons is just noise. This post rather explores one of the underlying rationalizations associated with this approach.

From a baseball perspective, the question is whether intelligently shopping at Tiffany's increases the odds of winning the World Series. Modern conventional wisdom, as recently expressed by writer Bob Klapisch, often argues that being just good enough to get into the playoffs is sufficient, not building the best team. The "logic", deriving from Billy Beane's famous statement that the playoffs are a crapshoot, is that the best team does not always win, luck is involved, so why build the best team?