With the announcement coming down just last night that Fangraphs has added splits to their stat pages, I thought it would be fun to look at interesting 2009 splits for each likely member of the 2010 Yankees. I looked at hitters this morning, and will now address starting pitchers, with relievers to follow at some point tomorrow. I will likely expand on some of these over the next few weeks. Remember, when you do splits, you are essentially splitting the sample, such that small sample size caveats apply.

CC Sabathia

FIP v. L: 2.43

FIP v. R: 3.69

CC against righties is a very good pitcher, but likely not a Cy Young candidate. His dominance against lefties is what makes him such a dangerous weapon. Much of the difference in performance comes from his significantly better K-rate against left handed batters (9.94 v. 7.02). I think it is interesting to note that CC would be a well above average pitcher even if he only faced righties.

AJ Burnett

Bases Empty:  WHIP 1.63, BABIP .348, FIP 4.62

Men On Base: WHIP 1.16, BABIP .250, FIP 4.03

AJ was significantly better once runners were on than he was with the bases empty, apparently buckling down once he got into trouble. However, as the BABIP suggests, he was quite unlucky with the bases empty and was very lucky once men reached. If both issues correct themselves, he should be slightly worse with runners on but will face fewer such situations due to an improvement with the bases empty.

Andy Pettitte

Home FIP: 4.67

Road FIP: 3.59

Pettitte had some major problems pitching in the new stadium, a fact that is reflected in his results. This is despite the fact that as a left-hander, he should have the tools to partially neutralize the effects of the ballpark. He gave up more line drives and more flyballs on the road, but significantly more of the fly balls allowed at home left the park (13.2% v. 5.1%).

Javier Vazquez

Bases Empty:  1.61 K/BB, .67 HR/9, 1.06 WHIP, 2.40 FIP

Men on Base: 2.12 K/BB, 1.06 HR/9, .98 WHIP, 3.34 FIP

As we have discussed at numerous points this offseason, Vazquez has, for much of his career, had difficulty pitching from the stretch. It is fascinating to note that his 2009 WHIP was lower with men on. However, is control seemed to get worse in those situations, and he gives up a lot more homers in those spots. Basically, Vazquez gives up his biggest blows with runners on base, which is why his ERA is usually worse than his FIP.

Joba Chamberlain

BABIP by Month (LD% in parenthesis)

Apr. .295 (23.9)

May .371 (25.5)

June .290 (15.5)

July .269 (23.6)

Aug. .374 (23.1)

Sep. .348 (19.3)

Rob at BBD did a study on Chamberlain’s velocity today, and found that his terrible August and September numbers could not be attributed to a loss in velocity. One possible explanation is what you see above. Joba’s BABIP in those two months was sky high, and could not be entirely explained by his LD%. It is possible that Joba was simply unlucky down the stretch.

Despite being the proud of owner of a fastball that could often challenge radar guns for accurate readings, for much of his career, A.J. Burnett has been surprisingly ineffective with his seemingly impressive mid to upper-90s heat. For instance, while with the Blue Jays from 2006-2008, Burnett’s fastball was, in total, 1.8 runs below average (-4.1 in ’06, +8.2 in ’07, -5.9 in ’08). In 2009, the lanky starter actually posted his worst fastball value mark ever, as the offering, which generally clocked in at 94.2 mph, was 13 runs below average. In the American League, only James Shields (-13.2) and Carl Pavano (-23.6) were worse, and their fastballs were significantly slower than Burnett’s. If one considers that Burnett is essentially a fastball-curveball pitcher, then this becomes an even greater problem.

But how, exactly, does Burnett manage to be so unproductive with a fastball that most pitchers would die for? According to pitch f/x data from a year ago, the movement on his fastball was solid and, of course, the velocity he can wield is above average. Thus, there is little there to indicate a flaw. Perhaps, then, the problem is not with Burnett’s fastball and, instead, the underlying issue rests on what the pie-loving right-hander is not throwing—his changeup.

In 2009, Burnett threw his changeup just 3.1% of the time. This was actually the lowest percentage of any starter in the American League with at least 180 innings under their belt. Though the best items in his tool belt are his gas and his hammer, utilizing the changeup in a way that matched his career average (5.7%) might have helped the 33-year old achieve greater success with his fastball. I say this because, based on historical pitch value data, Burnett’s best seasons with the fastball also featured an uptick in changeup employment. For instance, in 2007, Burnett’s fastball was 8.2 runs above average as he threw the change 7.1% of the time. Further, in 2005, Burnett’s fastball was 7.4 runs above average and 9.9% of his pitches were changeups. Basically, in the years Burnett utilized his changeup more often, his fastball’s efficacy increased. In the years Burnett threw his changeup less – 3.1% in 2009 (wFB of -13.0), 5.0% in 2008 (wFB of -5.9), and 4.2% in 2006 (wFB of -4.1) – his fastball’s efficacy was hindered. While I cannot prove a direct relationship between the two, it does not seem entirely far-fetched to link his fastball to his changeup, as the fastball and changeup are often dependent upon one another in order to be successful. In fact, it is the only noticeable correlation I can extract from the pitch value data (his use of the curve and slider have not varied much annually).

In 2010, I think we might see Burnett go to his changeup more often (it will be interesting to see how much Jorge Posada or Francisco Cervelli might call for it as compared to Jose Molina), as it will likely help setup his other pitches and increase the overall effectiveness of his fastball. Given the available data, it seems like a constructive idea.

Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images

According to Sports Illustrated’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees have signed 33-year old outfielder, Marcus Thames. Thames, a right-handed hitter, was originally drafted by the Yankees in 1996 and was traded to Texas for Ruben Sierra in 2003. He is a career .256/.329/.516 hitter against left-handers and appears to be the right-handed bench bat the team has been searching for (we hardly knew ye, Jamie Hoffmann). Thames hit .252/.323/.453 last year while with Detroit. Joel Sherman reports that it’s a minor-league contract and that Thames would earn $900K if he makes the team. This likely means that the Yankees are no longer interested in either Jonny Gomes or Rocco Baldelli.

Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

With the announcement coming down just last night that Fangraphs has added splits to their stat pages, I thought it would be fun to look at interesting 2009 splits for each likely member of the 2010 Yankees. I will look at hitters now, and address pitchers later today. I will likely expand on some of these over the next few weeks. Remember, when you do splits, you are essentially splitting the sample, such that small sample size caveats apply.

Jorge Posada

Home: wRC+ : 167

Away: wRC+: 101

For those that are not aware, wRC+ is the Fangraphs version of OPS+, and is likely a better measure because it corrects the OBP/SLG weighting problem inherent to OPS. Regarding Posada, I was surprised to see how stark his home-road splits were, considering that he is a switch hitter and is not a dead pull hitter. He certainly made use of the short porch, notching a 271 wRC+ when batting as a lefty and hitting the ball to right field.

Mark Teixeira

Grounders: .187/.187/.214

Fly Balls: .327/.320/.991

Liners: .747/.747/.939

According to Fangraphs, league average in these categories:

Grounders: .231/.231/.253
Flies: .217/.212/.602
Liners: .727/.723/.974

Teixeira did significantly better than average on flies and worse than average on grounders. The ground ball data suggests he needs to keep the ball in the air, but I wonder about the flyball data. It may be possible that shots that would qualify as liners in other parks are being ruled flies when they clear the wall in Yankee Stadium, such that much of his power is being shifted from the liner category to the fly ball category.

Robinson Cano

Low Lvg. FB% 30.2

Med Lvg. FB% 34.1

High Lvg. FB% 48.1

The more important the situation, the more likely Robbie was to hit a fly ball. This strengthens my belief that he is trying to do too much in those spots. It is important to note that players only have 60-80 high leverage at bats a year, such that the sample is small. As such, take this more of an observation of what happened last year than something that necessarily represents a trend.

Derek Jeter

ISO to Left: .105

ISO to Center: .082

ISO to Right: .278

Almost all of Jeter’s power was to the opposite field. That is a startlingly large split in power, and was a greater dichotomy than that in Jeter’s career ISO.

Alex Rodriguez

Low Lvg. HR/FB: 20.3

Med Lvg. HR/FB: 21.1

High Lvg. HR/FB: 45.5

A-Rod hit flyballs with about the same frequency in all situations. However, when the game was on the line, he took the ball out of the ballpark with much greater frequency. Unclutch, indeed.

Nick Johnson

Low Lvg. BB/K 1.02

Med Lvg. BB/K 1.29

High Lvg. BB/K 1.42

Johnson did will in high leverage spots overall, but I found his increased patience in those spots fascinating. When the situation was important, Johnson became more likely to strike out, but also more likely to take a walk.

Nick Swisher

Home ISO: .168

Away ISO: .316

Most of Swisher’s power came on the road, despite the New Yankee Stadium being a homer haven. If he can maintain something close to his road performance while bumping his home power a bit, he could find himself at 35 or more home runs.

Curtis Granderson

Home HR/FB: 8.9%

Away HR/FB: 15.7%

Granderson simply did not get much bang for his buck on fly balls in Comerica. His road numbers were significantly better than his home numbers, particularly against lefties, giving hope that he might return to the superstar that he was in 2007 once he gets out of the large ballpark in Detroit.

Brett Gardner

wRC+ v. L 115

wRC+ v. R 93

Gardner actually played fairly well against lefties. If he continues that and Granderson is not able to turn it around against lefties, might Randy Winn become the platoon caddy for Granderson rather than Brett?

Randy Winn

wRC+ v. R 102

wRC+ v. L -9

Of course, if Winn cannot turn this around, he will not be caddying for anybody. He has pretty solid career numbers against lefties, so this seems to be an anomaly, but he did hit significantly fewer line drives and more fly balls against lefties, both bad signs.

Last night, while you were all watching the Super Bowl (congrats to the Saints), I posted part of an essay I wrote as a college junior about the Homeric tradition in regards to baseball. This is the last part of that essay, which focuses directly on the film “The Natural”, which I’m sure you’ve all seen, and the character of Roy Hobbes.

The basic premise of this portion of the essay: Hobbes makes the transition from an Achilles-like character, one seeking fame and fourtune, to an Odysseus-like character, who is searching for his home and a place in the world. For the record, “mythos” means mythology in a much broader sense; think of it as mythology as a way of life and a way of thinking. Anyway, I hope you enjoy:

It is through his characters and story structure that Barry Levinson relays a Homeric message in his 1984 film “The Natural” which stars Robert Redford, Glenn Close, and Wilford Brimley, among others. Redford plays the main character of the film, Roy Hobbes.

Through Hobbes, the most Homeric elements show themselves. In the beginning of the film, he is an Achilles figure searching for fame, fortune, dominance, and immortality. By the end of the film, though, he has, through the events of the film, transformed, rather evolved, into an Odyssean character who is not searching for glory bur rather home, whatever that may be.

First, though, I will discuss the story structure and elements of the film before going into the characters and their Homeric tendencies. Overall as a film, it attempts to create a new American adaptation of Homer and “a vital American mythos that penetrates a people’s hearts and minds” (Curtin, 225). Curtin’s article stresses the importance of “mythos” in his paper and how it fits with “The Natural.” He quotes from Laszlo Versenyi’s essay “Man’s Measure: A study of the Greek Image of Man from Homer to Sophocles:” “Mythos, in Homer’s time, did not mean fable in our sense of the word; the tale was not something mythical, fabulous, fictional, and therefore untrue. Myth meant simply word of mouth” (Curtin, 226). This is important to “The Natural” for a variety of reasons.

Though the story is creating a type of new American myth, it much more fits into the ancient definition of the word, rather than the modern one. This is because of the visual nature of the film, and the fact that it is written and shot rather than told. Because it is on film, there is no way for anyone to dispute what happens in the story. People could speculate about off screen events, but that is useless when discussing film. “Like the Greek epics, in medias res” (Curtin 229) is how “The Natural” begins. Like The Iliad beginning with a fight between Agamemnon and Achilles, “The Natural” begins in the middle of things. All we see is a shot of Redford sitting at a desolate train station. Like the reader of The Iliad, the viewer of “The Natural” has no idea what is really going on until a little later. Because they start in the middle of things both stories must take careful time to explain things later on. Though it comes a little sooner with the film, both mediums do have a good deal of exposition.

Then, there are the similar plot points that occur in both Homer’s works and Levinson’s. First is the fact that Roy Hobbes leaves his home in the farmland to go to far off Chicago—read: Troy—to try out for the team there, read: fight in the Trojan War. At the onset, he is Achilles. Though he claims he will write Iris, the Glenn Close character and his romantic interest, so she can come out to Chicago and they can be married, his main goal is to impress the scouts and make the Majors, with the eventual goal to be a baseball immortal. He tells Harriet Bird, the woman who eventually shoots him and becomes his downfall, that when he walks down the street, he wants people to say “There goes Roy Hobbes…the best there ever was.” Though at this point, the film seems quite Illiadic, it will soon take a turn towards being Odyssean.

Bird soon shoots Hobbes and this sets him on a path that he never intended to take. Quite frankly, he embarks on an odyssey of his own to get back to the game he loves. Later on, we learn that he has been away from the game for sixteen years, close to the twenty years that Odysseus spends getting back to Ithaca. That overarching plot is very Homeric in and of itself, but there are also various episodes through the film that carry with them Homeric tinges. One such thing is during one of Hobbes’s first games with the Knights. Having been relegated to being a benchwarmer, he can only watch as the team’s star, Bump Bailey played by Michael Madsen, does not hustle for a ball, much to the chagrin of Brimley’s character, Pop Fisher, the team’s manager. When Bailey comes to the dugout after the inning is over, he and Pop have a confrontation. It is an interaction that is “comically paralleling the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles at the very start of The Iliad” (Curtin, 234). Though this scene is not intended to mock The Iliad in any way, it is a fun play on the scene from Book One. An earlier point of similarity is while Hobbes is on the train to Chicago. There he encounters “the Whammer” who is a Babe Ruth like figure (Curtin, 230)—he not only bears a striking resemblance to the Sultan of Swat but is also regarded by many to be the best in the game, as Ruth was and still is.

The two eventually confront each other, with Hobbes’s “agent” claiming that the young lefthander can strike Whammer out with three pitches. Hobbes eventually does and this episode is reminiscent of Odysseus’s homecoming when he is the only one to be able to shoot his own bow. What this means to say is that in a feat of strength, Hobbes is the rightful winner, just like Odysseus was in his story when finally shooting his bow and revealing himself as the rightful king. Curtin describes this as “a new hero” and king arriving and deposing the old one (Curtin, 230). Even though Odysseus is technically the old king, I feel the comparison works well here because of the singularity of the event. Odysseus is the only one who can use his bow and, as far as we can tell, Roy Hobbes is the only one who can get the best of the Whammer.

There are two times when we see the New York Knights (the Achaians) are struggling as a ball club. Both times occur when Roy (Achilles) is absent from the team. When Roy first gets called up from the minor leagues to play with the Knights, the team is floundering and at the bottom of the standings. The second time is when Memo Paris, played by Kim Basinger, seduces Roy and gets him to focus on her more so than baseball. Both times, “Achilles” is absent. Though they are absent for different reasons—Achilles is upset about a fight with Agamemnon, Roy is first not there to begin with and second, focusing on something rather than what he should be—what is important is that their respective sides suffer in their absences.

The character studies of “The Natural” also help move along the Homeric theme of “The Natural.” The most appropriate comparison is that of Roy Hobbes to Achilles first and eventually Odysseus. One important Achillean feature to Roy Hobbes is the fact that he, like Achilles, has a special “tool” which helps identify him. “Achilles has his wondrous armor” and “Roy has his bat” (Curtin, 230). Roy’s bat, which he calls “Wonderboy,” like Achilles’ shield is singular to him and sets him apart from his teammates—at least for a time. While each Achaian does not have a special shield or piece of armor like Achilles gets, the Knights eventually adopt the lightning bolt that is on the barrel of Roy’s bat by turning it into a shoulder patch, helping propel them towards victory. Also like the shield of Achilles, this bat is a gift to Roy: a gift, his second, his talent is the first one, (Curtin, 230) from the gods. Roy forges the bat from the tree under which his father died. The night his father died “a thunderbolt is hurled down out of the sky, splitting the…tree” (Curtin, 229). When the audience gets the first bit of exposition in the story—when Roy is on his way to Chicago, that is—we see him as a young man with the dream of becoming a baseball player. As his father has reminded him, he has all the “talent” and has worked hard. His goal is to not only become a baseball player but to be the best baseball player there ever was—an immortal in a sense. While he may one day die, if he achieves this status, his name will live on forever. This is the path Achilles also takes; he forgoes a life of literal immortality with lack of fame for a life of mortality that brings with it glory. While Roy’s objectives in the film will eventually change due to outside circumstances, he and Achilles share the common base of searching fame and glory. Roy’s “only desire,” like that of Achilles, “is to loose those extraordinary powers, expressing his talent, so that he might win fame among men, might become a baseball ‘immortal’” (Curtin, 231). However, the aforementioned events derail Roy Hobbes’s plans and he must re-think his role in the world.

No longer can he seek the fame and glory he once sought after being shot by Harriet Bird in her hotel room. It is because of this that he must make the shift from being an “Illiadic to an Odyssean character” (Curtin, 229). The most Odyssean quality to Roy is the fact that he has had to spend a great deal of time getting back to where he belongs. For Odysseus, it is twenty years sailing around the ancient Mediterranean trying to get back to Ithaca. For Roy, it is sixteen years of kicking around in either obscurity or the minor leagues to get back to “the show.” There is, however, a main difference to their stories and that is the fact that we do not see, like we do with Odysseus, the journey Roy takes to get back. We see the before “exile” as Curtin describes Hobbes’s absence on page 232 and 233 and the after—when he makes it to the Knights—but we never see what happens in between. Regardless of whether or not that journey is seen, it is paramount to the character development of Roy. Before he is lured and shot by Harriet, Roy has the “glory-and-fame-seeking consciousness of the Illiadic characters.” After his horrific ordeal and subsequent exile from and journey back to baseball, read: Ithaca and home, that consciousness “gives way to [a] long, arduous shedding of that…false consciousness” (Curtin, 232).

Like Odysseus, Roy knows that glory and fame must now come after merely finding a place to fit in and a place to coming home. But those similarities Roy shares with the King of Ithaca, while important, are not the most crucial thing when looking at Roy as a Homeric character and as comparable to Odysseus. The most important thing for both of them is that “neither becomes a comic-book hero, without flaws or weaknesses, but rather a hero of the classic-Greek mold: fully human in capacity to surrender to appetite and ego, but more than normally human in capacity to rise, in crucial moments, to heights that most men never attain” (Curtin, 232).

Both Roy and Odysseus are prideful men who fall victim to various trappings along the way. It seems that the main thing that traps Roy and Odysseus are women. Roy is lured and injured by Harriet and seduced into playing poorly by Memo while Odysseus is lured and tempted by Circe and the Sirens. The fact that Roy and Odysseus are men who can be lured by the physical, women, and the abstract, their egos, creates the most important link to Homer and the classic Greek myths from “The Natural.” Roy fits the bill of two of Ancient Greece’s most famous heroes and in him, Barry Levinson has molded Achilles and Odysseus into a single, new, American character who represents the heroic mythos that was essentially missing in American culture.

I was discussing hockey with a friend of mine, and an interesting point came up. Here is a chart of the top 10 scorers in the National Hockey League, and their draft position.

This is fascinating to me. The process of scouting, drafting, and developing NHL players has led to a near-monopoly of the league’s top scorers concentrated among the first few teams in the draft. Teams have been able to take 18 year-olds and correctly determine, for the most part, who will and won’t be a star.

I don’t think that I need to provide a graph to tell you that baseball’s situation was dramatically different. The top parts of every draft are filled with failure – look at Brad Lincoln, Luke Hochevar, Matt Bush, Delmon Young (yes, I’m labeling him a failure), Bryan Bullington. And it still gets harder for teams as you get further in the draft. And baseball teams get to wait for players to go through 2 or 3 college years if they want to draft someone. NHL teams draft at 18 almost exclusively.

This is why I oppose hard slotting systems for draft picks. In hockey, you can rank the top players pretty clearly. In baseball, almost all players are worth more to certain teams than they are to others. The Braves may so certain that they want a guy that they’ll take someone whom no one else will take for 20 picks. That player’s value will probably be below-slot.

I don’t have any answers for why the NHL draft is so easy for teams and why the MLB is unbelievably difficult. Hockey is a much more physical/athletic sport, which makes it easier to identify who will be successful. But at the same time, hockey is not football, and contains a lot of non-physical elements. Injuries have a lot to do with it too, as do the long haul of minor league development. I guess I don’t really have much of a point in mind, other than to stop and stare at the astounding differences between the two leagues.

In the Spring Semester of 2008 at the University of Connecticut, I took what is called a “capstone” course. Basically, it’s a seminar course and my entire grade was based on one research paper that I wrote. The course dealt with the Homeric tradition (that is, The Iliad and The Odyssey). For my paper topic, I chose comparing those classics to two “contemporary” American films: Barry Levinson’s The Natural and John Ford’s The Searchers.

Both films are excellent examples of their respective genres (baseball and the western). They also have things in common with the plot and character structure of Homer’s work from thousands of years ago. What follows is the portions from my paper (I got a B) that deal with using baseball as the sort of “Americanized” version of Homer’s settings.

Notes: pay no attention to the page numbers; those were obviously for citations from articles/books that you guys most likely won’t have.

That takes care of the West but what about baseball? What makes the American pastime right for the Homeric tradition? Perhaps it is because in the American culture, it is referred to as the “National Pastime” and is a game that is more or less central to America only. Though it is growing in popularity in Asia, the Caribbean, and surprisingly enough Australia, baseball is generally a game that revolves around the American sphere of influence and the American homeland.

Because of that, many feel that it is incredibly important to know baseball to know America. In his essay about “The Natural,” Kevin Thomas Curtin quotes Jacques Barzun who remarked: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” (227). Clearly, there is some link between the game and the American condition. That is why director Barry Levinson used a baseball backdrop for his rendition of “The Natural.” Though the film is based upon Bernard Malmud’s novel, to compare the two “would be a complete distraction” because “the film makers clearly set out something very different” (Curtin, 225).

That something different is the inclusion of a Homeric structure and Homeric characters that appears in the film. But again, why baseball for Homer? That is because with baseball, there is a sort of mythology that does not seem to be there with most sports. That could be because people focus on that mythology more but regardless of that notion, it is worth examining. In an interview with Joshua Siegel included in The National Baseball Hall of Fame’s “coffee table book” entitled Baseball As America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game, Levinson says that “[he’s] always loved the mythology of baseball” (228). On the next page of the interview, Siegel comments that the film’s “villianess,” Harriet Bird, says to the hero, Roy Hobbes, “if Homer were alive today, his heroes would be baseball players” (229).

Why, though? That is because we live in a time and an age in which warriors are relatively disconnected from popular view. In Homer’s time, the warriors were blended into every day society and it was about them that people spoke. Now we “support the troops” but we generally do not sit around recounting their actions and making mythic stories out of their endeavors. Instead, it is our heroes on the diamond that we discuss. Curtin remarks “In his time, Homer’s audience was as intimate with the fates and feats of Achilles and Odysseus as most are today with those of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams” (Curtin, 228).

Baseball works in telling a Homeric hero’s story because, simply, people will know it. Though it may seem odd to see men who hit, throw balls, and play a game for a living as heroes, it is nonetheless true. They are more than just our topics of discussion. Baseball players have become to some—mostly males—cultural “landmarks” of sorts and have assumed the roles of thereof; they have become our legendary heroes.

The other part of baseball’s inclusion of the Homeric is also the fact that for the beginnings of the 20th century, baseball was a game that was broadcast on the radio. It was an oral game rather than the visual game it became with the advent of television. “The Natural” touches on this by using a radio voiceover for various portions of the film. This is the ultimate in the Homeric. In their time, The Iliad and The Odyssey would be told to people via word of mouth, they would be sung and spoken rather than written down or acted out. The classic age of baseball is one that revolved around the radio and an oral tradition. “As Earl Wasserman remarked…baseball constitutes an historical pageant made present and alive each time one person talks to another about the game; thus the history of baseball…forms a special mythos…directly expressive of the American grain” (Curtin, 227).

That is quintessentially Homeric. Baseball and its portrayal are perfect grounds in which to sow a Homeric story.

Via Bryan Hoch (MLB.com), here’s Nick Swisher on joining the Yankees:

“I’ve been bouncing around from team to team the last couple of years, but, knock on wood, hopefully I’ve found a home,” Swisher said. “I really feel honored to be part of this tradition.”

Earlier this winter, there were reported trade rumblings involving Swisher, however, at the time, those rumors seemed rather unbelievable given the Yankees unsettled outfield situation and Swisher’s strong 2009 season. When one examines Swisher’s historic and projected production relative to his contract, and takes into account his age, as well as his clubhouse presence, I think it is safe to say that the right fielder has, indeed, “found a home” in the Bronx.

Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

From ESPN’s Keith Law:

Joel Sherman of the New York Post wrote Friday that the Dodgers were disappointed in how slow Hudson was, even referring to him as “Slow-Dawg,” a play on his “O-Dawg” nickname. This struck me as incredibly funny, since I saw Hudson a lot when we were both in Toronto, and he was never a plus runner, stealing 19 bases in three and a half years — yet when he was on first base, pitchers would throw over to hold him with absurd frequency. And from talking to people with Arizona, I know they noticed the same phenomenon when Hudson played there. Unfortunately, I think the cause here is that Hudson looks the part of a speedy, low-power middle infielder, and scouts and coaches are making assumptions that just don’t bear out in reality. He’s not fast, he’s never been fast, and anyone who files a report on him with a grade of 50 (average) or better for his running speed has made a bad evaluation.

While Law is discussing Orlando Hudson here – the “Slow-Dawg” – he might as well be referring to Robinson Cano. Though Cano is not viwed as a “low-power middle infielder,” he is often mistakenly perceived as having “good speed,” although, as Law says, such a characterization just does not “bear out in reality.” I remember Joe Buck referencing Cano in this way throughout the World Series and wondered how, exactly, Buck came to that conclusion given Cano’s poor stolen base numbers – 17 steals in 38 attempts – and decidedly low speed score (3.6). To be fair to Buck, even I admit that I was surprised at how sluggish Cano was on the bases when he first arrived on the scene in 2005.

Perhaps stereotypes regarding infielders as well as stereotypes pertaining to appearance are to blame. While Cano is a powerful middle infielder, he is, still, a middle infielder. Thus, we assume that he is faster, for whatever reason, because middle infielders just are that way inherently. Plus, Cano is slim and “looks” athletic, so perhaps that visual is what makes many people think he is faster than he really is (conversely, when we look at Prince Fielder, we do not consider him to be fast, so, assuming the opposite – thin equals fast – is often the case). In addition, though I am hesitant to say this in fear of a backlash, there are longstanding ethnic and racial stereotypes which distinguish minorities as “fast runners,” so I wonder if this is also implicitly at play with guys like Robinson Cano and Orlando Hudson. This is a difficult issue to discuss, but, as many academics have noted, it is a characterization that exists.

It is a mixture of these things – sometimes one or the other, sometimes all three – that likely influence our perceptions of speed in baseball. Orlando Hudson and Robinson Cano are just two examples of players that are “surprisingly slow” because of these preconceived thoughts. It is an interesting issue to consider the next time we watch a game.

Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

From baseballprojection.com, courtesy of RLYW:

Normally, projections do not forecast the same range of wins and losses as will happen in real life. We expect that a few teams will win 95+ games, but are not sure exactly which ones, and if you pick any one team (Yankees excepted) the odds are they won’t win that many games.

But yet I’m projecting 99 wins for the defending world champions. I think this is the highest projection I’ve ever had, for any team. I had them at 97 last year and they beat it by 6. I like the moves they have made in the last year. Curtis Granderson is a tremendous player who helps on offense and defense (at least against righties). Javier Vazquez was one of the best pitchers in baseball last year, and Nick Johnson is OBP Jesus. The Yankees are insanely talented, even more so than usual. The breaks of the season could mean that Boston wins the East, or even Tampa Bay, but the talent spread is so huge in this division that Baltimore and Toronto have basically no chance.

Wow. CHONE, for those who do not know, is one of the handful of widely respected projection systems, and a “highest ever” ranking for the 2010 iteration of the Yankees is pretty amazing. As a stated last week, projections are simply estimates based upon expected performance, and the amount of variance typical to a Major League season makes them more suited for use as a broad guide than for precise evaluations. That said, this simply confirms my belief that on paper, the 2010 Yankees project to be about as good, if not better, than the 2009 version.

This brings me to a question for debate. Do you think that Brian Cashman’s moves this offseason made the Yankees better or worse than they were when the 2009 season ended?