The Yankees are 2nd in the American League in runs scored. They are 1st in OBP, 2nd in Slg%, 1st in walks, 3rd in home runs, and hold the league’s best record. Generally, run scoring would not be a cause for concern. But I don’t think that I’ve been alone over the past month or so among Yankee fans in worrying about the Yankee offense. I ran the numbers and came up with this relatively disturbing graph:

This graph contains two elements. First, I took a 3-unit moving average of runs scored each game and charted it over 64 periods. Second, I drew an exponentially smoothed trend line to more clearly demonstrate the decline in scoring. The trend is disturbingly clear: the Yankees began the season looking like a league-leading, dominant offense, and have since scored runs in fits and starts, and look much more like a below average offense. Even worse: the moving average has stayed consistently low since about the beginning of May. We’ve seen sputters, but no consistent offensive recovery.

The culprits should be pretty clear. Mark Teixeira is hitting .224/.342/.399. Alex Rodriguez is hitting .282/.354/.466. Curtis Granderson is hitting .240/.324/.447. Derek Jeter is hitting .280/.334/.419. The Yankees have been playing one of Randy Winn, Ramiro Pena, or Kevin Russo every day for some time now. Despite strong performances from Brett Gardner, Jorge Posada and Nick Swisher, and a career season from Robinson Cano, the Yank’s cast of characters just doesn’t look like a particularly strong offense.

I’m generally in favor of the radical solutions, so I’d like to propose pretty big lineup shift. If I were Joe Girardi, my healthy lineup tomorrow would look like this:

LF Brett Gardner
RF Nick Swisher
DH Jorge Posada
2b Robinson Cano
3b Alex Rodriguez
1b Mark Teixeira
SS Derek Jeter
CF Curtis Granderson
C Francisco Cervelli

Marcus Thames and Juan Miranda can platoon at DH once Thames is healthy and Posada looks good enough for the team to ditch Chad Moeller.

I understand that egos and lineup politics make this impossible, but the Yankees should still do it. The Boston Red Sox are charging hard, and the Tampa Bay Rays are right there with the Yankees. One team in this division will miss the playoffs, and there’s a very good chance that the unlucky team will miss it by a margin of one or two games. The Yankees owe it to themselves and their fans to field the best possible lineup, which means replacing slumping legacy players with the best hitters possible.

If Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Mark Teixeira hit like their old selves, then they should be restored to their traditional spots in the lineup. However, after nearly three months they are still sputtering. Jeter and Rodriguez are aging players who may never recover, and it could be time to starting getting them used to a diminishing role on the team. Mark Teixeira may just be in the middle of a down year, but for now he’s taking up a valuable RBI spot without doing a whole lot to help the team.

I like instant replay. I don’t like long games. The biggest criticism of adopting an instant replay system in baseball is that it would take too long. For home run calls, we regularly see umpires disappear under the Stadium for five or more minutes at a time to check a call. Games are already very long, and managers asking to replay bad calls would take quite a bit of time.

My solution would be the “challenge flag” system. A manager would get two challenge flags per game. At any point in the game, the manager can use a challenge flag to dispute any call – balls and strikes, out at first, foul ball, home run, whatever. At no other time could umpires even elect to review the tape.

I like this system for a few reasons. First off, it expands instant replay to covering calls all over the field. Home run mistakes are nice, but they are infrequent. Umpires make basic human mistakes all the time because they can’t see a full picture of the action. High definition television cameras, on the other hand, see pretty much anything these days. Still, a call on the field could only be overturned if there is conclusive evidence that a mistake was made.

If a disputed call takes five minutes to check, then the game is only delayed by 20 minutes maximum. I also don’t think that managers will necessarily use their challenge flags every game. Because you only get two, it could be useful to save at least one for a major disputed call, and not waste it on a perceived blown call at 1st base with 2 men out and no one on. And Joe Girardi throwing a flag on the field is fun and dramatic, and adds a little bit to managers arguing with umpires.

Its silly to let human mistakes by umpires dramatically derail the game. They only have two eyes, and make mistakes all the time. The only downside that I can think of, besides slightly longer games, is that managers might use their challenge flags to delay a game and get a reliever warmed up. Sure, this might be an issue, but managers have all sorts of game delaying tactics that they use for the same purpose anyway. We saw it last night as Joba waited for Rivera.