Mike Silva raised an interesting point this morning, one that often gets overlooked in all the hullabaloo around Joba and Hughes:

Everyone talks about Joba Chamberlain as the “heir apparent” but Robertson should be just as much in the conversation. If he qualified his 12.98 K/9 would be second to only Jonathan Broxton last season. The one thing he needs to work on is his command, but that hasn’t stopped K-Rod (4.1 BB/9) from carving out a great career as a closer…..
Look, no one will ever replace Mariano Rivera. There is also no indication he is ready to retire or hang it up. At some point, unless he isn’t human, there will be a need for someone else to take the reins. Even if he is still around perhaps a break would be necessary from time to time. If you want him to pitch two innings every postseason you might need to pace him during the regular season.
Robertson gets overlooked in the conversation, but a pitcher that can miss bats like him certainly should have a bright future.

As Silva notes elsewhere in the article, if Joba and Hughes both succeed in the rotation, the Yankees will be in the market for a closer. Can Robertson be that guy? Some would watch him and wonder how a guy with just two pitches, including a fastball that averages just under 92MPH, could be so successful and strike out so many batters. However, his curveball is excellent and he hides the ball very well in his delivery on the fastball, such that it has “sneaky speed” and plays more like 94-95 than 91-93. He has the minor league pedigree and major league success, he has the stuff, and he has the K-rate. So where are the flaws? Why isn’t he seen as a future closer?

Jim Callis was asked that question in his chat this week, and said the following:

Not sure I see him as a top-notch closer, but I love him as a setup man. Yet another guy whose prospect stock soared in the Cape Cod League.

I agree with Callis, simply due to the one issue that Silva raises: his BB rate (4.74 last season) is high for a top closer. K-Rod is simply the exception that proves the rule, and he has a better repertoire than Robertson. While Robertson could improve in that area, he has always walked plenty of hitters, with a minor league BB-rate of 3.6. Even if he drops the walk rate below 4, that will still be significantly higher than most elite closers. Putting a lot of runners on base through the free pass is a dangerous prospect for a person who will often be pitching with a one run lead and the game on the line. I could see Robertson closing for some other clubs, but for a team that is used to the greatness that is Mariano Rivera, I think David will have to be satisfied with being the setup man.

The last of our guest posts was done by (sic). Some of you might recognize him from RAB as “the artist formerly known as (sic)” or from twitter as @tafkasic, and you can read more of his work at thebatshatters.blogspot.com. He took a look at the 2011 free agent market and the Yankees’ place within it. It is an entertaining read that I think you will enjoy.

The 2010-2011 offseason could be one of the most exciting Hot Stove periods in recent memory for Yankees fans. Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera will both become free agents, and the contracts of Andy Pettitte and Javier Vazquez will both expire. Additionally, Cliff Lee, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Manny Ramirez, Ted Lilly and Brandon Webb will all become free agents. Will CC and Cliff Lee stand side-by-side in pinstripes as the new New York Knick LeBron James throws out the first pitch of the 2011 season, causing the entire city of Cleveland to light itself on fire? Will they go for shorter contracts on pitchers, and pursue speedster Carl Crawford? Will they package IPK and Melky for Johan Santana? Wait…what?

There are a lot of moving parts, so the best way to attack this is to determine how much cash the Yankees will have to spend, try to hazard a guess at how much Lee and Crawford will earn on the open market, and see if there are any scenarios in which one, or both, fit into the Yankees 2011 payroll.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to be making several assumptions. First, I’m assuming that the Yankees resign Jeter for something close to $100M over 5 years. I’m also assuming the Rivera is resigned for $30M over 2 years. Finally, I’m assuming that the 2011 payroll will be in the $200-210M range. The first two are huge assumptions, obviously, but I can’t see those two leaving. The money may be different, but hopefully won’t be too much in excess of what I’m envisioning.

2011 Salary Commitments
Thanks to the invaluable tool at Cot’s Baseball Contracts, we see that New York already has $144M committed to the 2011 payroll. When you add my proposed $20M to Jeter and $15M to Rivera, and the payroll is already at $179M. From there, you have to factor in raises for Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes, who will become eligible for arbitration for the first time. Using Liriano as a comparison, it won’t be unexpected to see them both pull in $1.5M apiece. This bumps the payroll up to $182M, and I’m going to round it up to $183M to cover raises for Boone Logan, if he’s still around, and for the pre-arb guys like DRob, Aceves and others.

With a budget of $183M, the Yankees will have, at the most, $17-27M to spend.

2011 Free Agents
The premier OF free agent in 2011 will be Carl Crawford. Crawford will be 28 years old at the time of his next deal, and is the owner of a career tripleslash of .295/.335.437, an OPS of .772. This line is a bit misleading, because its weighed down by his first two seasons as a 20 and 21 year old when he posted a line of .274/.304/.364. If you remove that, he’s good for a .300/.342/.456 line. Crawford has averaged 50 steals per year over 7 full seasons and has posted phenomenal defensive numbers over the course of his career in LF.

I can’t envision Crawford earning as much as Holliday, who scored a $120M/7 year deal from the Cardinals. A better comparison might be Jason Bay, even though Crawford and Bay are as different as they come in LF. Bay received a 4 year deal worth $66M, with a $17M vesting option for the 5th year from the Mets, a total value of 83M over 5 years. Still, I expect Crawford’s lack of power to keep the value of his deal low, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him find a new home for a contract of 5 years and 65M, an AAV of 13M. His age, his defense, and his speed will work in his favor, but his lack of power ought to prevent him from earning an eight-digit deal.

Cliff Lee is the biggest starting pitcher to hit the market in 2011. He’s the owner of a career ERA+ of 109, but has seemingly put it all together to become one of the best pitchers in the game. In his last two years, he’s posted a 2.89 ERA over 455 IP, striking out 6.9 batters per nine and walking only 1.5 per nine. His K/BB ratio over that period is one of the best, 4.56. That’s superb. The risk with Lee is his somewhat low K/9, and his age. As a 31 year old free agent, it’s hard to see Lee getting more than five or six years guaranteed, despite the Phillies’ claims that he is looking for “Sabathia-type” money. Instead, I look for Lee to receive a six year deal worth $100M, an AAV of $16.67M. It’s expensive, but it is becoming increasingly rare to see bona fide aces hit the open market in free agency, and Lee’s price may go up even further if the Red Sox sign Josh Beckett to an extension.

Roster Analysis
The most obvious holes in the 2011 roster are starting pitching and LF. Here’s where it gets dicey (as if it weren’t already confusing):

Scenario 1: Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain have successful, injury-free 2010 campaigns, and are considered locks for the 2011 rotation.
In this scenario, the Yankees can simply resign Pettitte to another one-year deal worth around $11M. This would bump payroll to around $194M, and leave around $6-14M to spend elsewhere. With a full rotation, the Yankees could become players for Crawford. Signing him to a $13M AAV deal would max out the payroll for 2011.

Scenario 2: Either Hughes or Joba gets injured or very ineffective in 2010, and is slotted for a spot in the bullpen in 2011.
Here, the Yankees will only have 3 starters under contract for 2011. If they bring back Pettitte for around $11M, they’ll have $6-14M to spend elsewhere, and will need a fifth starter. The Yankees could attempt to pursue Lee, creating a formidable rotation of Sabathia-Lee-Burnett-Pettitte-Joba/Hughes. This would leave them unable to sign Crawford and completely maxed out on budget.

Scenario 3: The Andy Pettitte Era ends
If Pettitte decides to retire, or the Yankees decide to go in a different direction, then any number of things could happen. With a healthy Joba and Hughes in the rotation, the Yankees could bring in Lee for $16.67M per and sit right at the $200M threshold. This would give them a rotation of Sabathia-Lee-Burnett-Chamberlain-Hughes, and leave them with up to $10M to spend elsewhere.

Scenario 4: The Andy Pettitte Era ends and only Joba or Hughes is in the bullpen
If one of Chamberlain or Hughes is in the bullpen, or injured, then the Yankees would still need a fifth starter in addition to Sabathia, Lee, Burnett and Hughes/Joba. Here, we might see the Yankees use Zach McAllister in the 5 spot, or attempt to bring back Vazquez for $10M per year. Other alternatives include Lilly or Webb.

Scenario 5: The Twins fail to resign Joe Mauer
Twins fans, avert your eyes! If Mauer hits the market, all bets are off with Lee and Crawford. The Yankees could offer Mauer a deal of $180M over 8 years, an AAV of $22.5M. Assuming they were able to outbid the Red Sox and ink him to a deal like this, no sure thing, they would see their budget rise to around $205-207M. Accordingly, they would need Joba and Hughes to man the 3 and 4 spots in the rotation, and then attempt to get a 5th starter for cheap. Signing Mauer would also mean the end of the Jesus Montero experiment at catcher, and so the Yankees could shift him to LF and have him split time with Posada at DH. Scenarios like this are why non-Yankee fans hate us so very, very much.

Summary
Personally, I think Scenario 5 is very unlikely. I think the Twins will pony up the dough they’re about to get from their new stadium and sign him to an extension, allowing Twins fans everywhere to come back in off the ledge. That said, I can’t see the Yankees landing both Crawford and Lee. Their payroll is already precipitously high, and management shows no inclination to blow past the $210M ceiling. Of the four remaining scenarios outlined above, I’m fairly excited about #3, even though it involves saying farewell to Andy Pettitte. Signing Lee would provide them with a second ace, and a good hedge against the risk of Sabathia leaving after 2011. The best thing that can happen to the Yankees in the meantime is Joba and Hughes putting together successful 2010 campaigns, which will give the Yankees more flexibility and more options going into the 2010-2011 Hot Stove.

(I know, terrible headline. The NY Post would be proud).
As I am sure most of you know by now, Elijah Dukes was released by the Nationals yesterday. The Nats stated clearly that Elijah had not done anything wrong in terms of behavior, and that this was purely a baseball decision. The first question on the mind of many Yankee fans was, should the Yankees pursue Dukes?

Last offseason, I felt fairly strongly that the Yankees should try and trade for Elijah:

If I were Brian Cashman, I would strongly consider swinging a deal for Dukes. The Nats have a very weak farm system, so that the Yankees may be able to put together a package of pitchers enticing enough to aquire the mercurial outfielder. He would fill the Melky Cabrera role in 2009, as he is a much better bat than Melky, is not appreciably worse in the field, and runs as well as, if not better than, Cabrera. He would allow the Yankees to field offers on Xavier Nady at the deadline, and could slot into left field in 2010 when Damon and Nady leave. At worst, he would give the Yankees the ability to walk away from Matt Holliday, Jason Bay, and Manny Ramirez if the cost got too high.

I turned out to be wrong about Melky, and he put up a strong year while Dukes regressed mightily. The regression was such that if Dukes would cost prospects now I would definitely stay away from him. However, being that he is now a free agent likely to command a minor league deal or something close to the minimum, he becomes a more interesting option. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons:

Pros
1) He has plenty of talent: He had a poor 2009 that was marred by injury and a strange loss of power, but his 2008 was fantastic. I’ll let JMK at Mystique and Aura explain:

Dukes mostly destroyed the minors in the Tampa Bay system, then struggled mightily in his 2007 callup, and was shuttled off to Washington, where he rebounded to hit a line of .264/.386/.478/.864, an OPS+ of 127 in 81 games. His power numbers were excellent with .214 ISO, and he posted a strong UZR in RF (11.2), albeit in a very small sample. He snagged a few bags, too. All in all, Dukes was one of the few bright spots in Washington that year with his 2.8 WAR.

Those numbers from 2008 represent those of a star in the making. I am not really sure why he fell of a cliff in 2009, but it is clear that he has the skills and athleticism to be an above average player with the bat and adequate with the glove.

2) He projects to be better than the Yankees current options at 4th and 5th outfielder, and may be better than Brett Gardner: His projected wOBA based on an average of four projection systems is .346, significantly better than that of Jaime Hoffmann, Marcus Thames, and Randy Winn. Brett Gardner would likely remain the starter as he is a bit closer with the bat than the others and is much stronger with the glove than Dukes, but it is not hard to envision Dukes wresting the job from Brett at some point. Dukes is also a right-handed bat, so he provides the same advantages that a guy like Thames or Hoffmann does. From a purely baseball standpoint, this is a logical move that would improve the ballclub.

3) This is a good fit for Dukes: While he may not start right away, New York is likely his best shot to play in a winning environment for the first time while also affording him a reasonable chance of grabbing a starting spot. Being that Dukes has played for two awful franchises thus far, it might be a strong motivator for him to play with regularity for a winner.

4) He’s cheap, you can cut ties immediately if there is a problem, and he gives them options next offseason: Dukes will likely require less than a million dollars to sign, and can be stashed in the minors if he does not make the team immediately. Furthermore, there is no real downside here. If he acts up or plays poorly, he can simply be cut or traded without any repercussions. On the flip side, if he plays well and behaves, he can allow the Yankees to pass on an expensive left fielder such as Jayson Werth or Carl Crawford this offseason. It is the very definition of low risk, high reward.

Cons

1) His performance dropped in 2009, and he cannot stay healthy: His performance in 2009 was fairly shoddy, and he gained a reputation amongst National fans for having poor baseball instincts in the field and on the basepaths. The article quoted above from M & A suggests that pitchers were picking on him by throwing significantly more breaking pitches, and the Fangraphs data does support the idea that pitchers were cutting down on fastballs to Dukes. Furthermore, Dukes has had trouble staying on the field, with 4 stints on the DL over the last 2 seasons. Then again, if he gets hurt, the Yankees would simply be right back where they are right now.

2) There are some very serious behavioral issues. I do not want to sweep these under the rug, because Elijah has had some serious issues that include multiple arrests and prompted the Nationals to hire someone to follow him around and keep him out of trouble. Furthermore, dropping that a player with that sort of history into the shark tank that is the NY media frenzy may not be the brightest of ideas.

That said, I think that the Yankee clubhouse might be the best place for Dukes, as it is a tight-knit group filled with professionals who can set a positive example. Dukes is unlikely to disrupt such a veteran clubhouse, and as Mike Axisa explains, it might be the right place for Dukes to learn how to be a positive asset to a baseball team:

I think this is exactly the kind of support system that could help him thrive. Joe Girardi and Jorge Posada provide the tough love, A.J. Burnett and Nick Swisher would allow him to loosen up and be himself, and even guys like Alex Rodriguez and Joba Chamberlain, who’ve had their fair share of off-the-field troubles, can help him relate. I hate to bring race into it, but CC Sabathia and Curtis Granderson are two African American guys widely considered to be class acts and great people, and I can’t help but think they would be a positive influence on Dukes.

Might that be wishful thinking? Certainly. But once again, if he does something stupid and becomes a distraction, the Yankees can simply cut him. While it may add to the media circus around the Yankees, that should be irrelevant to the club, as they are certainly used to that sort of thing. I think that this is a risk worth taking.

Do you agree?

From Tom Verducci:

I know this to be true because Curt Schilling told me years ago. His theory was that the Red Sox and Yankees are so evenly matched that the team that gets the most starts out of its top five starters will be the better team. It’s amazing how right he has been….

Let’s look at the past seven years, the era in which Boston and New York essentially have been near-equal rivals, and examine the correlation between which team got the most starts from its top five and which team had the most wins….

Schilling has been right four straight years. Only once in the past seven years did the team with more starts have fewer wins, but even that occasion needs an explanation. It happened in 2004, when the Red Sox — who got an incredible 157 starts from five starters — may have had three fewer regular season wins than New York but beat the Yankees in the ALCS and won the World Series.
So determining who is better this year, the Red Sox or Yankees, becomes a very simple exercise: just forecast which team will get more starts out of its top five starters. And when you do that, the answer becomes obvious: the Yankees will be the better team.

I think Verducci is correct here. While you can argue about which rotation is more talented, it is clear that the Yankee rotation is more reliable. In the Red Sox rotation, Verducci dubs only Beckett and Lester as reliable, and even Beckett has some question marks regarding his health crop up occasionally. Conversely, CC Sabathia and Javier Vazquez are two of the more durable pitchers in the game, Andy Pettitte has remained healthy with consistency despite his advancing age, and AJ Burnett seems to have found a way to stay off the DL after years of struggling with injuries. Furthermore, the Yankees have greater depth, with 8 solid starting options, while the Red Sox have a larger drop-off after their top 6.

This study is obviously not dispositive, and the club that gets fewer starts from their top 5 starters can compensate in other areas. However, considering two similar bullpens and the Yankees superior lineup, the fact that the Yankees project to be more reliable in the rotation bodes well for their chances in the AL East.

(Just a thought: this sort of concept might be self-fulfilling. With teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, poor starters will not be given much of a chance, and the 5 guys with the most starts will usually be 5 fairly good options. In this way, counting the number of starts from the top 5 is just as much about effectiveness as health (whereas with lesser teams, the top 5 might simply be the 5 healthiest guys, because they do not have many effective options). As such, the team with the most starts from the top 5 is likely to be most effective and will rack up a larger number of wins.)

On Tuesday and Wednesday, TYU will be running four guest posts from four excellent writers. The third comes from Mark Allen, who some of you might recognize from twitter as @markelderallen. He looked at the current economic system in baseball, and the Yankees’ place within it. It is an entertaining read that I am sure you will enjoy.

Since 2003 the New York Yankees have paid over $180 million to Major League Baseball in luxury taxes. The luxury tax bills have not been sufficient to prevent the Yankees from putting a quality product on the field of play, but one has to wonder why every 7+ years the Yankees should have to offer a full year’s payroll to the “poorer” or “smaller-market” teams in the game.

The most common justification for the luxury tax threshold stems from a belief that the goal is somehow to achieve a level financial playing field among all of the teams. Words like “fairness” are often used and comparisons to football are made to seem logical and relevant. Before we can address the issue of how to create a level playing field, how to be “fair,” and how to obtain competitive balance, we must first address the greater question of why these should be league objectives.

Is there something inherently wrong with one team, be it the Yankees or any other team, generating more revenue than any other team? If the Yankees, over the course of time, as their spending power increases both in total real dollars (meaning adjusted for inflation) and relative to other teams, find a way to use their superior resources to win a disproportionate number of regular season, postseason and World Series games, is that wrong, and if so, how? Is it bad for business? Is it bad for the purity of the sport? Is it immoral?

First, let us consider whether this financial advantage is inherent or achieved. In my lifetime, and likely yours if you are reading this post, the Yankees were outspent by the Royals. Yes, twenty years ago it was the Kansas City Royals who led Major League Baseball in payroll. It bears repeating. Kansas. City. Royals. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but I find it hard to believe that both teams were putting an equal share of revenue toward payroll in the early 1990s. Since then, the Yankees have dramatically improved their revenue stream with the creation of the new Yankee Stadium (aka YSIII and NYS), and more importantly, the YES network. Today the radio rights to broadcast New York Yankees games cost more than the television rights to Kansas City Royals games, so it is unlikely the Royals will be outspending the Yankees any time soon.

This minimizes the criticism of many small-market teams that they could compete better if they were to actually reinvest their revenue into product development (such as signing draft picks, foreign prospects, and proven free agents). It does not eliminate the criticism, but the truth is that under the current system, even if they were to ramp up efforts to bring fans to the ballpark with, say, ballpark renovations or fan promotions, their revenue stream would not suddenly jump to a level at which they could financially compete with the New York Yankees.

If we agree that the financial advantage is inherent to the market due to population density, then we can agree that the financial advantage is “unfair,” but not whether fairness is relevant. Understand that Major League Baseball in its current iteration is, in real terms, more profitable than it has ever been for players, owners and team management. It is hard for any business to grow the way baseball has grown and simultaneously condemn itself. If unfair baseball is more profitable, then as a business, it is illogical to make fairness the goal.

However, when we expand our scope, we see that all sports are more profitable today, and so baseball’s growth, when understood in the context of the broader sports landscape, is less impressive. It is plausible that baseball’s growth is being slowed by the public perception of a lack of fairness or competitive balance. I say perception because the financial disadvantages of smaller market teams does not necessarily have an anti-competitive impact that would be considered unfair, even if we agree that those financial disadvantages are, within the present-day system, inevitable.

So for the purposes of discussion, we are considering the current landscape of Major League Baseball to be unfair and unbalanced, but even if we agree that this problem is intrinsic to the system in place, we may still disagree whether the problem needs correcting. I am assuming, for the purposes of discussion, that correcting this problem would result in increased demand for Major League Baseball.

Now, any economics student can tell you that, if baseball were subject to market forces, and one team, such as the Yankees, were able to produce an amount of revenue so relatively high that it prohibited another team’s ability to compete, that team would either be folded or forced to relocate to a stronger market, and in the words of Shakespeare, there’s the rub.

No matter what the product, market forces prevent competitive imbalance and dictate that, over the course of time, no profit is earned. The only way to ensure that is to allow the businesses manufacturing the product to compete against each other, and Major League Baseball does not, except when they do.

In the case of the Oakland Athletics, a move from Oakland to San Jose has been blocked because San Jose baseball fans primarily root for the San Francisco Giants, and so Oakland – a team that already competes in essentially the same geographical market – has been prevented continually from moving into an area populated primarily by fans of another team.

However, in the case of the Washington Nationals, just the opposite is true. The Nationals were previously the Montreal Expos – a team with no proximity to Washington, DC. Washington, DC and its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland were filled with fans of the Baltimore Orioles prior to 2007 when the Nationals came to DC. Orioles’ management protested the move, but was overruled by Major League Baseball, as commissioner Bud Selig was in favor of the move.

The rules that prevent most teams from moving into the geographic jurisdiction of existing teams are precisely the reason we have competitive imbalance today. If Florida could move to Manhattan, they would not only be increasing the size of their natural market, but they would be reducing the market size of two competitors who are presently dominant in the marketplace of professional baseball. Unfortunately, if the Yankees and Mets even had to blink to block such a maneuver, I’d be shocked. Both teams are too influential for the issue to subject to even be seriously broached with the owners.

Getting rid of this rule has the potential to permanently and summarily solve the problem of intrinsic financial advantages of a specific team. The luxury tax system, on the other hand, is not even a band-aid, nor is it a real acknowledgment of a problem. The Yankees are seen as having an intrinsic advantage because of the population density of their city and the lack of other teams in their geographic region, and yet the luxury tax does nothing to address this concern. If the Yankees made $10 billion in 2010, but spent only $100 million on payroll, they would pay not pay a cent of luxury tax this year. This tax is therefore effectively a safeguard for profit.

Baseball is exempt from antitrust regulations and therefore permitted by US law to operate in an anticompetitive business environment. The continued insistence on an anticompetitive marketplace has resulted in the ability of every team to make a profit – not just the teams from New York and Los Angeles. The Florida Marlins, for example, represent a metropolitan area of over 5 million people, so how is it that they recently had a team payroll that is considerably lower than John Lackey’s current salary? Ownership took money from the Yankees luxury tax payments, from ticket sales, from television and radio contracts, and they pocketed it.

If the fans of Major League Baseball are comfortable with ownership groups profiting and not reinvesting their revenue into improving their product (as EVERY other business must do to compete in the marketplace), then we should continue to operate in a system with salary restrictions, be they taxation-based or cap-based. If fans want teams to do everything they can to always put the best possible product on the field, then it is time to abandon the antitrust exemption and eliminate the geographic relocation boundaries presently in place. Let the market determine how many teams can compete, where they should situate themselves geographically, and individual teams can operate as they please in a free and open market. Then the success of each team will be the result of its merit, and that is what people are clamoring for. If that solution is unappealing to fans, then perhaps they should reconsider their stance on “fairness.”

Over the next two days, TYU will be running four guest posts from four excellent writers. The first comes from frequent RAB commenter Riddering, who some of you might recognize from Twitter as @riddering. Riddering was spurred to write by Will Leitch’s Yankees preview over at Deadspin yesterday. I greatly enjoyed reading the post, and I am sure you will too.

Early on in Spring Training this year Chan Ho Park experienced tightness in his glutes, pushing back his bullpen sessions. When he was questioned on it by various writers who cover the Yankees, he asked, “Is this big news?”

New York is different.

Over at Deadspin Will Leitch is writing a series of articles on each major league club as the regular season draws near. His article on the Yankees frames itself around the notion of Yankee Fans. They are not patient. They are not kind. They envy talents on other teams. They boast whenever possible. They are very proud. They are fans as long as the team is winning. The tears they shed after a championship only last so long before they harden themselves to conquer the next one. They trade away players who don’t please them.

–wait a minute. When did Yankee fans become George Steinbrenner? What unholy event granted the fandom his temperament and powers? I do not recall the fans of the New York Yankees trading Alfonso Soriano because he lacked the stoicism required to be part of the team. Surely had this been possible Carl Pavano would have been released rather than retained through his contract years.

Leitch confuses the Yankee machine of ownership, media, and fans. Oh, fans can be ornery—of that there is no doubt. However, there is only so much their displeasure can do. George Steinbrenner is the man who traded away certain players when they did not meet his immediate expectations. The media reports on every move the organization makes and often presents editorials on players, such as A-Rod, that can be misconstrued as being a report on the feelings of the fans.

Leitch makes another error in this article and this one more regrettable. Instead of following the data to a story, he excludes that which doesn’t confirm his profile of the typical Yankee fan. The results make the story much lesser than what could have been.

I believe that if Leitch had come into this article with a more open mind he would have found a better story to tell. That is the curious case of Yankee fans and how exactly a fan base is shaped by the World Championships its team has won.

“Until you win one, here, you’re nothing. (Unless you’re Don Mattingly.) Even if you have little to do with the outcome at all.”

Yankee fans only treasure those who win The Big One. This would be true if not for the list of players who are treasured even though they never won a championship in New York: Don Mattingly, as mentioned, Mike Mussina, Bobby Murcer, Aaron Boone, and Dave Winfield to name a few players. These men sustained excellence on the field with the Yankees or they just had the luck to run into one when the moment was grand enough to remain in people’s memories for years to come. All without taking home a championship for New York. Murcer, Mattingly, and Mussina unfortunately played in times when the Yankees weren’t conquering the world of baseball but they somehow managed to capture the loyalty of the fans. Winfield too missed out on a championship and was dubbed Mr. May by George Steinbrenner. Yet this Hall of Fame player is thought well of in his time in pinstripes. Captain Derek Jeter himself recalls Winfield being the player he idolized as a kid. Aaron Bleepin’ Boone won no ring in New York but no Yankee fan can hear his name mentioned without smiling.

Yet there’s no denying that the list of Yankee Legends with a ring is longer than the list of Yankee Legends without one.

Each team in baseball has its outstanding players, treasured by the fans and lifted up in legend by the franchise. However, when a team has won 27 championships in less than a century it becomes more difficult to extract players who were on the team for a significant period of time without winning a championship. If you’re a quality player on a team that wins the big one so very often the odds are in your favor. It’s a problem no Yankee fan would complain about but this is the chicken that came before the egg and those quick to criticize this fan base seem blind to the conundrum.

Do the Yankees have so many retired numbers because of the championships this team has won or do they have so many championships because of the players who possessed such talent to place their numbers on a wall and their likenesses in a monument?

How do you solve a problem like too many excellent players being fortunate enough to come together to use their excellence to win the ultimate prize in baseball?

We cannot determine whether or not certain Yankee figures would be so appreciated had they not won a single World Championship. Perhaps in an alternate universe there is a beloved Yogi Berra who possesses not a ring for one finger nor such a quality bat nor teammates such as Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. It’s true that if you ask a Yankee fan of any age to name their favorite Yankee you’re more than likely to hear a player who possesses a ring. Yet this is no “Aha!” moment. It’s just the likelihood of the odds from this, the winningest franchise in sports history.

There might be a few hipster Yankee fans out there who dismiss the winners and instead wear names such as Balboni or Pipp on their backs but let’s not get distracted by outliers.

Where does all this winning leave the modern Yankee fan, victim of winning circumstance and misrepresentation?

We Yankee fans have the history to know the team has won a World Series Championship every ~3.2 years since 1923. Odds were in the past that if you played in New York long enough you’d get yourself a ring but that’s no guarantee for the present or the next ten years and it’s not a value we can use to project the future of the franchise or the quality of its players. We shouldn’t take that for granted. To achieve the ultimate goal in professional baseball all it takes is a moment—sometimes. At other times a career of talent and desire cannot be enough.

Let’s not fulfill this prophecy of Yankee fans suffering from Steinbrennerism. For 2010 let’s make sure we aren’t judging Javier Vazquez based on one bad pitch amidst a career of quality innings. Let’s not come to the season and the new players with a narrative already in mind. Let’s allow it to be played and evaluated as the games unfold.

How about we show we’re better at analyzing our team than Will Leitch is at analyzing its fans?

Austin Romine has had a very quiet spring training. He showed up for pitchers and catchers, and we’ve heard very little of him since. By many accounts, Romine is the #2 prospect in the Yankee organization, and I think quite a bit underrated by everyone commenting on him. Jesus Montero is a much sexier prospect, and his sexiness diminishes Romine’s considerable accomplishments and abilities.

I remember writing about Romine right after he was drafted. My reaction was that the Yankees may have found themselves first-round talent in an obscure high school in Arizona. Romine’s scouting report – good power, a rocket arm, good mobility, and enough athleticism – sounded like a younger version of Toronto’s 1st round pick J.P. Arencibia, who has since mostly succeeded in the minor leagues. The Yankees were able to find Romine because he had little exposure to MLB scouts at his obscure high school, despite all the positive signs, including a family history in the majors.

I prefer to keep things pretty simple when I evaluate prospects. What can Romine do? He can play plus defense at catcher, and he has better hitting skills than most peers at his position. While the hitting skills may or may not develop, the defense is already there. We’ve seen with guys like Omir Santos and Francisco Cervelli that defense alone can carry a catcher to the majors, so he doesn’t have to hit a whole lot on top of that in order to be valuable. Romine might be the most certain commodity in the Yankee system.

I think that there are a number of other reasons to believe Austin Romine will be a successful major league catcher:

• The Florida State League was particularly hard on hitters this season, and Romine, the FSL Player of the Year, still hit .276/.322/.441, improving on his raw power in a much tougher environment than he was subject to in Charleston. While that line seems modest, Romine was in fact top-10 in many offensive categories, including slugging, home runs, doubles, and total bases. He was younger than his competition, and the only catcher (besides Jesus Montero) to show that kind of hitting.
• Austin Romine was only 20 years old in 2009. At the beginning of his third professional season, Romine will be 21 years old and entering Double-A. He will be one of the youngest players at his level. While Jesus Montero was a prodigy who hit for power as a teenager, we can’t expect Romine (nor Montero) to be any where near the end of his hitting development at this stage in his career. He could add even more power.
• The average catcher hit .254/.316/.408 last year. It really doesn’t take a whole lot of stick to be a big competitive advantage as an every-day catcher. We don’t really know how much Jorge Posada’s defense hurts the team, but I’d wager that if you replaced him with a plus defensive catcher, you would earn 2-3 wins at the very least. By that logic, a .750 OPS Romine could be one of the best catchers in the league, which isn’t really asking a lot of a guy who could hit 20 home runs.

Overall, Yankee fans should have a lot of confidence in their second-best hitting prospect. A year from now, I could easily foresee a scenario where Romine is a top-50 prospect in all of baseball.

This is a question I have asked before, and Bill Simmons touched on some relevant answers in a recent mailbag:

We knew something shifted in baseball a few years ago; it’s definitely happening in basketball right now. Whether it transforms the other sports remains to be seen. I do think we could reach a ceiling with performance-related formulas some day soon — if we’re not getting there already — and complicated analysis will shift to less definable quantities like injury recovery and behavior. But that’s a few years away. As I mentioned at the conference, the big challenge for sabermetricians this decade will be learning how to educate a mainstream audience in a relatable and entertaining way. Easier said than done.

There are some quantifiable areas that have yet to be fully explored, with defensive metrics still waiting for technologies such as Hit f/x to help take them to the next, more accurate level. However, there are some elements of the game, particularly offensive production and pitching, where the innovation seems to be about building upon existing ideas and adding a higher degree of accuracy rather than reinventing the wheel.

Outside of defense, where might we see some revolutionary ideas? Simmons mentions behavior and health, and I think health in particular will become a new frontier for statistical analysts, as we try and predict injuries based on workloads, pitch and swing types, and other observable factors. Teams that can find some measure of predictability in terms of player durability will find themselves at a strong advantage when it comes to building an effective, consistent team. Injury projections represent a logical evolution of the “Moneyball” philosophy that encourages teams to exploit market inefficiencies.

Where do you think the sabermetric revolution will take us next?

Nick Swisher, by all measures, had an excellent 2009. After a terrible 2008 in Chicago that lead to him being traded for practically nothing, Swisher bounced back in a big way and helped the Yankees to their 27th championship. The question now is whether he can repeat his performance. On the surface, his numbers suggest that he is not due for a major regression:

Swisher’s numbers in 2009 are similar to those from 2006 and 2007, and a look at his Fangraphs page shows that most of his other indicators (such as batted ball data) have remained consistent and steady as well. However, two recent articles suggest that if you dig deeper, you might find some reasons to believe that Swish is due for at least a bit of a regression regarding both his walk rate and his power. First, Jeff Zimmerman of Beyond The Boxscore used swing data to compute plate discipline, and then extrapolated an expected walk rate for each player. Swisher’s estimated walk rate was 12.5%, while his actual walk rate was 16%. This suggests that he is likely due for a correction in his walk rate in 2010.

Another important element of Swisher’s game, his power, may also be facing a bit of a downturn. Mike Axisa explains:

“Just Enough” homers are those that cleared the fence by less than ten feet vertically or that landed past the wall by less than the fence height (so if it’s an eight foot wall, it landed no more than eight feet deep)…..
As you can imagine, Just Enough homers are the most volatile year-to-year because they’re so close to the fence. As Rybarczyk chronicled at ESPN’s TMI blog, players who’ve hit 30 total homers in a season with at least 40% of them qualifying as Just Enoughs have seen their homer totals fall 23% on average the next season. That’s a problem for Swisher and the Yankees, because he led the American League with 14 Just Enough homers, 48.3% of his total big flies.
This isn’t the first time Swisher has been in the Just Enough danger zone either. His 14 Just Enoughs were second in the league back in 2006, exactly 40% of the career-high 35 homers he hit for the A’s. What happened in 2007? Swish regressed back to just six Just Enoughs and 22 total homers, a 37.1% drop. This isn’t to say Swisher is guaranteed to see a drop off in his homerun – and thus overall offensive – production in 2010, but it’s not looking good.

Basically, Swisher’s knack for sneaking balls over the wall last year may have overinflated his home run totals to an unsustainable level. As such, it would not be surprising to see him back around 20-25 home runs, rather than increasing past 30 as he enters his prime.

Now, stating that Swisher will lose production in the walk and home run categories sounds like pretty bad news for a three true outcomes (HR, BB, K) type player. That said, neither study sees Swish losing enough in either category to sap him of his effectiveness, and you could make the argument that a player at his age is likely to improve. Furthermore, Swisher was terrible at home last year, which is something that is uncharacteristic for players in general and Swisher in particular. While he is unlikely to repeat his road performance, the room for improvement at home should overcompensate for any loss of effectiveness on the road. In all, I expect Swisher to be very similar in 2010 to what he was in 2009, but would not be surprised to see a modicum of regression in terms of walks and power.

We have been bandying about the various options that the Yankees have at 5th starter for a while now, and I thought it might be interesting to add some numbers to the discussion. I asked people on Twitter to provide projections for each player in each role, assuming that they spent the entire season in that role. Fangraphs currently does something similar with projections, and noted sabermatrician Tom Tango is a major believer in crowdsourcing. Small sample size and sampling issues definitely apply, but I think the averaged projected performances are quite reasonable. Thank you to everyone who participated. These were the results:

As Starters (bottom row is the average)

As Relievers (bottom row is the average)

As you can see, this leaves us with the following permutations, assuming all three make the club:

So, what does this all mean? It suggests that Yankees fans believe that all three permutations will be fairly effective, and that there is really not much of a difference between the options. In fact, if you add a slightly above replacement level pitcher (say, Sergio Mitre) to option #3 to make up the innings that it lacks relative to option #1, #1 and #3 are practically identical. Even option #2, which lags a bit behind even before the replacement level innings are added, still only shows a difference of 5-6 runs over an entire season, which is equivalent to about half a win. Based on these numbers, it would make sense for the Yankees to have either Joba or Hughes in the rotation for developmental reasons. Since the computed difference to the club in 2010 would be marginal at best, the Yankees can consider developmental concerns when choosing a 5th starter.