Umm.... 7 games against KC, 8 against Tampa Bay, 3 against San Francisco 7 against the White Sox and 6 against the Orioles don't count as basement dwellers. Come on man, the only quality team they've played since the June 21st is Anaheim and that was in New York. Like I said in my earlier post we'll all find out what the Yankees are made of in the next 3 weeks. My bet is that they fall apart and crumble like they did previous to June.
No doubt the next three weeks are the tough part of the schedule but even that isn't as tough as you make it out to sound and that's because there are no great teams in baseball this year. It is in the Yankees hands to win or lose and at least they don't need to depend on anybody else for help.
So you are saying that the Yankees are beating the teams they are supposed to??? I really dont understand the argument. Should the Red Sox record fall under a microscope because they play the same games against the same teams as the Yankees????? Just like in all sports, if you beat the teams you are supposed to beat, you will be at or above .500. When you beat the teams that are as good as you, you contend for your division title. When you beat the teams better than you with the rest of it, then you win the division. This is the time of year where we find out about all teams. Brewers have sure fallen after their hot start, havent they? Oh yeah, the Mets have too. Remember the Phillies horrible start??? Where are they now??????? It all comes around. except of course for Pittsburgh, KC, Tampa Bay and Washington who are horrible all year.
I agree with Rich that the Yankees have played mostly bad teams lately. It's not like it's a debatable point. However, I don't agree that they'll fall apart. I think the Yankees stay in it, even with the schedule getting much tougher. I think when August ends, they'll either be leading the wild card or within 3 games.
3 games vs Texas, 6 vs TB, 3 vs KC, 3 vs Chi, 6 vs Bal Nope. the Sox have played nothing but top tier teams.
In that same span, since June 1st (62 games), the Sox have played the following: NYY (3), Oakland (4), Arizona (3), Colorado (3), San Fransisco (3), Atlanta (3), San Diego (3), Seattle (6), Teas (4), Tampa Bay (6), Detroit (3), Toronto (4), Kansas City (3), CWS (4), Cleveland (4), Baltimore (3), Anaheim (3). Those teams have a combined .504 W%. If you take away the 12 weakest games, (6 vs TB, 3 vs SF, 3 vs KC, teams the Yankees have played 18 times in that span), the W% of the remaining 50 opponents shoots up to .521. The Sox played a MUCH tougher schedule since June 1st than the Yankees.
I'm not arguing that the Sox haven't played these teams either but what I'm saying is there is a reason for A) The Yankees getting back into the WC race B) The Yankees having the best record since early June C) All the so called experts jumping back on the bandwagon That reason is they've had arguably the easiest schedule since mid June. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a team that has had an easier schedule in the last month. I'm not saying they're dead or they're not going to m,ake the playoffs. My prediction is they aren't as good as Detroit, Cleveland, Anaheim and Minnesota but I'm not an expert nor do I claim to be.
The reason is they won more games then anybody else in that time frame. Didn't Boston lose a series to KC? Didn't all those other supposed good teams lose series to weak teams too? Didn't Detroit go 1-9 there in one stretch and just lose a series to TB today? Like I said, the reason is they just won more games..simple. If you think there is a big difference between the good teams and the bad teams, there isn't (in general).
Hey, as long as we're allowed to cherry-pick... what is the Yankee opponent winning percentage over that period if you take away THEIR twelve weakest games? Check this out: Over 62 games... a record of 30-32 is a .484 winning %... lower than the level of competition the Yankees face. Over 62 games... a record of 32-30 is a .516 winning percentage, greater than the W% of the Sox opponents over that span. That's a two-win swing for any given team. It's not like they're miles apart. But fine... the Sox played some tougher opponents... and played .500 ball for two months. Even with those games against KC, Texas, Chicago, TB, SF, etc... they played .500 ball. Which means they didn't take care of their easier opponents the way they should have. The Yankees did, for the most part. The difference the Yankees have made up in the standings since June 1st cannot be accounted for by the difference in opponent W% alone. Which gets to the point: Yes, the Yankees have had an easier schedule. Yes, it is going to get more difficult. But the schedule alone is not WHY the Yanks did well and gained ground, and it certainly isn't a foregone conclusion that they're going to do poorly and lose ground. Of all the factors to consider, I'd put that reasonably far down the list.
Reasons. Plural. Why the Yankees were able to gain ground: Variance - the Yankees were particularly awful earlier in the year in terms of how their actual record matched up to their expected W/L. You would expect that to normalize over the course of the long season, and we have witnessed that correction to some degree. I believe the largest deficit the Yanks faced in the adjusted standings this season was six games. Bottom line, over the season, these things average out, and we're starting to see some of that. Player performance - regardless of who they were facing earlier in the year, players like Abreu, Damon, Matsui, Melky, and Cano were underperforming their career norms by quite a lot. Cano and Melky don't have the history that Abreu or Matsui do, but all of those players were outside of the realm of normal player variance. This is similar to Lugo's horrid slump and Manny's lack of production earlier in the year, except it was happening to almost half of the Yankee lineup, and it happened at a time where the Yanks, unlike the Red Sox, didn't have a healthy and effective pitching staff to pick them up. Roster moves - Picking up Clemens improved the team. Melky playing CF every day improved the team. Believe it or not, Giambi and Doug M. getting hurt improved the team. Getting rid of Kei Igawa improved the team. Bringing him back hurt the team. Getting rid of him again improved the team. Health - Earlier in the year, the Yanks didn't know what they had, and that might've played into their poor start. The Yanks had 3/5 of their season-opening starting rotation down at the same time (Wang, Moose, and Pavano). Matsui had a slow start with a hamstring injury. Damon had leg cramps and back problems and is only just now getting healthy. These injuries were all within the span of a few weeks. They were patching a team together, and were throwing starters out there that couldn't go more than 4-5 innings, which obviously diminished the effectiveness of the relievers. Now, I can't pin an exact number as to just how many wins or losses these factors caused. And this isn't to say that there won't be other, similar factors in the future that impact this team's record. But if I were placing bets, I think the things I just mentioned had more of an impact than the the record of the teams they faced. Because remember, earlier in the year, the Yanks couldn't beat the D-Rays. The Yankees had a sub-.500 record. Their post ASB record might be magnified because their opponents have been shittier recently... but the best record in baseball since June 1st isn't owed SOLELY to the fact that they've faced sub-par opponents. They've put up close to a .700 winning percentage... that isn't JUST because the teams they've faced have been shitty.
The reason I took out the 12 games is because the Yankees played just 12 of 58 games against 4 teams who DRAMATICALLY skew they overall winning percentage of their opponents. Statistically, I suppose the right way to do it would be to weight each opponents record based on how many times they played them, but since I A) don't know exactly how to do that, and B) don't care to put that much effort into it, I simply removed the "outliers" if you will. In other words, 4 teams that the Yankees only played about a quarter of their games against in that span shouldn't be able to raise the collective winning percentage by 38 points. That's fine, but we're not talking about a 62 game span here. We're talking about approximately 1500 games, representing the total number of games played by the opponents. So over 1500 games, a .516 winning percentage is a record of 774-726, while a .484 winning percentage is a record of 726-774. That's a difference of 49 games, and that IS a big difference. No, it's closer to .455 and .521 when you weight the percentages like I said above.
But you didn't remove the outliers in an objective fashion. You removed the "high-end" outliers for one team and the low-end outliers for the other... which accounted for just under 20% of your data pool. Might as well talk about how if the Red Sox won all their one-run games and the Yankees lost all their one-run games, the Sox would have a twenty game lead. Look, if you want to judge the Yankees' performance by winning percentage... if you claim that strength of schedule is a real thing and has predictive value... you have to take it or leave it. As a whole. You can't parse it so it fits into your neat little package where the good teams the Yanks played don't count as much as the bad teams and vice versa for the Sox because of too much deviation from the median. There aren't enough teams to make that a statistically valid adjustment. Personally, I think this is just one of the flaws with judging a team by its schedule based on its record at the time, since records are dynamic. The Blue Jays have been hot, and are now over .500... but what if they weren't when they were playing someone else? A hot team that's still under .500 can be harder to beat than a slumping team above .500. Look at the Sox and Yanks' performances during this stretch, and compare the results to the teams' winning percentage at the time. The Sox lost a bunch to KC. The Yanks took two of three from the Angels. The Sox lost two of three to the Yankees in early June, who - at the time - were under .500... did they lose a series to a bad team or not? These wins and losses over 62 games aren't guaranteed to come from where they're "supposed" to come from. They're dynamic probabilities. Which brings me back to the point that opponent winning percentage is not a very accurate predictor of performance. No, it's not. It's actually 48 games over 1500 games (the total pool)... which is a twenty-four games swing. But it's the eqivalent of a two-game swing for EACH TEAM over the 62-game span. The point was to show you how few games it takes over the 62-game span (which IS the span we were talking about) to drastically change a winning percentage for any given team. And there is no valid reason to weight the percentages that way... unless, of course, you have an agenda and already want to see a certain outcome. Hey, if you take away all the games where the Red Sox didn't score as many runs as their opponents, they'd be undefeated!
Yes all those things you stated are true but I'm not talking about any other team. I'm talking about the Yankees. It was insane to think that the Sox were going to win 120 games or whatever they were on pace to win. The Mariners are playing as good as anyteam in baseball but I'm not comparing them to the Yanks and it was also proven this past week that the Red Sox might not be the best team in baseball after the Angels put a hurtin on them. Maybe the Mariners have a tougher divisional opponent than the Yankees. Everyteam goes through slumps but what the Yankees did at the begining f the season was not look good against good teams. They looked bad, they look good now but my thinking as to why is because they played bad teams. I guess everybody will find out the btruth in the next 3 weeks and hopefully the Yankees prove me right. If not..... I've been wrong before.
That's funny coming from a guy who dissapeared for a long time and started posting about the Yanks again once they started to win a little. I'm here, just as I've been for years... I stand by everything I said. The true test comes over the next 3-4 weeks as I already pointed out. Admittedly I didn't see the AL Central going it the tank as bady as they have the past 2 weeks but there is plenty of time for those teams to correct themselves and play the type of baseball they're capable of. Should be a fun 2 months.
Not really. April series: Split with TB Lost to Bal Won vs. Minny Lost to Oak Swept Cleveland Swept by Boston Swept by TB Lost one game to Tor Lost to Boston May series: Swept Texas Split with Seattle Won vs. Texas Lost vs. Seattle Lost to White Sox Lost to Mets Won vs. Boston Swept by Angels Lost to Toronto So in April and May, the Yanks lost series against Baltimore, Tampa Bay, the Mets, Oakland, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, Angels and Seattle. Of those teams, Baltimore, TB, Toronto, Oakland, and Chicago can all be called "bad," right? Boston, the Mets, Seattle, and the Angels are "good." The Yanks, in those first two months, beat Boston, Cleveland, Minnesota, and Texas (twice). The problems weren't who they were playing. The problems were numerous. They couldn't beat ANYONE on a consistent basis. Much of that was pitching issues (due to injuries and other causes). A lot was also due to underperformance by numerous bats (Abreu, Damon, Cano, Matsui, Cabrera).
