Not time to panic but something needs to change

 The way the New York Yankees finish Mission 28 is by fixing the computer glitch in their analytical department.

The fanbase doesn’t know who the group of Yale MBA’s are and wouldn’t know where to begin in picking them out of a lineup, but they are to blame for this poor start at the beginning of 2021. This lineup will hit, they will score, don’t believe, look at the back of the guys baseball cards, they produce. The pitching will get solved even with the club plugging several leaks at one time. Even if the staff is duck taped—it’ll be good enough to compete in the playoffs.

Back-to-back series against Baltimore and Detroit will not move the needle for me and scream to the hills that the Bronx Bombers are fixed. The Yankees are supposed to stump lesser teams because they are a World Series contender. When the Yankees are scoring eight plus runs against a team like Tampa Bay, Minnesota, or Houston—I’ll reconsider. Until that point I will remain cautiously optimistic about this team. The last two starts for Jameson Tallion and Corey Kluber are promising and showing signs of what could happen if they find it completely, but that happens for nobodies who have one or two good starts. It’s still really early and playing teams you are supposed to pound into the dirt to get right is what will get you primed for a big matchup. For the fans who are like me (or worse) remember that it is a long season for a sport where 70-80 percent of the time your favorite player fails to get on base.

This game is also a seven-month soap opera that has a media that overreacts in the moment which feeds fanbases to overreact 100 times as much. Just search “Yankees” on Twitter and you’ll see a million opinions that want to fire this guy, or trade that guy, and completely punt on a 162-game season that is only 31 games complete. I get that. I also get fans pointing out the Yankees problems being problems a year ago with nothing changing through the offseason. That to some extent is true. There are problems that haven’t been addressed yet, because if you count the 60 games from last season the Yankees would be 91 game through a normal season with a record of 49-42. Through 91 games in 2019 the Yankees were 59-32 and they just beat the Blue Jays 4-2. The Blue Jays were 35-59. So, if the pandemic season/a month and seven days of 2021 played in 2019 these would be the standings:

1.      Tampa Bay Rays (55-40)

2.      Boston Red Sox (50-41)

3.      New York Yankees (49-42)

They’d be in third place behind the Red Sox by a game. They wouldn’t be great, but the sky is far from falling. If you want to scream about how the game is played, with scheduled off days, that happens in every sport. In football and hockey, it’s not days off, it’s series off or lines off, but they are there. The problem with baseball, in particular with the Yankees, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what day is scheduled as a rest day. In the NBA you can see that this star is resting on a random Wednesday because they are playing a lottery team and they play a playoff contender on Saturday. In baseball the powers that be frame rest days as “he’s off because we say so” even if he went three for four the day before with two doubles.

No matter what the fans say, stars resting will not stop, but an explanation needs to be given instead of just hiding behind a computer.

With that said, the analytical department must be better. Brian Cashman can go out and trade whoever he wants, but until he fixes the people in charge of crunching the numbers, the Yankees will not win a World Series. That’s because in an analytical age, the New York Yankees are behind. Instead of trying to fit new players into a broken system that dates back to the beginning of last decade—find new analytical guys who can crunch new numbers to fix the Bombers problems because this roster is a championship contender. So, for the rest of the season, instead of finding a replacement for Gleyber Torres at short, call for Brian Cashman to find the best analytical department in game.

 

 

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