Comments on: Yankees Missing Bats To Blame For Team’s Record

By: Steve Lombardi

Steve Lombardi — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:46:42 +0000

Interesting birtelcom - thanks.

By: birtelcom

birtelcom — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:54:01 +0000

Also, checking BR’s wonderful Expanded Standings, we see that the Yanks’s hitters at 5.3 runs per game lead the AL East in scoring runs and are third in MLB. The pitching/defense, on the other hand, giving up 4.6 runs per game, is 4th in the AL East (behind not just the Red Sox but the Jays and O’s as well) and 7th in the AL. Clearly the Yanks have been unlucky in close games (check out that Luck column in the Expanded Standings), and will likely get better in the second half of the season but the Yankees under-performance thus far is at least as much the responsibility of the pitchers as the hitters who overall (that means you A-Rod, Jeter, Posada)have been pretty darn good.

By: birtelcom

birtelcom — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:43:18 +0000

I was curious to see if what you found about the Yankees was unusual. I re-ran your PI search for games lost while giving up 4 ER or fewer, except looking for all teams instead of just the Yanks, and asking PI to return the results in the form of number of times such games occurred per team. I then took the resulting list, pasted it into Excel and ran an average. The average number of losses per MLB team this year when the team’s pitchers give up 4 ERs or fewer is 13.6, compared to the Yanks’ 15.