For a similar breakdown and musing on the payroll and the tough player choices ahead, click through here to Stephen Rhoads’ piece on RAB, which has a complete, editable Google document that you can play around with. All offseason long, we’ve been talking and thinking about the looming $189M payroll target the Yankees are aiming [...]
The scrap heap season has officially kicked off, with the Yankees signing former Red Sox reliever Manny Delcarmen to a minor league deal yesterday and reportedly engaging in serious talks with utility player Bill Hall for what I assume would also be a minor league contract. Once upon a time both Delcarmen and Hall were solid big league players with some nice upside, but neither one of them really panned out, with the bottom falling out on both guys in recent years. Hall did manage to squeeze out a decent season in Boston in 2010, but went right back to being awful last year, finishing with a .211/.261/.314 (55 wRC+) slashline. I wouldn’t expect either to contribute much, if anything, to the Yankees this season, but it doesn’t hurt to have a few more see-what-they-can-do bodies hanging around camp.
(The following is being syndicated from The Captain’s Blog). On Saturday, I posted a follow-up to a recent Fangraphs’ analysis of relief pitchers’ aggregate performance over the last 30 years. Although my findings supported the statistical conclusion of the Fangraphs’ piece (i.e., reliever performance has not changed meaningfully over the period considered), there was a divergence with regard to the [...]
After C.C. Sabathia’s lucrative contract extension and talk of Cole Hamels receiving a similar deal, I have to think back to Roy Halladay. After their 2009 loss to the Yankees, the Phillies traded for Roy Halladay, and promptly signed him to a 3-year, $60 million deal with a vesting option for the 4th year. It’s [...]
While the trade for Michael Pineda has made the 2012 Yankees a stronger team than they were before, losing Jesus Montero should not be minimized. In the end, the Yankees lost to the Tigers in the ALDS because they couldn’t score runs when they needed to, not because they couldn’t prevent them. Montero was going [...]
Nick Swisher had an up and down season in 2011. It ended up fine for him, as he produced a 122 wRC+ on the strength of a .358 wOBA, one point better than his career mark of .357. It was, however, down from 2009 (.375) and 2010 (.377). The biggest difference for Swisher in 2011 [...]
If you missed it over the weekend, Dave Cameron had a pretty interesting piece at Fangraphs last Friday in which he examined the performance of relief pitchers in general since the advent of reliever specialization and the tiered bullpen, and concluded that reliever performance hasn’t actually gotten much better since 1982. Now, as much of a critic of modern bullpen usage as I can be at times, I’m not totally sure I buy Cameron’s conclusion, mostly because there isn’t any mention of expansion in the article. With four new teams added to the league since 1982 in addition to the extra roster spots being occupied by relievers, there are more relief pitchers in the game than there are now which would mean the league average performance should go downward as jobs are created for lesser caliber players if there’s no increase in the performance of the more talented players.
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Chad Jennings of LoHud inspired this piece after reading his Ones That Got Away article on Saturday. On the heels of the Jesus Montero deal, one can’t help but wonder what the Yanks would look like if they never embarked on making bold moves like that, ones where they give up significant talent in order [...]
This is a slow time of the year for roster moves, but there’s always plenty of good baseball related reading material out there. -Ever heard of Ferris Fain? Me neither, but Troy Patterson of THT explains why fans should know who he was. -Dave Cameron of Fangraphs asks if modern bullpen management is yielding better [...]
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