The New York Yankees are baseball’s biggest team. They dominate the headlines, they dominate the standings, and their team seemingly has every position manned by an all-star. Yet, since 2003 they’ve made it to one World Series and they didn’t come particularly close to winning that one. They are spending more than two times as much as they spent when they won four World Series in five seasons. So, what gives?
If you listen to the Yankee brass you will get a plethora of answers. The New York contingent (Brian Cashman and Joe Torre) will tell you that their pitchers are getting old and are having trouble staying healthy. Secretly, they would probably tell you that the endless chasing of free agents and big names has depleted their farm system where this is little to help. The Tampa Bay contingent (George Streinbrenner and Gene Michaels) blame everything on Mel Stottlemyre. If you look at the last four major pitchers to leave New York you can begin to see what they are talking about.
INN W-L ERA SO BB HR
NYY Contreras 166.2 15-7 4.64 154 72 26
CHW Contreras 279.1 20-11 4.06 222 117 32
NYY Clemens 391.2 30-15 4.11 382 121 42
HOU Clemens 425.2 31-12 2.43 403 141 26
NYY Pettitte 343.0 34-13 3.73 277 82 27
HOU Pettitte 305.1 23-13 2.80 250 72 25
NYY Weaver 359.0 18-20 4.61 225 95 32
LAD Weaver 444.0 27-24 4.11 310 110 54
I suppose that coaching could be the answer when you consider that every pitcher here was better when they left New York. However, when you look at the numbers you see some chinks in the armor. Every pitcher had a K/BB ratio of at least two to one and only Jose Contreras gave up more home runs per nine innings than the league average. Ah, so Mel Stottlemyre must not be to blame.
This is when people outside of New York wax poetic about how much team chemistry they club had in the late 1990s while the current Yankees seem to be a chemistry experiment. I guess that could be, but when John Dewan released The Fielding Bible, the answer seems quite clear. Bad coaching, old pitching, and chemistry are just a red herring. The real difference between these Yankees and the championship clubs come on the defensive end. Unfortunately, The Fielding Bible only goes back to 2003, but we have some alternative means to check on the defense of the great Yankee teams from the prior century.
MI CI OF Total Rank
2003 -26 -5 -17 -48 27
2004 -42 +16 -57 -83 30
2005 -72 +3 -95 -164 30
These numbers might seem like gibberish, so they deserve some explanation. First of all, “MI” stands for middle infield (SS and 2B), “CI” stands for corner infielders (1B and 3B). The totals you see are the number of plays those fielders actually made in comparison with the number of plays they should have made based on league norms. So, in each season they made fewer players they were supposed to and in the last two years have made the least amount of plays in baseball. Gee, no wonder the pitchers struggled a little. Following are the positional rankings at each position except catcher.
2003 2004 2005 AVG
1B 24 9 30 21
2B 19 30 36 28
3B 10 4 13 9
SS 34 31 31 29
LF 26 30 11 22
CF 29 31 35 32
RF 8 27 31 21
So, these numbers are pretty damning, but it is far worse than it seems. The ol’ baseball adage says that you must be good up the middle defensively. The Fielding Bible did not rate catchers, but in the other three spots they averaged at 28, 29, and 32 respectively. So, they ranked in the bottom three or four at every position. The best position (third base) is the least valuable defensive position on the diamond next to left field. In case you’re wondering, Alex Rodriguez was rated as the fifth best shortstop defensively in 2003.
The decision to put Rodriguez at third is indicative of how unimportant defense is to the Yankees. ARod is less effective as a third basemen in general, but it’s more mind-boggling that he was a top five shortstop and they moved him in favor of the worst defensive shortstop over the past three seasons. Johnny Damon’s average ranking in the last three years was 19th, but that was with a 23rd and 30th ranking the last two seasons. He’s not much of an improvement. Ah, I know what you’re thinking. How can you definitely say the Yankees defense is the reason for their demise? In a way, that sentiment is exactly correct. After all, The Fielding Bible only goes back three seasons and that is using only the +/- metric. How will they rate if we use a different metric entirely? Also, shouldn’t we compare the current Yankees with their counterparts the past few seasons?
In order to do this we will go to Baseball Prospectus’ defensive efficiency. Defensive efficiency is defined as the rate of which balls in play are converted into outs. That seems simple enough don’t you think? If my suspicions are right then I would expect us to see these numbers begin to dip after 2001 when the Yankees stopped advancing to the World Series regularly.
DEF EFF Rank
1996 .683 22
1997 .685 18
1998 .713 1
1999 .699 7
2000 .693 13
2001 .684 26
2002 .690 21
2003 .681 28
2004 .688 19
2005 .689 22
Data is rarely ever clear cut, but if we divide this data into two halves we can see a significant difference. The club won four World Series crowns in the first five years and averaged a 12.1 big league rank in the period. Even when you remove 1998 (after all, a lot has to go right for you to win 114 games) you can see that they were above average in three out of five seasons. The average rank in the final five seasons was 23.1. None of those seasons were above the big league average.
Of course, this isn’t to say that old pitching and bad chemistry don’t play factors in the Yankees post-season malaise, but fielding is definitely a factor. The Yankees offense can bludgeon their way through the regular season, but there is always superior pitching in the post-season. You can ill afford a porous defense when runs are at a premium.
Scott Barzilla is the author of “Checks and Imbalances,” “The State of Baseball Management,” and is looking forward to his release of “On the Outside Looking” at the end of 2006.
