You might consider the reports that offense is down league-wide and reweight.

Oh man, Rachel Ray is a Red Sox fan? Her stock just plummeted.

Well, you know, getting back two hitters who had the highest combined Runs Created for teammates in 2007 might help things, a little. This team will not score only 623 runs, as is the current pace. Getting Ensberg and Molina out of the lineup will help.

I didn’t know Rachel Ray’s stock was ever high enough to plummet.

Now if I see Giada with a B on her hat, there’s trouble.

You might consider the reports that offense is down league-wide and reweight.

True.  AL OBP is down only 1% but SLG is down 7%.  That would change the offensive projections relative to the run environment from 233 runs to 215, which means they are still 30 runs below expectations. 

Well, you know, getting back two hitters who had the highest combined Runs Created for teammates in 2007 might help things, a little.

Well yeah, obviously, but the point here is that even if we use the actual playing time which accounts for the injuries,  the Yankees are underperforming.

GIADA

Unfortunately, I don’t see any moves that can be done to fix that.

Kevin Long probably shouldn’t get too comfortable.

I’m sorry, but where are these projections from?  I’m not trying to attack the fundamental point, but these projections seem quite optimistic.  Not that BPro is the end-all of projections, but of all of the starters’ projections listed above are higher than PECOTA on both OBP and SLG except for Melky, in some cases significantly.

Combine that with the league wide drop in offense that’s correlated pretty well with lower than average April temperatures, and it seems like the hitting underperformance is much less than claimed—and the pitching/defense underperformance is probably underplayed.

I’m sorry, but where are these projections from?

They were supposed to be the average of five projection systems (CHONE, Marcel, PECOTA, ZiPS and CAIRO) but it looks like I only used an earlier version of CAIRO which was a bit optimistic.  I’ll check my spreadsheet, I think overall these projections are probably about 6-7% too high, so in the current run environment that knocks the expected runs down to about 200 instead of 215.  So they are still underperforming, but like you said, it’s less than claimed.

and the pitching/defense underperformance is probably underplayed.

Looks like you’re right.  I’ve got the defense at -9 overall by zone rating, although they were -7 before yesterday.  That’s around -33 pro-rated over a full season which would be about 10-15 runs worse than expected if it continues.

The pitching was two runs below average when compared to the current league average at the time of this post, although last night’s game makes them nine runs worse.