Monday, June 9, 2008
WOE No More?
From the beginning of the season the Yankees’ offense has been a major disappointment, leading to many of calling them WOE for Worst Offense Ever. The team scored 968 runs last year and brought back just about everyone who had a part in that. Obviously some decline from Jorge Posada and Alex Rodriguez was to be expected, but I had that estimated at around a 45 run drop, which means they should stilll have been a 900 run offense. Instead, through May 22 the Yankees as a team were hitting an underwhelming .256/.323/.404 and had scored 191 runs in 48 games, an average of 3.98 runs a game, which works out to 645 runs over a full season.
Offense is down in the AL by about 10% this year, but even accounting for that that’s still a shortfall of 175 runs or so.
Since then, they’ve hit .322/.382/.486 as a team and have scored 100 runs in 17 games, which is 5.9 runs per game and would be the equivalent of scoring 952 runs in a season. Obviously, the fact that they’ve been doing their damage against teams like Seattle and Kansas City is one reason for the improvement. The weather changing could be another factor as well. Still, we should be happy to see them starting to hit like they were expected to all season. With the return of Jorge Posada the team is complete again, and that should bode well for the offense to continue playing well, even if they aren’t going to hit .322 for the rest of the season.
Although they’ve crept above .500 the Yanks still have a negative run differential. However, over the stretch from May 23 through yesterday they have a Pythagenpat winning percentage of .568, which is roughly equivalent to a 92 win pace. That may be superficially encouraging but it needs to be tempered with the fact that the Yankees are playing through an easy part of their schedule.
The good news is Mike Mussina and Darrell Rasner have continued to pitch effectively and Joba Chamberlain’s building up his stamina to hopefully give the team a third effective starter. The bad news is that Chien-Ming Wang and Andy Pettitte have been awful lately and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for why. If those two can’t get right, this team isn’t contending. More than the bullpen or the offense, that’s the biggest problem facing the team right now IMO.
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