Is It Time To Panic?
Like many of his teammates, Gary has looked lost at the plate this year (Charles Wenzelberg / NY Post)
Stats as of 4/27
As I write this, the Yankees are 10-13 and are tied for last place in the AL East. The offense is 27th in runs per game, last in slugging, 21st in OBP, 29th in OPS, and last in batting average. In the “scapegoat stats,” namely runners left on base, and strikeouts, they are basically league average (Average: 200 K, Yankees 197. Average: 144 LOB, Yankees: 145). As we discussed in our ground ball rate post, the Yankees have abandoned the very thing that made them successful in recent years: hitting the ball hard in the air. What’s making this happen? Why is everyone slumping at the same time? How survivable is this? Is it time to panic?
Really, it’s tough to say. When we see things like DJ’s OPS being down 220 points compared to 2019, or Aaron Judge slugging 95 points below his career average, or Gleyber slugging at less than half his career rate, it’s almost impossible to think this is anything but an aberration. Why has this aberration sustained for nearly a month month? Why it is affecting the whole team? Is anything going well?
Let’s jump into things.
Why You Should Not Panic: Pitching
The major reason not to panic is that the Yankees have been elite at run suppression this year. They are 13th in the AL in runs allowed per game (descending) and 22nd in all of MLB. You can go a long way allowing 3.95 runs per game. In 2019, only one team in all of baseball allowed fewer than 3.95 runs per game (Dodgers) and the Astros, who many of you will remember won the pennant in 2019, were right at 3.95 and led the AL. The Yankees were better than league average at run suppression in 2019 (4.56 runs/game) but what we’ve seen this year has been a significant improvement.
The bullpen has been a major part of the Yankees’ transition into a run suppression machine. Yankee relievers have posted the best WHIP in baseball (.99), the third best ERA (2.44), the third most strikeouts, and most by any AL bullpen (107), as well as the sixth best K/9 in baseball (10.43) and second best K/9 in the AL. That is all really good, and it feels relatively sustainable. Contributions have come from throughout the pen (Luetge, Wilson, Cessa, and King have pitched 40.1 combined innings with a 2.22 ERA), Aroldis Chapman has hardly pitched (only on pace for 49.1 IP this year), and Zack Britton isn’t even back yet.
This is not to mention that this staff expects to gain Luis Severino (and Clarke Schmidt) at some point this year, that we have yet to see the best of Jordan Montgomery, that Domingo German may be finding something, that Taillon seems bound to turn the corner, and that Deivi Garcia and Mike King are really good despite being used as depth pieces.
The underlying stats are good too! We love when the underlying stats are good here at YankeesFiles dot com. Only 9 teams allow a lower average exit velocity than the Yankees, and only 3 teams allow a lower hard-hit %. Those stats both contribute to Yankee pitching boasting the best xBA (expected opponent’s batting average) in the league, and the seventh best opponent’s BA. If anything, the Yankees’ pitchers are getting a little bit unlucky.
I’m seeing a lot of #discourse on Yankees Twitter from people who are tired of the Yankees running Corey Kluber out there every 5 or 6 days, but I am happy to inform you, and them, that run suppression is a strength of this team, not a weakness.
Why You Should Not Panic: Hitting
SOME of the underlying stats for the team as a whole are not bad when it comes to hitting. Per Statcast, in 2019, no team had a a differential worse than -.005 between their batting average and their expected batting average. The Yankees’ current differential is -.043, which basically means they are getting massively unlucky on batted balls. This also goes a long way toward explaining their BABIP being 29th in the league. For comparison’s sake, in 2019, their BABIP was 6th in the league, and from 2017-2019 their differential between BA and xBA ranged from +.002 to +.015, indicating that they got a little bit lucky, presumably as a result of hitting the ball stupidly hard a lot.
In this same vein, the Yankees have the 6th worst differential between their slugging percentage and their expected slugging percentage (-.085). If the Yankees slugged at their expected percentage (even if we ignore the change in OBP that would almost necessarily come with that), their team OPS would go from 29th in baseball to 8th.
Ultimately, these stats tell us that the Yankees are getting unlucky. It would be really weird for the Yankees to continue to experience these gaps between their expected and realized stats. Of course we hope that the way they narrow the gap is by seeing less bad luck in their outcomes, and not by knocking down their expected stats, but we’d feel very different about this team (weak contact, ground balls, and all) if they were not the victims of luck that’s as bad as theirs has been.
Even their exit velocity and hard-hit rate stats aren’t as bad as their play might lead us to believe they are. The Yankees rank 14th in average exit velocity, only .8 MPH off of the league leaders, and 11th in hard-hit rate, just 2 percentage points off the league leaders. This team is certainly not hitting the cover off the ball and lighting up the exit velocity leaderboards, but they’re hitting the ball harder than you might expect for a team that has produced so poorly on offense.
Why You Should Panic: Pitching
We don’t need a deep dive on this one, the two major concerns are very obvious and tied to each other. Starters not named Gerrit Cole are consistently not pitching deep into games (the Yankees are 24th in MLB in IP by starters) and as a result the bullpen is getting worked pretty hard (3rd most IP by relievers). Hopefully this concern is assuaged by the Yankees being less cautious about the pitch counts of guys like Kluber and Taillon as they show signs of health, and the starting staff turns a corner as a whole. The Yankees are 8th in ERA as a team, but their starters rank 20th as a staff. Take out Gerrit Cole, and that gets even worse. We need to see some improved production out of the rest of the staff.
Why You Should Panic: Hitting
Here’s the central question we need to answer. Is this prolonged, team-wide slump so weird that it must be real or is it too weird to be real? The stats we discussed above that tell us that the Yankees have been getting very unlucky seem to suggest that this slump is too weird to be real, but not all the stats support that.
Hard-hit rate is down around the league, but the Yankees hit the ball hard 38.9% of the time in 2019 (this would lead the league in 2021, for reference) and are only doing so 29.5% of the time in 2020. That’s a big drop. There are some teams with good records (Boston, Oakland, Kansas City, Seattle, Chicago (AL)) who hit the ball hard as often as, or less often than, the Yankees, so a team can succeed that way. Regardless, I struggle to see the Yankees continuing to fail to make hard contact the way they have thus far.
Am I worried about DJ LeMahieu’s average exit velocity being down 2.7 MPH this year from the rest of his career as a Yankee? Yes. Am I worried about his ground ball rate being up 11.8% from 2019-20? Yes, but you already knew that.
Do I understand how Gary Sanchez can be exhibiting the best plate discipline of his career (swinging at the lowest percentage of pitches outside the zone and highest percentage of pitches in the zone) but making 10% less contact on pitches in the zone than his 2015-2020 average? No. Do I have any clue if that trend can continue? No. Am I concerned? Yup.
How about Aaron Judge? Does it make any sense to me that he’s walking more than he did in any year of his career except 2017 and striking out less than he ever has before but slugging 70 points lower than he did in any other season of his career? No. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m worried about that too.
Don’t even get me started on Gleyber Torres, who figured out how to walk in the last 2 years but completely forget how to get extra base hits.
At the risk of sounding like a simpleton, there’s a lot of weird, bad stuff going on in the Yankees’ offense right now. It’s a lot of weird, bad stuff that I’m having trouble explaining. It all has me pretty worried, and I’m getting tired of waiting for them to break out.
So Is It Time To Panic?
Look, I’m not going to say you have to be a moron to panic about this team, but I will say that a lot of morons are panicking about this team.
If you’re panicking, you think the following: A 2-time batting champion has forgotten how to play baseball, a 2-time All Star with a 50 homer season who should have an MVP award has forgotten how to play baseball, a 4-time All Star with an MVP award and a 59 homer season has forgotten how to play baseball, a guy who made 2 All Star teams before he was 23 has forgotten how to play baseball, and the fastest player to 100 home runs in AL history has forgotten how to play baseball (among others). You can go on believing that, but I’m just not bought in.
The stats say the Yankees are getting unlucky, both on the mound and at the plate. History says this team is constructed of great players. It’s been 23 games. Relax.
Let’s go Yankees.
Stats from Baseball Reference, Fangraphs, and MLB Statcast
