Don’t Believe Anything You’ve Read About the 2022 Yankees… Except This

AnalyticsThoughts
Written By Will Harris

After another ALCS disappointment, we’re left to look back at what could have been (MLB.com)

We’re all upset.

We all know how good the Yankees were until August. We all know how bad it got after.

So if you’re my dad (totally random choice and not reflective of a thing he’s been saying WAY TOO MUCH), this is the most disappointing Yankees team in a while, by some metrics.

Was it though?

There are some good points in favor of that argument.

An Uncertain Start

The season certainly started off on a disappointing note . They traded Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela for Josh Donaldson, IKF, and Ben Rortvedt in what is bound to go down as one of Brian Cashman’s biggest blunders.  While Gary didn’t have a good season in Minnesota, Gio posted a 119 wRC+ and was 50% more valuable than Donaldson by fWAR for about a quarter of the price.  Third base was not a position of need for the Yankees, and allowing the Twins to dump an albatross of a contract on them and then go out and sign Carlos Correa is abhorrent.

Excuse my language.

The fact that their shortstop and third base failures are tied up in the same move with a team that ended up with one of the shortstops who should’ve been playing for the Yankees is painful.  Carlos Correa posted a 140 wRC+ and 4.4 fWAR for the Twins while IKF posted an 85 wRC+ and 1.3 fWAR in the Bronx, which included him failing to catch a flip from Gleyber on what should’ve been an inning-ending double play, effectively ending the team’s season.

IKF’s replacement in Texas, Corey Seager, was just as valuable as Correa while playing the true Gold Glove defense that we were assured IKF would play. That spray chart looks awfully friendly to Yankee Stadium too, I’d say.

Seager’s hard-hit fly balls would fit in nicely in the Bronx (Baseball Savant)

Marcus Semien isn’t really a shortstop, but he WAS on the market and put up a 4.2 WAR season of his own in Arlington. Hell. Even the failure that was Trevor Story put up a 100 wRC+ and 2.4 fWAR in his 94 games, and Javy Baez, who was a disaster in every way, was a 2-win player.

The Yankees could’ve had Correa and Gio for a few million dollars more than they got Donaldson and IKF. Inexcusable, and it came back to bite them.

The real shame of the IKF trade, as I’ve been saying all along, was the predictability of its failure. He’d never been worth more than 1.7 fWAR, and his wRC+ had never reached 90 in a full season. To make things worse, he was packaged with an over the hill racist who struck out in every consequential playoff PA he had.

So the season had some disappointing aspects, and I attribute a lot of that to the Donaldson/IKF move.

I won’t act like the Donaldson/IKF trade explains the downfall of the Yankees completely. This team got out to an historic start, and then lost game after game due to a combination of injuries, regression, bad luck, and poorly-timed slumps. Suddenly a 120-win team that was leading the league in everything was a 99-win team that had a pretty good year and a nice September.  Still, the Yankees won their first division title since 2019 and advanced past the ALDS for the first time since that same year. They must’ve done something right!

(Relatively) Consistent Greatness

They did. In fact, they did a number of things right. The rightest thing they did was employ Aaron Judge.  The presumptive MVP broke the AL (and clean) home run record en route to tying 1956 Mickey Mantle for the best non-Bonds series since integration by fWAR.  It was a distinct pleasure to watch Aaron Judge this year, and the Yankees’ top priority going into next season should be making sure that Aaron Judge is putting on the pinstripes again in 2023.

Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo both posted phenomenal first halves of the season, ranking in the top-11 in MLB in homers.  Stanton went on to make the All Star Game, and Rizzo was snubbed.  The second base duo of DJ LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres produced 4.7 first half fWAR, and each had a wRC+ around 130.  Of course, all of these performances paled in comparison to that of Matt Carpenter, who posted a 279 wRC+ and 13 homers in just 97 PA in the first half.  Combine this with a resurgent Luis Severino, and utterly dominant performances from Clay Holmes and Michael King, and the Yankees looked like an absolute juggernaut.

Just wanted to throw that in lest you forget how good Mike King is.

Coming Back to Earth

Slowly, though, things unraveled. Michael King’s elbow exploded thanks to an Aroldis Chapman blowup in what should’ve been an easy win in Baltimore.  Clay Holmes only had three saves after July 22, partially thanks to spending time on the IL.  The Yankees traded for Frankie Montas at the deadline with Luis Severino on the IL, but Montas was terrible of hurt for the rest of 2022.  Scott Effross looked to be a viable bullpen piece, until we found out he needed TJS.  Ron Marinaccio emerged as a trusted reliever, but got hurt at the end of the season and di not resurface in the playoffs.  Playing without Chad Green and Zack Britton seemed fine until it didn’t.

Aside from Aaron Judge, who posted a 251 wRC+, 29 homers, and 6.6 of his 11.5 fWAR in his 68 games in the second half of the season, the offense took a major step back. Anthony Rizzo kept up his strong performance, posting a 122 wRC+ but seeing his power fall off considerably as he fended off a back injury. Oswaldo Cabrera and Andrew Benintendi were the only other above-average offensive contributors to get more than 110 PA for the Yankees in the second half, each posting a 111 wRC+. Gleyber Torres was slightly below average. DJ LeMahieu was abysmal (86 wRC+, injured). Jose Trevino regressed considerably. Giancarlo Stanton was a shell of himself. Aaron Hicks was unwatchable.  The major regression from the offense, when combined with the injuries to the pitching staff, turned a team on a record-setting pace into a team that won just 35 of its last 70 games.

Plays like this didn’t help, but real fans know I blame Frankie Montas for walking Ji-Man Choi. Should not have been in that situation.

Before getting into what ultimately happened, I want to highlight some of my favorite games of the year (one from each month). In spite of what Whipple may tell you, this was actually a very good, very well constructed team that was very fun to watch.

Yearbook Photos

April: Donaldson beats the Red Sox on Opening Day

Gerrit Cole was hit hard early, but Rizzo, Stanton, DJ, and Donaldson brought the Yankees back for a walk-off win in extras against a team that we thought was pretty good at the time. Little did we know that would be one of very few shining moments for JD.

May: Judge shows the Blue Jays how 2022 will go by launching a walk-off homer against Jordan Romano

Going into that game, the Yankees were only up three games in the division, but they set a tone in that ninth inning and never looked back (that much).

June: The Yankees make another dramatic comeback late, this time against Houston

Aaron Hicks delivered his one good moment of the season, hitting a massive three-run homer off Ryan Pressly to tie the game before Judge walked things off with a single to left field.

July: Judge walks off the Royals

This was not that interesting a game, but I watched it from a bar in Fort Lauderdale and I was complaining about Andrew Benintendi the whole time. Hey Kevin, that was fun, right?

August: Josh Donaldson is overrepresented on this list

The Bringer of Racism saved Aroldis Chapman, and prevented further contraction of the division lead when he went yard off of Jalen Beeks for one of two ultimate grand slams the Yankees hit this year.

September: Judge hits 60 and Stanton walks it off

There were a number of phenomenal games in September, but Judge hitting his 60th home run at Yankee Stadium a few batters before a walk off grand slam by Giancarlo Stanton is tough to beat.

October: I don’t care that it was a loss

By October, the Yankees had clinched the division and there was no longer any drama about home field advantage. In the only loss on this list, Aaron Judge broke the AL home run record and secured (as if he hadn’t already) his first (should be second) MVP award, and a place in baseball history.

It All Came To An End

Let’s address the elephant in the room.  We all know how the season ended.  IKF missed a flip from Gleyber on a double play (the video is a few paragraphs up if you want to relive it), but realistically, the season was over before that.  The Yankees made their third ALCS since 2017, but the ending was all-too-familiar, dropping the series to Houston in four games.  The team’s .579 postseason OPS was the second-lowest of any Yankees team to advance to the ALCS or further in the divisional era. Their .502 OPS in the ALCS was the third lowest by any Yankees team in any playoff series of more than one game, a mark of futility only surpassed by the 1963 Yankees (swept by the Dodgers in the World Series, .448 OPS) and the 2012 Yankees (swept by the Tigers in the LCS, .488 OPS).  It was an embarrassing performance. A team that has a .751 OPS in the regular season will not win frequently posting a .502 OPS in a postseason series, especially if it allows a team with a .743 regular season OPS to post a .755 OPS in that series.

Spare me the hand wringing about strikeouts, please.  The team was not constructed to strike out a ton. In fact, they struck out a league average percentage of the time.  They just struck out a lot more in the ALCS. Even when they weren’t striking out, it’s not like they were hitting. The 2017 Yankees hit .302 in the ALCS when they didn’t strike out. The 2019 team hit .310 (those teams hit .205 and .214 overall in their series respectively).  This team hit .263 when it wasn’t striking out. Not exactly setting the world on fire. I won’t turn this into another “every out is just an out, especially when there aren’t runners on base” but I will point out that 35.2% of the Yankees’ PA in the ALCS came with runners on base (disgustingly low percentage), and 34% of their strikeouts came in such situations. If you strike out 50 times, but 33 of them are with the bases empty, who cares? Those might as well be groundouts, fly outs, or foul outs. They don’t matter. I’ll also note that you can argue they timed their strikeouts better in the ALCS than they did in the regular season, when over 40% of them came with runners on base.

This was a team that was constructed to succeed in the playoffs. They tended to get runners on base (5th in MLB in OBP) and slug once they did (.440 SLG with runners on base, 5th in MLB, ahead of Houston, 4th in OPS with runners on base, most HR in MLB with runners on base).  In the ALCS, they didn’t do that. They posted a meager .232 OBP overall, and slugged just .196 with runners on base, with just two XBH and no homers. That’s all you need to know.

My challenge to anyone who says that the ballooning strikeout rate and repeated #RISPFail in the ALCS is proof that the Yankees had a poorly-constructed roster is to explain the vast gap between their regular season and playoff performances in those areas. It’s going to be harder than you think, and frankly I don’t think you can do it.

You might say the Yankees fell victim to elite pitching. There’s something there, as Houston led the league in pitching fWAR and led the AL in ERA and K/9 while posting the lowest HR/FB rate in the league.  Even still, if an inability to deal with elite pitching were a major problem for the Yankees, we would’ve seen it during the season, and we plainly didn’t.  They were the fifth-best team in baseball in high leverage situations (in which you’re likely to see a team’s best pitchers) by wRC+, seeing no change in their strikeout rate as compared to their season average.  They also scored the most runs, had the best run differential (tied Houston at +36), and had the second best pythagorean winning percentage (.592 to Houston’s .596) against teams with winning percentages of .550 or better (89+ wins) in the regular season. You can’t do that without hitting good pitchers well. It just isn’t possible.

What we saw this year was a good team that was plagued by injuries down the stretch and didn’t have quite enough time to get guys healthy and get the kids enough experience to excel in the playoffs. That’s how I will always see it. Is it disappointing? Sure, but it doesn’t mean this team was fatally flawed and had no chance.

The path to beating Houston was clear, and a few breaks going the other way or the Yankees seizing a few opportunities would’ve done it. That’s not what happened. That’s how I ended up writing this article.

This team is VERY close to having everything it needs to win a World Series, if it’s not all already there.  A strong offseason is always important, but the Yankees don’t need to make major upgrades all over the place (although I will be requesting a few) to be considered the class of the AL in 2023.  Whatever happens, we’ll have you covered here. Until next time, let’s go Yankees.

Will Harris
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