Baseball Bytes: Bronx Bombshell
The Yankees are closer to the World Series than they've been in years. Plus, a league-versus-league referendum is coming.
Welcome to another ✨Postseason Edition✨ of Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I dive into several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Damn Yankees!
The New York Yankees have always been a franchise that wants their rich legacy of success to be taken Very Seriously. For instance, walk around New Yankee Stadium — a building with a looming exterior that evokes the Roman Colosseum — and you’ll be greeted with constant reminders of their unparalleled dominance, with signs and banners celebrating legends from Babe Ruth to Derek Jeter. Did you know the Yankees have won 27 World Championships? Spend an afternoon at Yankee Stadium, and it’s the only fact about baseball history you’ll be able to remember.
Which is what made it ironic that recent versions of the Yankees were so difficult to take seriously in October.
From 2016-2022 — a period basically encompassing the Aaron Judge Era — New York won the equivalent of 658 regular-season games (prorating shortened schedules to 162 games) in seven seasons, but had zero World Series appearances to show for it. That was by far the most wins in any seven-season block of Yankee history that failed to produce an appearance in the Fall Classic; the next-most (outside of spans that overlap it) came from 1982-1989, with 619 wins and no World Series berths. It was a very un-Yankee-like era for the proudest franchise in all of baseball.
This year, however, the Yankees’ skeptics might need to re-acclimate their thinking back to the olden days of pinstripe-filled postseasons. According to my Playoff Predictor model, New York (with a 2-0 lead in the ALCS) now has an 85 percent chance of making the World Series and a 44 percent chance of winning it — both marks easily coming in as the highest among the Final Four field:
📊 2024 MLB Playoff Predictor 📈
The Yankees haven’t exactly dominated this postseason, at least not relative to the standards of some of their other World Series teams in semi-recent memory. They are 5-1 in the playoffs, but their +1.33 runs per game differential is just 1.4 higher than we would expect based on the Elo Ratings of the opponents they faced (and the location of each game); by comparison, the 1998 team was 2.5 RPG better than expected based on their opponents, the 2009 team was +2.6 and the 1999 team was +3.0:
That said, it is higher than the 2003 (and especially 2001) versions that fell short in the Fall Classic, as well as the 2000 and 1996 championship squads.
As I’ve hammered home throughout the playoffs thus far, the current Yankees seem to be focused on doing enough to win — aside from a few egregious baserunning blunders (that didn’t end up mattering) in Game 2, that is. All of their postseason games have been decided by 3 runs or fewer, but they’ve been consistently benefiting from the most crucial play(s) in those games, according to Win Probability Added:
Can that persist? Can a bullpen that was maligned throughout most of the regular season keep taking care of its business? We’ll see if this formula can carry the Yankees all the way to championship No. 28 — but for now, they are in a far better spot than any of the other three teams in the playoff field.
⚾ AL Redemption or NL Dominance?
Keen-eyed readers recently pointed out a really interesting feature of the current Elo rating leaderboard (even updated through the playoffs): NL teams dominate the top of the list.
Of the Top 7 teams on the list, six belong to the Senior Circuit — the Yankees being the only exception — and seven of the Top 10 do as well. Meanwhile, the Guardians are all the way down at No. 13, alongside a bunch of other AL clubs like the Tigers, Orioles, Royals and Rays — behind even a Cubs team that didn’t make the playoffs. So what gives? Is this a bug?
It has to do with what happened in Interleague Play this season, particularly as the schedule wore on. Across the entire regular season, the NL beat the AL 369-321 (the equivalent of 86.6 wins per 162), which was the most lopsided showing for either league in the recent balanced-schedule era — and the fourth-most dominant showing in the Interleague era (since 1997) for the NL, which had a general tendency to fall behind the AL during that span.
But the disparity between leagues also grew as the season went on. After starting the year with just a 106-114 record against the AL, the NL surged to a 263-207 record (90.7 wins per 162) from June onward, including a 55-35 mark (99.0 wins per 162) in September alone. Since Elo is more sensitive to late-season form, continually updating to try to hone in on each team’s current quality, this meant NL clubs were able to “steal” a lot of rating points from their AL counterparts before the postseason temporarily cut off interleague games.
Reader
rightly asked whether any of this was caused by the White Sox being such horrible representatives for the AL — and the Southsiders certainly didn’t help their league’s cause by going 11-35 in interleague (38.7 wins per 162) this year. But we can see the same pattern of evolving dominance play out even if we remove every single White Sox interleague game from the sample:Obviously, no interleague games have been staged since the start of the playoffs, so the teams have just been cannibalizing Elo rating points from each other over the past few weeks. But we will get a final referendum of sorts on the NL-versus-AL question in the World Series, which is looking most likely to be Yankees-Dodgers (with a 49.0 percent chance of happening), but could still involve our other potential combinations.
Weighting for likelihood across all of the different combos, the AL winner has an ever-so-slightly higher chance of winning (50.3 percent), so the Yankees’ edge in our playoff predictor may yet carry the AL despite the NL’s evolving advantage as the regular season played out.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.