The Yankees Have Baseball’s Perfect Stars-and-(No)-Scrubs Roster
Headlined by Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, these Yankees are also a tribute to the power of positive thinking.
It might be tempting to chalk up the 2024 New York Yankees’ early success to the revival of an old, star-driven formula for baseball’s most storied franchise. Indeed, the acquisition of RF Juan Soto, the breakout of young SS Anthony Volpe, and a healthy season (knock on wood) from irreplaceable CF Aaron Judge have gone a long way toward powering New York to one of the American League’s best records and the second-highest World Series odds of any team in baseball right now.
But in addition to the blinding star power, there’s another essential element to the Yankees’ success that falls more under the execution of Joe Maddon’s favorite motto: “Try not to suck.”
According to Wins Above Replacement, the Yankees have allocated 24.5 percent of their total team-wide playing time1 to players on pace to generate 5.0 or more WAR2 this season — a rate that ranks second-best in MLB, behind only the Kansas City Royals (24.7 percent). But even better, they’ve devoted only 4.6 percent of their playing time to negative-WAR players, which easily leads Atlanta (7.1 percent) and Milwaukee (9.1 percent) for the lowest share of time given to bad performers thus far.
Although Judge (9.0 WAR/162), Soto (9.0), Volpe (7.4) and SP Luis Gil (5.3) are on pace to combine for 30.6 WAR, the most of any top foursome in the league this season — the L.A. Dodgers’ quartet of Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow and Freddie Freeman checks in behind, at 29.1 — that tally accounts for just a shade over half of the Yankees’ total WAR/162 as a team (60.7).
So it also matters a lot that the rest of the roster is producing, too. Only two of New York’s top 29 most-used players (RP Caleb Ferguson and CF Trent Grisham) are currently running below replacement level.
This stars-and-no-scrubs method of roster construction is a great way to build a baseball team. In full seasons since the 1994 strike, the share of playing time to players with either 5+ WAR or negative WAR has explained 65 percent of the variation in seasonal winning percentage. (For comparison, WAR itself explains around 85 percent.) So if you go out and acquire stars, plus avoid sinking at-bats and innings into truly bad players, you’re probably going to have a very good season.
And while the “stars” part of that equation is not always easy to pull off, the “no-scrubs” aspect seems to be more common — and more effective when it comes to winning, as well.
Again looking at full seasons since the strike, we find that the frequency of building a team with less than 10 percent of its playing time devoted to sub-replacement players (14.1 percent of all teams) was much higher than the rate at which teams were able to give at least 20 percent of playing time to players with 5+ WAR (4.7 percent). In other words, it’s easier to make sure your worst players are at least above replacement level than it is to add elite talent at the top of your roster.3
And if we run a regression between winning percentage and our shares of playing time given to stars (5+ WAR) and scrubs (<0 WAR), minimizing the latter has a relative importance about 1.8 times as high as maximizing the former.
For a team like the Yankees, the luxury is being able to do both. New York has no shortage of stars to build around, which has often been the franchise’s primary focus going back to the days of George Steinbrenner, and well earlier. (Even though George’s son Hal recently said the Yankees’ current payroll was “not sustainable”.) But these Yankees also contain a lower-cost lesson for other teams who want to boost their performance: Try not to suck — or at least, stop giving so much playing time to players who do.
Filed under: Baseball
Based on plate appearances and leverage-adjusted innings pitched. (You can find that in my daily WAR .csv file.)
Typically the mark of an All-Star type season.
This shouldn’t be surprising, since the definition of the replacement level is — to quote Piper Slowinski of FanGraphs — “the level of production you could get from a player that would cost you nothing but the league minimum salary to acquire… Minor league free agents, quad-A players, you get the idea.”