The Yankees Update

4 Games Back!

With a sweep of the Cleveland Indians (and aided by 2 blown saves by Eric Gagne for the Red Sox), the Yankees find themselves only 4 games back in the Division race. That's right. It's a race now.

I know, I know. I wrote them off in May when they slipped to 14-1/2 games behind the hated Red Sox. I mean, wouldn't you if it was your team sitting that far back a very strong team that was playing .700 ball and only had to go 50-50 to get to 95 wins?

Make no mistake, the Red Sox are still in the driver's seat with 6weeks to go. They may win 100 in which case it just won't matter what the Yankees do. The Red Sox play the Devil Rays, something like 70games... Okay I exaggerate; but it is true their schedule is pretty easy compared to the host of contenders the Yankees still have to see off the Tigers, the Angels and have a healthy dose of Blue Jays and Orioles.

In determining this, I used Baseball Prospectus's third-order standings, which are based not on actual records but on underlying team performance. These theoretical standings, to give an example, see the Yankees as a 71–47 team, and the Cleveland Indians as a 62–56 team, which seems fair after this weekend. The Yankees may be only 1.5 games ahead of the Indians in the real world. But after Saturday's 11–2 shelling and the sight of Jhonny Peralta being picked off first with the bases loaded and none out while down by four yesterday, few would see the teams as equals, or as likely to perform equally well over the rest of the season.

These third-order standings show the Yankees as nearly equal to the Red Sox, and an order of magnitude better than any other team in the league, and thus as likely to stay hot enough to make it to October. The great variable in pennant races, though, especially in the era of the unbalanced schedule, is strength of opposition. If the Yankees and Indians each played nothing but .500 teams the rest of the year, we'd expect that the Yankees would play .598 ball, and the Indians .530 ball, based on how well they've played this year. As is, though, the Yankees will be playing teams with a combined third-order winning percentage of .526, while Indians opponents will be at .481.

This disparity means that, speaking roughly, the Yankees project to play .572 ball over the rest of the season, while the Indians project to play .549 ball. Combine that with their actual records to this point, and the Yankees' projected record comes out at 91–71, while the Tribe's is 90–72. Those April losses counted.

Unhappily for Yankees partisans, the same exercise shows the Red Sox finishing with a 100–62 record. More happily, it shows the Detroit Tigers ending the year at 88–74, with the California Angels grabbing the West title with a 92–70 record, and the Mariners ending up at 87–75. That would put the Yankees, Indians, Red Sox, and Angels in the playoffs, which certainly sounds reasonable enough. These aren't, though, large margins, and a bad week could well knock the Yankees out of the hunt.

Yankees may still fall out of contention for the Wild Card berth, let alone the Division in a bad week. On the other hand, one should not count on this but historically the Red Sox have been known to choke late in the season... :)