“I think everyone who watched his first season in NY could have reasonably expected this debacle.”

First half: great. Second half: injured and bad.

This is just my opinion…

Unreasonable Positive Projection: As good as he was with Atlanta
Unreasonable Negative Projection: Won’t finish the season in the rotation
Reasonable Projection: League average ERA, close to 200 innings

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You guys do understand that these players are people with emotions, good days, bad days, they get grumpy and can fold under pressure and are not robots that you can just plug in and out and expect them to put up “numbers”? Just look at what pat burrel did with the rays the last year and half and what he’s done in San Fran. Playing with the numbers and using them as a tool to make an educated guess is great, but you cant soley rely on them because there are people involved and a person is the ultimate variable that you can’t predict with just numbers.

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nope voice of reason they are all robots

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Agreed. I like the idea of bringing Melkey back as a 4th outfielder though

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@Voice of Reason- Stats incorporate the good days and the bad days. Stats don’t just “skip” the bad days. If a player has a good (psychologically speaking) day, then it may or may not show up in his stat-line. Same with a “bad day.”

We could argue all day how much a player’s divorce, or child’s birth, or mother’s illness, affects their play, but the bottom line is that on that good or bad day, their stat line is still recorded and goes into the record book.

If you want to believe that Melky simply had “a lot of bad days” this year and that is why he had a down year, I’m not about to argue that with you.

People say CC, A-Rod, and AJ are human. People used to say (and still do say sometimes) that they are complete choke artists precisely because they are human (they have emotions, they understand the moment, they can’t handle it, too much pressure, etc.) However, as soon as A-Rod hits an ALDS game winning HR, or CC pitching 8 shutout IP, or Game 2 or the WS for AJ Burnett, everyone shuts up about “emotions” “clutchiness” and other things that are mostly fallacies.

Is AJ Burnett capable of pitching in a big game or not? Can he handle the pressure or not? Ask any Blue Jays fan and the answer is no, but then how did he pitch that game 2 of the WS last year? Platitudes and generalities sound nice when you want an excuse, or don’t know how to properly analyze something.

You think CC had a bad day at home? I’ll use the stats that show he pitched 4 innings and allowed 9 hits and 6 runs (or whatever bad line it was.) Your silly platitudes appear in the stat-line more-often-than-not, and if they don’t… it’s probably because they are complete sham.

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Look, one of my favorite Yankee moments was watching David Cone, coming off a season where he won 4 FUCKING GAMES!, come into a World Series game and get Mike Piazza, the greatest hitting catcher of all time, to pop up with a fastball that topped out in the mid-70s.

When it comes to player moves (i.e. the 2009 Yankees offseason) stats are great. But if you actually watch the players perform, go deeper into physicals, and put down the binder, you’ll be far more successful. Heck if Cashman got some kind of idea on how happy/upset Vazquez was in New York in 2004, then he would’ve know that he was uncomfortable here. He also could reasonably predict that 6 years of playing for losing ballclubs (with the exception of the one White Sox team that squeaked into the playoffs) won’t change his comfort level in the brightest spotlight in baseball.

At the end of the day, after all the numbers crunching you guys want to do here, you have to realize there is no statistic for straight up testicular fortitude. Stats tell you a lot, but every team has a pulse. Cash completely ignored that by taking those two guys out of the picture and replacing them with mercenaries.

You guys realize that too much reliance on that binder is a bad thing when you criticize Girardi for his managing these past two months. But can’t the same argument you’re giving about how Girardi is awful be applied to Cashman?

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@history professor, I’m not saying that the bad days aren’t in the stat sheet, what I’m saying is that can’t predict how certain players will react to certain situations through stats, even the “clutchness” stats and situational stats too. And I also never mentioned melky, while I was a fan of his, I thought at the time it was a good move because of how well javy had pitched before he got hurt in 2004, but it seems people like to go with one extrreme or the other, you have to find a happy medium. Letting matsui go replacing him with johnson was one of the biggest mistakes they made this offseason, while getting berkman helped cover that mistake it was still adumb move that maybe it the sabermetrics book looked good but anyone who followed baseball the last couple years couldve told you it was a mistake.

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Intangibles people stop using them because they only make you sound retarded. Just because a guy has more “heart” or “clutch” does not make them a better player. My god its like trying to teach a 3 year old how to read.

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@ Bleacher creature- So tell me, who on the Yankees recently has had testicular fortitude? A-Rod? (No- then yes.) CC (No- then yes.) Burnett (No- but WS Game 2.) Tex? Swish? Matsui? Mussina? Giambi?

Your voice is the same voice that said A-Rod could never make it in NY (just like the voice is now saying Vasquez never can.) All it takes is a few good games and the history completely changes. Hell, for a hitter all it takes is one big HR and for a pitcher one really big start and everything is forgotten.

Do you not remember Mariano Rivera, the God of all baseball players, costing the Yankees 2 World Series titles in ’01 and ’04? Where was his testicular fortitude on those days?
Did A-Rod magically find his last year? I suppose Matsui waited until the last year of Yankee career to win the WS. He just decided to write the story that way with his testicular fortitude that he usually reserves for his pornography collection.

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Letting matsui go replacing him with johnson was one of the biggest mistakes they made this offseason, while getting berkman helped cover that mistake it was still adumb move that maybe it the sabermetrics book looked good but anyone who followed baseball the last couple years couldve told you it was a mistake.
————
@voice of reason

You can’t rewrite history here. This is not how things went down. The Yankees didn’t way “We are going to let Damon and Matsui go and sign Nick Johnson.” (Even though this website has always loved NJ.) What really happened is that the Yankees thought to themselves “We can only keep one of Damon and Matsui because both are essentially DHs. We would rather keep Damon because he is healthier, can still play the field some in a pinch, and can run.” Matsui realized he was going to get squeezed out and quickly signed a deal that he thought was favorable. The Yankees wanted Damon over Matsui, Matsui knew it, and he looked out for #1.

That left only Damon. From there, Damon screwed the pooch. The Yankees still preferred Damon over NJ, but Damon and Boras fucked that up by holding out for 2 years or too much money, or whatever. The Yanks said “fuck this, we aren’t waiting on this, especially if he and Boras hold to these demands.” NJ seemed like a reasonable deal, and he would have been if he stayed healthy.

That’s a rough sketch of what happened. All this gibberish of “choosing NJ over Damon or Matsui” is nonsense and revisionist history. And I’m here to set the history straight!

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Yankees didn’t say*

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@History Prof:

It wouldn’t hurt to proofread before clicking ‘submit’

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We’ve been doing just fine with bringing out the lunatics to this site, thanks

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Unreasonable Negative Projection: Won’t finish the season in the rotation
___________________________________________________________

How could it have been an unreasonably negative projection when it turned out to be true? We do have hindsight now, so I’d call that a vey reasonable/precisely accurate projection.

I’m not saying it was unreasonable to expect him to be good. I respect the viewpoint of you and everyone who was enamored by the statistics and expected a positive season from him. But Javy Vazquez is an affront to sabremetrics! And for you to list him in the category of good risks taken by cashman this season is a little difficult to swallow.

And yes, I fully expect javy’s stats to return to their norm next season, when he is pitching for pittsburgh. He’s just one of those guys. It doesn’t mean sabremetrics isn’t a great tool, it just means it’s not perfect.

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“How could it have been an unreasonably negative projection when it turned out to be true?”

If I tell you you’re going to get hit by a plane while sitting at your computer and it happens, that doesn’t mean it was a reasonable estimation of future events. All it means is that it did happen.

“And for you to list him in the category of good risks taken by cashman this season is a little difficult to swallow.”

The Yankees gave up two spare parts (Cabrera, Dunn) and one prospect (Vizcaino). For a guy who was a top 10 pitcher in 2009, on a one year contract and projected to be a Type-A, I’d say that’s a pretty decent deal to swing.

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History Prof, I’m not saying the other guy is right, but you are a fucking moron. Respond to his point for a change.

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Gardner is a great bench role player. He will never be anything more than that.

Thank god the Yankees will probably see the light on this after a full season of this fucking moron in LF.

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Also some of you assholes are writing so much in your posts. Anyone who sits here and read these long ass posts is a jerkoff.

Fuck you guys.

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Gardner was the best position player on the Yankees this season outside of Cano. That is 100% fact.

Yankee fans are fucking idiots.

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I thought this post was supposed to be about Lunatics who want to trade everybody.

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Trade A-Rod to the Cubs for Geovany Soto.
Trade Tex to the Braves for Jason Heyward.
Trade AJ to the Mets for Bobby Bonilla.

Sign Jeter, Mariano, and Andy to ONE-Year contracts for $10 million.

First Base is split between Heyward, Swisher, Posada, and Montero.

Nunez plays third.
TWO of the young arms populate the starting rotation.
Cano gets a horchata machine in the dugout.

And yes, please dig up Billy Martin’s corpse, thank you.

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@ Real Avg RAB Guy, I thought I tried to address some of their better to understand points (some players are clutch, some aren’t… and that letting Matsui go for NJ was stupid.)

Trying to convince someone that “clutchness” doesn’t exist is like talking to a fucking child. I should simply be able to point at Alex Rodriguez and say “Look at this guy, he was the least clutch guy in the history of baseball and now almost every Yankee fan wants him up in a big spot.”

As for the other guy retardedly saying “I wanted Matsui over NJ,” that doesn’t mean anything when his context and history is completely wrong. I was trying to let him know how completely stupid it made him sound.

Once the season is over, fans like the change parts so that all the characters and stories fit the narrative in their own head (whether its that Vazquez is unclutch, or Matsui should have been resigned) no matter how out of touch with reality their narrative is.

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“If I tell you you’re going to get hit by a plane while sitting at your computer and it happens, that doesn’t mean it was a reasonable estimation of future events. All it means is that it did happen.”

This is nonsense but just to play along with this silly analogy, a more apt description of the Javy risk would be:

a) The last time I sat at my computer I was hit by a plane.

b) Other people sat at the same computer, they were hit by a plane, too.

c) Most evidence suggests getting hit by a plane while sitting at a computer is extremely improbable, thus the chances of it happening again are small.

d) there are other computers available, and no one’s ever been hit by a plane while sitting at them.

If I had a choice, I’d sit at the computer that has no history of attracting plane crashes. Cashman chose to sit at the one that has the history, thinking it was statistically improbable for it to happen again.

Bad decision, and not a good risk.

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I do concur, though, that the pieces we gave up for him were inconsequential (i.e. I’m not on the Melky band wagon). The real cost of that trade, though, was the place in the rotation that we gave him which could have gone to someone else. It was more about opportunity cost than asset cost.

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Mike K. – the only reasonable voice.

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Mike K.- You remember Vasquez made the All-Star team his other time he was on the Yankees? Say what you will about AS appearances as good indicators of performance, but the point is that he actually performed very well in the first half of the season with the Yankees.

Other seasons in his baseball career he has been an extremely serviceable major league who struck out lots of batters and threw 200 innings. The last time he made fewer than 32 starts in a season was over 10 years ago, and then he sucked this year. He wasn’t asked to be a #1, just a number 3 or 4. Unfortunately he couldn’t even do that. But to say anyone saw a season this pathetic coming is insane (unless you are the same person that yells “SEE I TOLD YOU!” every time A-Rod strikes out with runners on base in the playoffs.)

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Grim, great name, but you’d be banned at RAB.
/tsjc’d

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you guys know I was one of the worst players in baseball this year right?

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“Gardner is a great bench role player. He will never be anything more than that.

Thank god the Yankees will probably see the light on this after a full season of this fucking moron in LF.”

If you’re serious, stop watching baseball. You are ALREADY WRONG. He was a ton more than “a great bench role player” this year. He was the second best player (not position player, PLAYER) on the team this year.

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@Joe Pawlikowski: so should you

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I’ve been frequenting this site since early ’06… I’ve had some great laughs, read some great interviews. Saw some interesting perspectives. Why I started reading/writing posts I have no idea. The pure comedy ones are great. As for the rest… you’re all such geniuses AFTER the game/season is over. (Why aren’t you in the MLB?) The negativity toward a team you supposedly root for is disgusting. You’re losers. The SMART money is that NONE of you have any coach/manager/GM experience, and probably were picked last for sports as a kid. So, while this site will remain ENTERTAINMENT (great at it by the way). I leave you with this: WITH 200 MILLION TO BURN, YOU COULDN’T DO ANY BETTER… FACT. NOT ONE OF YOU. 15 out of 16 years in the playoffs, 7 WS, 5 rings. Like ANY of you could best that? But hey, with all that revenue, maybe people would stop bitching about the photoshops? Doubt it… (And they say New England fans are whiners… holy shit!!!) I’m out! Sticking to viewing the sites Photoshops/Interviews. My loyalty far exceeds this bunch of posting douchebags. GO YANKS!

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History Professor: Believe me, I’m not one of those guys. I’ve never said Arod wasn’t clutch; I don’t think we would have won the WS with Damon, Melky, and Matsui; and I’ve never uttered the phrase “True Yankee”. I just hate Javier Vazquez. And I think there were a whole lot of us who expected him to fail this year, and I don’t think we were crazy to think so.

Whatever. We’ll never see him again, so let’s move on. I was just surprised to see Gary Wallace (whose opinion I respect) citing him as a good risk. I thought it was hubris on Cashman’s part.

(We will never see him again, right? I mean, if he goes back to the NL and posts some wicked numbers, Cashman isn’t going to trade for him again, is he? You guys have a line to him. Please confirm.)

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FNG – it was nice having you. your contribution will be sorely missed.

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“I thought it was hubris on Cashman’s part.”

I’m inclined to agree with you. He seems to have a little bit of “I can make this work, screw you,” in him with Vasquez and NJ.

“I was just surprised to see Gary Wallace (whose opinion I respect) citing him as a good risk.”

I understand the other side of the Vasquez argument, I just don’t agree with it. I thought the trade was a good decision at the time and I’m not going to let the outcome change that. It didn’t work out at all and, knowing what we know now, the Yankees shouldn’t have done it, but that’s an unfair way to look at it.

There’s no way Vasquez is back in pinstripes. I can’t even imagine what would happen if he was re-signed and I prefer not to.

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@ Mike K-

Going into the season, did you think Vasquez was going to have a better or worse season than CC, AJ, Hughes, Pettitte?

Obviously everyone should reasonably think CC will have a better season than Javy, and probably the same with Pettitte.

But looking at Hughes, Javy, and AJ (from a pre-2010 perspective) I find it hard to put money on any one of the three having a significantly better year than any of the others. You could have hoped Hughes would have the season that he did, but he also could have bombed it in his first full year starting. AJ could have been expected to do what he has always done (be inconsistent), but he ended up being even worse. Given Vasquez’s track record, I think the case could easily have been made that he would have had the most reliable 2010. Obviously that didn’t happen. Obviously your insanely pessimistic prediction was right and NoMaas’s more middle-of-the-road prediction wasn’t right.

I just think it was perfectly reasonable to think that Javy could have been the 3rd best starter (at best) and at worst an acceptable 5th starter. If you really thought he was going to pitch 157 innings to a 5.50 era, then shit, tell me which stocks I should invest in.

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“I think the case could easily have been made that he would have had the most reliable 2010. ”

please make that case. wasn’t he the 3rd pitcher we picked up who excelled with the Braves the year before & failed miserably with us?

your case is based on that you couldn’t imagine him pitching as poorly as he did? that’s weaker than the presumption in the face of recent history that he would be the biggest upgrade of them all.

Here is something you can take to the bank. JV will be back as a top of the rotation innings eater for whomever he plays for in 2011

However, JV is just an indirect reason we got bounced in the ALCS. Can’t blame him for anything in october.

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Cashman F’d the season.

He didn’t make one solid move. Everything backfired on him especially the Seattle trade. He really held that up because of Nunez?

If that’s true he should be tarred and feathered. And have me lick his scrotum.

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Melky had the better 2009. Melky got off to a hot start, Gardner got injured, and Gardner never played that much better in 2009 than Cabrera to force Girardi to give Gardner the starting CF role. However, 2010 Melky to 2010 Gardner is a different story.

One point about Gardner and why we’d be better off signing guys like Jayson Werth or Carl Crawford who can actually hit the ball to play that corner outfielder spot and sit Gardner on the bench. The one trademark of a playoff/championship team is good pitching. Period. Look at who will win it this year: a team led by Cliff Lee or a team led by Tim Lincecum. The trademark of good pitching is not walking anybody. The first two arguments shouldn’t be argued by anybody, sabermetric nerd or Joe Morgan clone.

So by relying solely on Gardner’s ability to get on base and draw walks in the playoffs is a flawed philosphy. Especially because the last thing Cliff Lee or any pitcher wants to do is pitch around the 9 hitter in the Yankees lineup and put Gardner on the base-paths. With other high OBP guys, like Nick Johnson, this isn’t a big deal because Johnson would need a Lambo to steal second. And considering Gardner’s scouting report is that he’s a slap singles hitter who has no chance of hitting an extra base hit (unless it’s one of those Alfonso Soriano hustle doubles circa early 2000s), he’s going to be attacked early in the count (and eventually overmatched) by a good pitcher. Bringing in a Crawford/Werth, who can get on base at about the same rate as Gardner, will force opposing pitchers to not throw the first couple of pitches down the plate, something that happened to Gardner a lot in the Texas series. And if your manager channels his inner Joe Torre by playing favorites and keep Mr. Minka Kelly in the leadoff spot, then what do you lose with replacing your 9-hole hitter with an all-star?

Just my two cents

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Can we all at least agree that Phil Hughes is an absolute disgrace? I seriously want to see a personal apology from him to his family, friends, loved ones, and the fans for completely embarrassing himself. Has to be one of the worst pitching performances in MLB Playoff history. Trade him, release him, I don’t care – I’m completely done with him.

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q: “then what do you lose with replacing your 9-hole hitter with an all-star?”

a: $100M

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This whole thread wins retroactively.

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FNG: we still cool?

/tsjc’d

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” And if your manager channels his inner Joe Torre by playing favorites and keep Mr. Minka Kelly in the leadoff spot, then what do you lose with replacing your 9-hole hitter with an all-star?”

DA YANKEES HAS AS MUCH MONEY AS DEY WANT!!11!1!11!!

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