Crashing "Bombers"

Even Hillary Clinton doesn't give you something to write about every day.  OK, she does, because when your contempt for those outside your inner, sainted circle is so blatant, you're bound to say something we can all write about.  But other important things are actually happening.

Like, you know, baseball.

It is the last few weeks of the season before the playoffs start, the playoffs which Major League Baseball prefers to call the "postseason", perhaps to avoid confusion with football or the interminable playoffs in basketball and hockey.  And the end of this regular season is kind of fun.

It's fun for me, anyway, because the Red Sox are contending for the playoffs postseason, and the Cubs, who have not won a World Series in almost 110 years and haven't been in a World Series since World War II, are crushing the National League.  But some aspects of this part of the season, this year, are not so much fun.

One of those is the tendency of the sports media to seek out story lines involving the New York Yankees, even if they have to invent a few along the line when they're not doing that well.  And that seems to be happening as we speak.

There is this thing called "cause and effect", and this other thing called "post hoc, ergo propter hoc", and they both apply to this piece.  They apply, because it is a poor story that cites an action and an outcome, and then conflates the two to where the intent is to imply that the action caused the outcome.  When it is done that way, the Latin phrase applies, the logical fallacy that because A follows B, then A must have been caused by B.

So at some point during the summer, the Yankees organization decided that it was so horribly saddled with old players on massive, bad contracts, that it needed to pull the plug on its approach.  They released the ancient Alex Rodriguez (and ate the $60 million they still have to pay him), and traded the old but serviceable outfielder Carlos Beltran, and two of their top three relief pitchers, Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman, for a bunch of minor-league prospects, sending a boatload of cash along with them to pay their contracts.

Now, understand that Yankees don't pull the plug on their approach and concede seasons like this -- ever.  That would be to admit that they had done something wrong, which they simply don't do.  But in this case, it was so blatantly obvious that their fat contracts for players like Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, C. C. Sabathia and others had tanked the 2016 season, as they all got very old very much together.

"Bring up the kids", the fans wailed, and the organization actually did that, benching or trading the old players and bringing up players from AAA who were supposed to be the next great generation.  And that's where the cause-and-effect part of the story gets a bit muddled.  Since the trades, the last being at the July 31 trade deadline with a 52-52 record, New York has gone 24-14, including winning seven of their last eight games.

So they bring up the "kids", and they start winning games.  Naturally, they're winning because they brought up the kids, right?

Well, not so much.  Remember, for example, the discussion of OPS (on-base plus slugging), the individual combination stat that reflects the keys to offensive proficiency that actually correlate with team runs scored?  If you didn't remember, know simply that a tolerable OPS for a position player is .750; a player over .850 would be an All-Star, and one with a career over .925-950 or so would be a Hall of Fame-caliber hitter.

Want to know how those "kids" are hitting?  Well, exactly one -- the catcher Gary Sanchez -- has an OPS over .765 (admittedly it is 1.128, which is startling, although it's still only 34 games).  The infielder Ronald Torreyes is at .761 in 55 games; the outfielder Aaron Judge is at an abysmal .574 in 25 games.  In 49 games, the infielder-outfielder Rob Refsnyder is only at a weak .680; the catcher Austin Romine an even weaker .660 in 55 games, and the first baseman Tyler Austin in 19 games is at .688.

They're not hitting, one excepted.  What has happened is that there have been isolated incidents of note, such as two of them getting their first big-league homers in the same game, and a walk-off hit here and there.  Those make headlines, and assumptions follow.  But those just make for headlines, not systemic accomplishments.  And the team has been winning.

What is going on is that they have won not because of but in spite of the kids (again, Sanchez excepted), and the fan base and the media have gone all post hoc on us, making connections that don't exist and calling them the "Baby Bombers."  It makes for great headlines, but if you're out there in search of the truth, well, the facts are not bearing any of that up.

By contrast, let's look at the OPS of the other, older or somewhat older regulars in the lineup, since August 1st when the "kids" came up.  That would include second baseman Starlin Castro (.813 in that time), and mediocre but better-than-the-kids first baseman Teixeira (.741), third-baseman Chase Headley (.737), outfielders Brett Gardner (.729) and Jacoby Ellsbury (.776).  Catcher Brian McCann (.691) and shortstop Didi Gregorius (.678) have not contributed as much, but compared to the "kids", well, that's only comparably awful.

There is time, and there is as much chance of the young players proving themselves better as there is of Sanchez coming back to earth.  But in a political season, one where lies abound, truth is stretched and reality a fleeting blessing, we could live so happily with some accuracy in sports journalism.  There is surely a lesson in there.

The last 18 games will write their own stories, of course, but it will be of benefit to all of us if those stories are then written with limits on exaggeration and with boundlessness in reality.  Of course that never happens when the Yankees are concerned.

Caveat lector.  May the reader beware.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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