Team Offense, New York Yankees

The 2017 series on team offense continues with the New York Yankees. The Yankees finished twelfth in the American League and twenty second in the majors in 2016 with 4.20 runs scored per game.

I am using RotoChamp as a source of default lineups. That Joe Girardi order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.92
Probable lineup: 4.79
Worst lineup: 4.63
Regressed lineup: 4.43

This analysis should make Yankees fans very happy. Girardi and the LAT agree on Brett Gardner leading off, Matt Holliday following Gary Sanchez in the order and the members of the lower third of the order. The LAT likes Greg Bird second, but with the high uncertainty attached to his projection, Jacoby Ellsbury seems like a safer choice.

Like the Padres in the previous post, the Yankees bring a number of young players with little MLB experience into the lineup. That means uncertainty in the projections. The players might bomb, or they might really be the baby bombers.

It also means that the Yankees are for the first time in a while, send a much more youthful lineup to the plate. The World Championship teams were built on a few, strong, young players up the middle and some solid veterans at the corners. This team isn’t quite there yet, but they appear to be moving in the right direction.

(Originally I only did Marcels for players in the majors in 2016. I calculated the projection for Bird and added it to the file.)

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

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Previous posts in this series:

March 19, 2017

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