A) I DON'T KNOW HOW THEY DO IT

I think the most frustrating thing about this season is the sharp contrast with the Yankees. Both teams [the Yankees and Red Sox] have had numerous problems, more than they could have pessimistically expected before the season. Yet the Yankees have ignored their problems and are running away with the best record in the AL while the Red Sox are simply praying for a spot in the playoffs.

- Ben Jacobs

If we knew at the start of the season that the Yankees would suffer the following:

1) Kevin Brown would be out for two months, with Mike Mussina being out for almost as long and ineffective when he did pitch;

2) Jason Giambi, wracked by parasites and tumors, would give the team very little for virtually the whole season;

3) The performances of new acquisitions Javier Vazquez and Alex Rodriguez would be slightly below expectations (it's true);

4) Jose Contreras would implode faster than ... a rickety raft sailing from Cuba to Florida;

5) Being forced to give 11 starts to the group of Donovan Osbourne, Alex Graman, Brad Halsey and Tanyon Sturtze;

6) A surprising offensive decline from Derek Jeter, along with Bernie Williams failing to wholly reverse his slide;

7) Second base being manned by Miguel Cairo for virtually the entire season; and

8) Not adding any star players via an in-season trade, despite rampant speculation;

then most baseball fans would have predicted that the Red Sox would at least be even with the Yankees, if not far ahead. Yet the reverse is true. How?

1) The offense, of course, is the biggest factor. Check out the AL leaderboard of Win Shares ; showing Sheffield and Matsui tied for the lead in the AL as of August 12. Even with A-Rod's slightly diminished production, having 3 of the top 6 players in the league is a pretty good foundation. Matsui has essentially replaced Giambi's production; he's finally fulfilling the hype that accompanied his 2003 debut and is a reasonable contender for the MVP award (which would do wonders for the US-Japan relationship). Imagine what'd be if Giambi had contributed this year!

Almost as important to the Yankees' offense is the lack of a truly weak link in their usual lineup. For example, the Red Sox offense has two hitters almost as valuable as the Yankees' trio in Manny and David Ortiz, but Pokey Reese does his best to counteract their contributions, and his negative impact is accentuated by the fact that (at least before the Nomah trade) he played most of the time he was healthy. Enrique Wilson and John Flaherty would be up to the task, but they don't play enough to really hurt the team. Even the Yankees' lesser players - Clark, Cairo, Sierra, et al - have done enough positive things to avoid dragging the offense down. Combine that with the contributions of the big three, and you have a pretty good offense.

2) The bullpen - specifically, the "Quan-Gor-Mo" combination - has received plenty of credit, and deserves it. As of August 5, the Yankees' bullpen was ranked eighth in baseball by Baseball Prospectus' "Adjusted Runs Prevented" (BP hasn't updated since then), a big improvement over last year. (As is often the case, the trio of Quantrill, Gordon and Rivera total is higher than the team total - the other dwarves in the bullpen drag down the total. This is a good omen for the postseason, as those dwarves won't be seen within 60'6" of the mound in a playoff game the Yankees have any chance to win.)

3) The Yanks' defense is much improved over last year; they are in the middle of the AL in Defensive Efficiency (I believe they were second-to-last last year). Lofton, despite not being at his best, has been an improvement over Bernie in CF. The most notable change has been in the infield, which will be discussed below.

4) Luck - as noted last week, the Yankees are overachieving compared to their expected record (as has been customary throughout the Torre era), while the Red Sox are catastrophically underachieving compared to their expected record for the second time in three years.

B) OH CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN

Switching 19th century writers, this has been a tale of two seasons for Derek Jeter. And I'm not talking about before versus after his catastrophic early-season slump - I'm talking about his offense versus his defense.

After his horrific early-season slump, Jeter's superficial offensive numbers don't look out of place with the rest of his career, except for his batting average being slightly below normal. But look closer, and his production is still way off his career norms for one very specific reason: he's stopped walking. From 1997-2002, Jeter walked between 57-91 times each year (and was at that pace in his injury-shortened 2003 as well), resulting in an OBP that never dropped below .370. This year, he's on pace to walk fewer than 40 times and his OBP is .332. Whether it's residual bad habits picked up during his slump, nostalgia for the departed Alfonso Soriano or something else, it amounts to a substantial decrease in his offensive production.

But that may be balanced out by perhaps the most shocking development of the 2004 baseball season: Jeter's improved defense. Prior to the season, the debate over the quality of Jeter's defense ranged from whether he was the worst in the league to whether he was below average, but not the worst in the league. That's not a debate Jeter supporters would like to get into. The consensus of informed opinion (and not-so-informed opinion) was that the Yankees would be losing out on the full benefits of the A-Rod acquisition by moving him to 3B and leaving Jeter at shortstop.

While it's impossible to prove a negative, it's difficult to imagine how that solution would have worked better than the much-maligned shift of A-Rod to 3B. A-Rod has been outstanding at his new position. And Jeter is actually second in the AL in fielding Win Shares among shortstops, and has accumulated more than four times the amount he amassed last year (in comparable playing time due to his injury). By this metric, Jeter has gone from one of the worst fielding shortstops in baseball to one of the best. That calls up memories of Vizzini's lisp: "Inconceivable!" I can't find any in-season calculations of the other advanced defensive metrics (such as UZR or Baseball Prospectus' Fielding Runs), but I assume that an improvement in Win Shares of this magnitude would show up in the other metrics as well, even if not to the same extent.

How did it happen? Perhaps A-Rod's shortstop-like range has enabled Jeter to cheat to his left, but this effect didn't show up when Jeter played with Brosius, a superior defender.

Maybe sabermetrics has had an impact after all. In an e-mail to me on the subject, David Pinto wrote:

In the 1990's, I wrote a piece in one of the STATS Baseball Scoreboards
about Griffey's defense in center. He always ranked low in our zone
ratings. So I did a really detailed study of Griffey's zone ratings, and
the main thing I learned from it was that (this from memory, I should really
dig out the article) was that Griffey was basically letting his left and
right fielders make a lot of plays that other centerfielders normally make.
Griffey was being lazy, and not calling for every ball he could get (which
is a CF's job, after all). Griffey's zone ratings started going up after
that.

I like to speculate that we in the sabermetric community have an effect on
the game. It takes a long time, but every once in a while I see something
that says to me, "they're listening to us." I wonder if someone talked to
Griffey and told him to start going after more balls? And certainly Cashman
is smart enough to know that Jeter was a bad shortstop. Did he or Torre
find a way to confront Jeter with the numbers? Did all the talk of A-Rod
being a better shortstop get to him? I don't know, but between you and me,
I like to think these numbers had an effect.

I hope so. One thing is for sure: I haven't been this wrong about anything since I spent two days telling my brother that Scott Brosius had no chance whatsoever to get a hit off Byun-Hyun Kim in the 2001 World Series..or when I drank the sabermetric Kool-Aid and thought the Yankees should have traded Soriano instead of Jiminez in 2001 (true story: I got into this with Joe Sheehan at a BP Pizza Feed a couple of years ago)...or when I was convinced that Drew Henson would become a star...or when I thought that Ed Yarnall would be as good as Andy Pettite...

C - FINISH (OFF) WHAT YOU START

Much ink has been spilled / pixels have been displayed bemoaning the sub-par performance of the Yankee starters. Let me suggest a very simple explanation, and it doesn't have anything to do with the heart, fortitude, big-game ability, etc. of the departed starters from last year (whom we all love...sometimes, in Wells' case):

Last year, these were the strikeout ratios of the Yankee top four starters:

Name 2003 K/9
Clemens 9.0
Pettite 8.6
Mussina 9.1
Wells 4.7

Wells' was shockingly low, but the other 3 were very high and enabled the team to avoid its then-shaky defense.

Here are the 2003 ratios for the top four starters in today's Yankee rotation (not counting El Duque):

Name 2003 K/9
Mussina 9.1
Brown 8.8
Vazquez 10.4
Lieber 6.2 (from 2002)

Finally, here's how the current Yankee foursome has done this year:

Name 2004 K/9
Mussina 6.3
Brown 5.6
Vazquez 6.7
Lieber 4.6

Guys, take your pick: approach the performance of your 2003 predecessors, or what you did yourselves last year. Either one will do. Notwithstanding the team's improved defense, it seems to me that the #1 culprit in the starters' problems has been too few strikeouts. A far more strikeout-oriented staff was annihilated by Anaheim in the 2002 playoffs; with the Angels again among the league leaders in fewest batting strikeouts, I shudder to think of the butchery that might result if those two met again. (We'll get a preview in their series next week.)

D) THE GHOST OF MARIANO DUNCAN

A key part of the Yankees' 1996 championship season was the freakish performance of one Mariano Duncan, who seized the 2B job, hit .340 and slugged .500, and was annointed the "team leader" by the media because he bought some T-shirts with an inane slogan. When his "leadership" failed him the next season, along with his bat and glove, the Yankees turned to the lovable Luis Sojo, who - for the one time in his U.S. playing life other than the 2000 World Series - hit enough to actually be useful (.307 batting average, .355 OBP). When his season was ended in August by an errant fastball to the wrist, the Yankees traded for the slick-fielding Rey Sanchez, who completed the unholy trinity of flukish performances by hitting .312 with a .758 OPS. That off-season, the Yankees decided not to tempt fate a fourth time and traded for a then-legitimate star in Chuck Knoblauch. And all was well, until the first time he tried throwing to first base...

Apparently, the Yankees' deal with Mephistopheles contained an option clause.

While Enrique Wilson, unable to face Pedro Martinez every time out, has done his best to drag the Yankees' offense down, Miguel Cairo has drawn deserved plaudits for his performance. Even with a recent slump, Cairo's OPS is .756 - not great, but by comparison, Jeter's is .770 (see above re: his decrease in walks) and the departed Soriano's is .812 after a recent hot streak; he was almost even with Cairo for much of the season. And the Cairo-Wilson combination has been more than adequate defensively (better than Soriano). While I expect the Yankees to acquire a better 2B in the offseason, Cairo has enabled the team to focus on other areas for now. (Not necessarily improve those other areas - thank you, Arizona and the Yankees drafting personnel - but focus on them nonetheless.)

E) "MOST PUTRIFIED CORE"

Near the end of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Hector brings onstage a soldier he has newly killed and remarks:

Most putrified core so fair without,
Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life.

As Professor Edward Tayler notes, one of the themes accentuated by the scene is the unnaturally rapid decay of the body in question.

Yankee fans could be forgiven for feeling Shakespearean over the performance of Bernie Williams this year, and not in an eloquent way. Like the rapidly decaying soldier slain by Hector, the descent of Williams from consistent All-Star has been shockingly sudden. It appears that he will not reach the level of 1996-2002 again. He can still help the team in a complementary role, which will probably be his station next year (if he's not traded). But the star player the Yankees had for almost a decade is probably gone, and that is sad. I'd still vote for him for the Hall of Fame, but I don't expect people who actually have the power to will do the same.