Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
As we enter a new baseball season, I’d like to talk about money. Baseball fans always complain about the rich teams spending money and winning all the time. They’ve argued for decades that financial imbalances make the game worse. In the strongest version of these arguments, they claim outright that a team can buy the World Series.
Can they, though? Can a team buy the World Series, or is this just hyperbole? ESPN recently wrote about it with regard to the Mets.
Let’s figure it out.
An old baseball proverb says you shouldn’t check the MLB standings before Memorial Day. In my own version of this, I call it the 50-Game Rule. And while one might formulate it in a nuanced way, we can summarize it quickly. Don’t check the standings before your team plays 50 games!
Conveniently, that happens sometime around Memorial Day. And I use it every season to evaluate the Yankees.
However, I recently read the book Extra Innings, published by Baseball Prospectus. It covers stats-based answers to many of the common questions baseball fans and analysts ask. Among other questions, they asked how many games a team needs to play for us to predict its final record.
The answer: only 17 games! After 17 games, you can predict a team’s final record better than chance. But in order to get much more in-depth predictive value – in order to predict a team’s final record more accurately than looking at its past couple of seasons – the team needs to play 48 games.
Notably that hits very close to the 50-Game Rule. And so, the rule still works. More or less. And, of course, as a Yankees fan, I’m not interested only in predicting their final record. I want to know whether they’re a World Series contender. Surely that requires a larger number of games.
So, the last time I checked in, the Yankees had jumped out to a 39-15 start and looked great. At the All-Star break, they’re now 64-28. They still look great! Trimming back a bit to the exact mid point of the season, they were 58-23. And Aaron Judge had 29 home runs (now 33).
Could they still fail to win the division? Of course. The AL East rocks, pretty much from top to bottom. Will they? I doubt it.
How’s your team doing? And, also, what do you think of the 2022 season overall? As I noted a few weeks ago, I was happy to see Manny Bañuelos at work!
Almost 3 years ago, I wrote a post about a baseball prospect named Manny Bañuelos. The story of Bañuelos illustrates a lot about what happens with young baseball players. He started as a very promising young prospect. But then he went through various cycles of injuries, trades, and so on.
By the end of the story, Bañuelos was in his late 20s and no longer a major prospect. It illustrated one of the many ways a baseball career can go the wrong way.
But I’m pleased to note that the Bañuelos story has taken a more positive turn in the last 3 years. Since 2019, he seems to have rebuilt his pitching skills and prospects. He played in both Chinese and Mexican baseball leagues, and he even worked himself all the way back to another stint with the New York Yankees.
As I write these words, Bañuelos just recorded his first major league save with the Yankees. Congrats! And then, after I wrote these words, the Yankees traded him to the Pirates. Thus is the life of a baseball player.
Edward Linsmier, The New York Times
Most people will tell you not to check the baseball standings before Memorial Day. In my version of the advice, I call it the 50-Game Rule. The rule says that you don’t evaluate your team until they’ve played 50 games. That usually happens…right around Memorial Day.
OK, so I’m a bit late on this one. The Yankees have played closer to 60 games. They were 35-15 at the 50 game mark. They’re 39-15 right now as I’m writing this, and playing really solid ball. They’ve got a 7.5 game lead in the AL East standings. And, despite a number of injuries, their pitching staff is leading the way.
Will it be this way the entire season? Of course not. But I think I like my team’s chances right now.
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