The Futility Infielder

Anyone banking on a quick turnaround by the Yankees after their shakeup got some sobering news on Tuesday, not that they shouldn't have seen it coming. With the new Bernie Wiliams-free lineup taking the field behind him, Kevin Brown once again soiled his diaper early against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, allowing six runs in the first inning, and the Yanks lost, 11-4 to drop their record to 11-16. Meet the new dross, same as the old dross.

Brown has now allowed 12 first-inning runs in his four starts (and four in the second inning of one start), putting the Yanks into the position of being blown out early. Worse, over his last nine starts since making his hand into a maraca (including the postseason, where he cost the team its season by taking the ball in Game Seven when he was physically unfit to do so), he looks as cooked as a pot roast in a burning whorehouse, to borrow a wonderful phrase from my BP colleague Jim Baker. Brown has pitched 39 innings over those nine starts to the tune of a 8.08 ERA, a record of 1-7, and a batting average on balls in play of .395, a figure which has more to do with his leaving balls up in the strike zone where they can be smashed for line drives than a particularly shoddy defense behind him.

With the Yankee rotation already in a patched-up state with rookie Chien Ming-Wong subbing for injured Jaret Wright for the foreseeable future and fellow rookie Sean Henn taking Randy Johnson's start today, the team's lack of depth in that department is suddenly glaringly obvious. With no El Duques rehabbing in Columbus or Sterling Hitchcocks biding their time in the pen (not that that scenario worked out so well), they have little margin for error. With Brown bearing a $15 milllion price tag, the durability of a Fabergé egg, and a disposition only slightly sunnier than Joe Stalin after an all-night vodka binge, they have no takers for his services and few options but to either let him pitch, force him to rehab in Tampa, or sink the cost.

Steven Goldman suggested to the BP internal mailing list that a trade to the Mets for Tom Glavine might make sense as a salary dump for the Flushing franchise (Brown comes off the books this winter, while Glavine's got another year). While I think the Yankees would take a random bucket of putrefying roadkill procured by Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel if it would get Brown further from their sight, Glavine and his low K/high ball-in-play rates are just what the doctor ordered -- if that doctor is named Kervorkian. Pass. My personal preference would be to hack off either two or seven of Brown's fingers, as it worked for his namesake, Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown roughly a century ago. I suspect the line of fans who would be willing to perform such radical surgery on Brown would circle Yankee Stadium several times.

The Yankees' record is now 11-16, and while based on their track records there's enough talent on hand to turn it around, the news is bleak when one studies the probabilities for success of teams in that position. A couple of years ago Rany Jazayerli of Baseball Prospectus studied the season-opening records of nearly seventy years' worth of teams and found that the die is cast very early on.

Keeping in mind that the baseline for this period was at 15.2 percent of the teams in the study making the playoffs (that's my calculation, not Rany's), after 10 games, a team with a 4-6 record such as the Yanks held has an expected winning percentage of just .484 for the rest of the year and a mere 5.2 percent chance of making the playoffs. At 20 games, the chances of an 9-11 geam of making the playoffs are the same, 5.2 percent. At 30, a point three games down the road, here are the expected winning percentages for the rest of the year and the playoff odds for the various combinations of records open to the Yanks:

        EWP   Playoff
14-16  .494    5.0%
13-17  .473    2.2%
12-18  .469    1.8%
11-19  .438    1.5%

To borrow a line from Yogi Berra, it gets late early out there; one month into the season, it's pretty much win-or-else time for the Yanks according to this logic. Of course, the Yankees are not just any team, they're a team which has won over 100 games three straight times. In his further research Jazayerli found that there is actually a quantifiable relationship between a team's previous records and their predicted one from an early-season start:

P = .1557 + (.4517 * X1) + (.1401 * X2) + (.0968 * X3)

where P is the projected record, X1 is last year's winning pct., X2 is two years ago, X3 three years ago. Then the final winning percentage, Y, is

Y = P + ((S-P) * (.0415 + (.0096 * G)))

where S is the team's current winning percentage and G is their number of games played. Run the numbers for the Yankees and you get a predicted winning percentage coming into the season of just .587 (since even the best teams tend to regress to the mean) and based on their current record, an even less rosy .533 for the year, which projects to 86-76 and in all likelihood a lonely October in the Bronx, followed by several crucifixions.

Here's Goldman, from his latest Pinstriped Bible:

The saying, "better late than never," isn't always true. At times, especially when it comes to aging baseball players, the proper answer is "on time or you might as well not bother." The calendar turned to May and what had been obvious for more than a year finally dawned on the Yankees. They had an aging team, one where several positions were in need of urgent fixes. For years, strong production at defensive positions — center field, shortstop, and catcher — had sustained the offense despite often subpar performances from the traditional power spots. Bernie Williams had been in decline for a number of years. His glove quit long before his bat did, but after 2002 both had been in question. Rather than pursue the obvious solution, one that was clearly within the team's financial boundaries as the winter began, the team went in other directions. Months later, they are still paying for that decision.

As has been noted by several commentators, including this author in Tuesday's New York Sun, very few teams have come back from a start as bad as 10-15 and made the playoffs. Barring a truly impressive winning streak followed by a period of sustained, consistent winning, the story of this season has very likely been written. This will be forever known as "The Year The Yankees Chose Not To Make An Offer To Carlos Beltran."

That the Yankees could be one of the few teams that could turn it around is reason enough to stay tuned. Certainly their record of the past few years argues that there are untapped resources here. Still, the battle will be fought day to day, with every game counting. The Yankees will need to be honest with themselves in a way that they haven't been in years. The end of the Bernie Williams era is only the first step. The moves announced after Monday's game are not guaranteed to have much of an impact. That's not to say they're not worth trying, but to expect a sudden turnaround would be premature.

We'll know a lot more about these Yankees in the next week, but right now it's shaping up to be a long summer with an unhappy ending for this team.