Sweep! One-month Review

Yankees 6, Rangers 1 (Sat.)
Yankees 8, Rangers 5 (Sun.)

The Yankees completed the sweep yesterday, good outings by Chacon and Wang making Torre's brutal managing Friday night a non-factor. Now it's an off day, and the Boston comes to New York for three games starting tomorrow night.

Three more games vs. Boston of the schedule. Yay. Personally, I wish the Yankees could play the 19 games against Boston and the six vs. the Mets all at once at the beginning of the season, and leave 137 games to concentrate on baseball. But anyway, it should be a fun series. Randy was 5-0 vs Boston last year; he'll have to pick up his game if he's going to continue that dominance Tuesday.


The One-month performance reivew

It's a month and change into the season, so it's a good time to take stock of the Yankees' performance so far.

First, the bottom line: Results. In first place (percentage points ahead of Boston). Recall last year at this time the Yankees were 11-19.

Some stats:

Team BA: .290 (3rd in AL)
Runs: 183 (2nd in AL)
On-base: .388 (1st in AL)
Slugging: .466 (4th in AL)

ERA: 3.76 (2nd in AL)

Fielding pct.: .989 (4th in AL)
DER: .7193 (4th in AL) (DER is an important but often-overlooked stat that tells a lot more than a team's fielding percentage. DER is a measure of the percentage of balls put in play (not including home runs) that a team turns into outs. For the 2005 season the Yankees ranked 10th in this category in the AL.)

And a few stats that are not quite as big a deal, but are important to this particular team.

--Yankees lead the AL in sacrifice bunts.
--Yankees are 5th in stolen bases in the AL.

I mention those last two not becasue I love sacrificing and stealing so much, but becasue last year's team was often criticized for not playing "small ball" when the situation seemed to call for it, being too home-run reliant, too big-inning reliant.

So overall, the hitting is good (and pretty well-distrubuted -- the Yankees scored 8 runs yesterday with nothing from Damon or Jeter). No surprise there -- this team will score plenty of runs. And while it's not necessairly a conscious small ball approach, I do notice the team picking up the "cheap" runs -- the RBI groundouts, etc. And that's a good sign.

The starting pitching has been pretty decent, even with Randy's uneven start. Mussina looks like a young man again, Chacon and Wright have been surprisingly good thus far, and Wang has been good enough, most starts.

The bullpen is . . . OK. Proctor a nice surprise, Mariano still seems to be struggling to find his form. Meyers has been generally good. But please, Joe, please -- the love affair with Sturtze must end, and end now. Does he have pictures of you in some compromising position?

So overall, not a bad first month. Lost a couple they shoudl've won, won a couple they should've lost. It's all good.