No. 10: New York Yankees
Happy Opening Day, everybody! I was hoping I’d crack the top 10 by Opening Day; it took some doubling up (whew!), but here we are!
My thought: “Why do we need to be done with the team previews by Opening Day?” The first few days of the season are a perfect time to talk about the best teams in baseball, or at least the teams that look to be best. So today we start with the Yankees.
OK, today is also the last day to get 20% off your first year at JoeBlogs. We’re going to have a lot of fun this year, doing our thing, counting down the most famous baseball players of the last 50 years, writing about all kinds of sports and pop culture and whatever else, and also counting down to the release of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL. I got the final copyedited pages on Wednesday and will spend the next two weeks going through those… and then the book will pretty well be done, and Advance Reader Copies will start going out to reviewers and early readers. We’ll try to give away a few of those ARCs!
And, as mentioned before (and to be mentioned again), if you preorder the book from Quail Ridge Books I will sign it and inscribe it any way you like… if you preorder the book from there or anywhere, you’re eligible to get the bonus chapters that were recently cut from the book.
But, I’m getting away from the point. Opening Day! 20% off! Let’s talk some Yankees…
Wait, are projection systems really predicting the Yankees to stink?
A couple of weeks ago, Joe Sheehan—and I know I keep saying this, but I get so much joy from reading Joe’s baseball writings, and he gets our ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ recommendation—put out his predicted standings. One of the things I really like about Joe’s predictions is that he doesn’t back away from them, not even the inevitably terrible ones. That is to say, when he wildly underpredicts or overpredicts a record, he will write about why that happened, what surprises came along, what misjudgments he made. It’s hard for me to think of anybody else who takes that kind of responsibility, present company included.
Anyway, he predicted the Yankees to go 82-80… and that shocked me. It shocked me for two reasons. One, even with the still-confusing injury to Gerrit Cole, most projection systems I’ve seen have the Yankees winning somewhere between 88 and 92 games. The betting over-under line for the Yankees seems to be around 91.5 games, which might not be super-predictive—I imagine bettors in general will overestimate the Yankees—but it does tell you where the money sees them.
The second reason it shocked me is