I INVENTED THE PIANO-KEY NECKTIE, I INVENTED IT

Last night I was mulling over the Yankees' recent surge and whether or not I should adjust my 90-win forecast. The Bombers have been scoring runs at an insane rate lately, but mostly against teams that have pitched poorly all season, such as the Devil Rays, Royals, and White Sox. I began to wonder if there was any decent way of quantitatively expressing a team's tendency to outperform against poor pitching and underperform against good pitching relative to other teams. So I made up a random statistic and called it On-Base Plus Slugging Nominality (OPSN), defining it as the percent difference between the slope of the linear regression of a batting entity's OPS versus league pitching entity performances and the ratio of a batting entity's OPS over the average league OPS. It's a mouthful, but I'm pretty sure it makes some sort of sense. The result should be that a positive OPSN means that the batting entity performs disproportionately better against below-average pitching entities and whose OPS is therefore nominal in nature, and vice versa. Anyway, in this case the batting entity is the Yankees, the pitching entities are broken into teams (in the American League), and the time-frame is the 2007 season to date. Here's a graph that sort of breaks it down:


So the Yankees' OPSN versus AL pitching staffs is (2.1129-1.1029)/1.1029 = .916, which is probably a significant figure despite the relatively small sample sizes of around eight games per opponent faced. In other words, this Yankee team is likely to beat down on bad teams and get shut down by good pitchers. Why this might be the case is a matter of speculation, but I would guess that it probably has to do with things like:

- Bobby Abreu has lost a bit of bat speed and can be overpowered.
- Robinson Cano chases pitches that break out of the strike zone.
- Alex Rodriguez is something of a guess-hitter.
- Hideki Matsui has trouble with above-average two-seam fastballs.
- Melky Cabrera is young.
- Andy Phillips can struggle against high-level offspeed, breaking stuff.

Of course, my methods are pretty unscientific here and my conclusions could be off. In all likelihood, the best way of doing this analysis would be to calculate the OPSN of each individual Yankee hitter over the last several years (or however long they've been in the majors) against individual pitchers, adjusting for seasonal or ballpark factors, and doing some fancy statistical work to account for varying sample sizes. But I'm too lazy. Bottom line is, I'm not going to go with the new market consensus that the Yankees will win 95 games this year, but I'll go ahead and adjust to 91 wins, maintaining a 3.5 win standard deviation.

Joba Chamberlain, the Yankees second-biggest pitching prospect next to Phil Hughes (though I guess he's not just a prospect anymore), has been called up to work out of the bullpen. While I love that the Yankees are flexing their young-pitching muscle, I have mixed feelings about this move. Joba has been rushed, and he's only had three appearances in the minors as a reliever before being called up to the bigs to be a seventh-inning guy. He could easily overpitch on adrenaline and hurt himself. Word seems to have it that his fastball is sitting at 98 in relief, as opposed to 94 in starts, and the truth is that most pitchers simply can't put that kind of strain on their arms for more than a few seasons. Just ask Eric Gagne and Joel Zumaya (Guitar Hero my ass). Or, invent a time machine and ask Jonathan Papelbon in a couple years after this happens: