As of the morning of August 9, the Yankees are 61-54, tied with the Seattle Mariners in being just a half-game out of the second American League wild-card spot (currently held, very tenuously, by the Kansas City Royals).
It's possible, over the course of a long, 162-game season, for teams to experience a net aggregate of being either "lucky" or "unlucky." This is typically defined using Bill James' Pythagorean Won/Loss Record, which provides an estimate for what a team's win-loss record should be based on the number of runs they've scored vs. the number of runs they've given up, as a team. In the screenshot below, you can see the current run differential for each of the teams in the American League East in the circled column, labeled "DIFF":
By this measure, the Yankees have given up 19 more runs this season than they've scored. (The first-place Orioles, on the other hand, have scored 46 more runs so far than they've given up.) Since the object of the game is to score more runs than your opponent, as a general rule the better teams in baseball end up usually having positive run differentials each season.
This season's Yankees, as I mentioned above, do not have a positive run differential. In fact, if you look at their Pythagorean Won/Loss Record, their expected record right now should be about 55 wins and 60 losses, which should put the Yankees somewhere around the Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox in terms of overall team quality. Thus, one can say the Yankees this season have been "lucky," to the tune of six games they shouldn't have won, but ultimately did.
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But can a baseball team, to an extent, control their own luck (or, alternatively, render the idea of a "luck" statistic useless)? It strikes me as possible that a manager can manage each game in a season in such a way to make this happen, and my hypothesis is that Joe Girardi and the 2014 New York Yankees have been consciously trying to do so.
Since "luck" depends on a run differential, one potential way to make it look as if your team's been luckier than it actually is would be to (a) make decisions in such a way to maximize your team's chances of maintaining a small lead, while (b) also making decisions in such a way to essentially "punt" on certain games which appear to be lost, turning the types of games you might ordinarily lose by 2 or 3 runs into games you would lose by 5 or more runs.
Anecdotally, watching the Yankees this season, it's my belief this is essentially how Girardi's been managing the pitching staff and lineup changes in his team's games. (Independent of whether it was his decision or something handed down to him as an edict, if it works to the point that this particular, very much offensively limited Yankees team makes the playoffs, Girardi should earn at least some consideration for American League Manager of the Year.) To test this hypothesis, I pulled down the Yankees' season data (game-by-game) from baseball-reference.com, and using Excel, created a quick PivotTable to test my hypothesis:
Hypothesis: Are the Yankees disproportionately winning close games and are they disproportionately losing blowouts?
Results:
The data in each cell represents the number of games so far this season (as of August 8) with that particular result. So as an example, the Yankees have a 19-16 record in games this season settled by one run. They are also 6-3 in games decided by exactly six runs.
Typically when a team looks like they're playing lucky over the course of a season, a statistician would first look at the team's record in one-run games. A one-run game can, in theory, go either way by virtue of the very close score, so if a team somehow wins a disproportionately high percentage of their one-run games (like the 2012 Baltimore Orioles, who somehow - ridiculously - went 29-9 (!!!) in one-run games), this must be due to just variance. But looking at this metric, the Yanks' 19-16 record in one-run games isn't too far off from the theoretical prediction of a .500 record in one-run games, so in this sense, the Yankees haven't been that "lucky."
Expanding the analysis to one- and two-run games, though, the Yankees perhaps look a bit luckier. Combining these numbers, the Yankees have been 38-26 in games decided by two runs or less - a .593 winning percentage, good enough on its own to make the playoffs most seasons. So maybe in this sense, the Yankees have been "lucky" - but here we perhaps need to stop talking about numbers and start talking about the actual New York Yankees, as a team.
The one true strength of this year's Yankees team has been their bullpen. Joe Girardi has the (uncommon) gift this season of turning each close game into a 6- or 7-inning affair, thanks to exceptionally strong performances this season by set-up man Dellin Betances and closer David Robertson. Additionally, you could argue the team's greatest weakness (at least at this point in the season) is its patchwork starting rotation - even though they've pitched well of late, many of their starters are outperforming their individual predicted performance, so you'd expect some regression to the mean over time. My point here is, the Yankees' strongest point (their bullpen) is inversely related to their weakest (the rotation) - whenever the starter isn't out there pitching, a reliever is. If you have a lock-down bullpen, you're way more likely to win the close games (defined here as 2 runs or less), vs. lose them. It's what the Yankees did in 1996 with Mariano Rivera and John Wetteland in the bullpen, and it seems to be working this season, as well.
What about the second question in my hypothesis: are the Yankees electing to essentially "punt" on games when they're down by 5+ runs, allowing them to turn into blowout losses?
Well, in games decided by 5 runs or more so far this season, the Yankees are 10-16. These numbers suggest that in a directional sense, the Yankees are more likely to be blown out than to blow out another team. This could very well be a direct function of the season-long anemia of the current Yankees offense, and I don't think 10-16 looks too strong in one direction or the other, so I don't want to put too much stock in these numbers until the rest of the season plays out.
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I have two main points of writing this:
- When someone looks at just the numbers and says "Oh, the Yankees are luck boxes this season, screw them," they're sort of missing the point - the Yankees appear, to an extent, to be gaming the very idea of "Pythagorean luck" and disproportionately winning close games, through leveraging the use of the strongest parts of their roster and advantageously matching up in ways that have mostly succeeded (though most Yankees fans, including this author, agree that Girardi over-thinks match-ups in the context of individual games - for me, though, it's more of an aesthetic annoyance in the sense that I don't want to watch so many pitching changes. It's not that I don't get his logic.)
- Ordinarily when a team is six games "lucky" at this point of the season, you'd expect them to limp toward the finish, ending the season with a record which more reflects the "zero luck point." For the Yankees, that would be a full season record somewhere around 77-85 (give or take a few). But this season, at this point, I think you can actually argue the opposite. The Yankees have made it this far with a completely anemic offense and riding on the backs of their Triple-A pitching staff. Their offense should be producing BETTER than they are, so if their performance actually improves the rest of the season - and, if, somehow, the team can manage to get an injured starting pitcher or two back - there's no reason why this Yankees team couldn't sprint to the finish, ultimately making the playoffs as a Wild Card (or maybe even a division winner).
