Good afternoon everyone, it’s time to dive back into the mailbag and answer some of your questions. Remember to send in your questions for our weekly call by e-mail to pinstripealleyblog [at] gmail [dot] com.
Hal Steinbrenner asks: I read an article about Yankees/Pirates talks re: Skenes trade. Putting that aside, I do think Skenes would like out and the Pirates aren’t close like Skubal/Detroit was last season. This offseason, it’s exactly what I think the Yankees should do — what would a return package realistically be?
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Out of this world expensive is the only true answer. The Yankees reportedly floated the idea of a Skenes trade to Pittsburgh this deadline season, offering up names like Spencer Jones and George Lombard Jr., but it was to no avail as the Pirates weren’t interested in moving one of, if not the best pitcher in baseball so early into his career. The report was notable mainly because the Yankees were one of only a few teams to even broach the topic with the Pirates, with the rest of the league simply assuming his untouchability status and looking elsewhere for upgrades.
Now, will Paul Skenes end up a Pirate for life, sign any kind of extension to see how they play out, or be destined for a trade eventually when the team can’t get pen to paper? That’s all up in the air, as the 23-year-old ace isn’t set to reach free agency until 2030 as things stand and the landscape of the league could change dramatically by then. But, with the Pirates’ current management/ownership situation and their recent history, it’s fair to assume that the latter is the most likely route and entice fans to dream big about a future with Skenes donning their team’s cap. Pittsburgh would be doing a disservice to themselves and to baseball if they seriously entertained the idea this early, however, and the reasonable price they could ask for would be enough to deplete any farm system indefinitely. This is a situation for two or three years down the line at minimum, and we’ll see if the Yankees have the chips to get a discussion going then — but a lot of other teams will be bidding by that point.
OLDY MOLDY asks: Does run differential correlate with World Series success? How well did the Yankees do this year in games they scored three runs or less? How do they compare with the other teams in run differential and low scoring games?
Let’s answer this in two parts. First, to touch on run differential in general first, the top five teams this year by run differential are the Brewers, Yankees, Cubs, Phillies, and Dodgers. Not a bad field to pick from if you wanted to predict some LCS matchups or a World Series contender, even if it heavily skews NL this year (the Red Sox, Tigers, and Blue Jays would all come next in a distinctive tier below). Looking back to last year, the Dodgers and Yankees were the 1-2 combo atop the leaderboard and made it to the Fall Classic, but the No. 3 team in Milwaukee was ousted in the Wild Card Round by a Mets team that then made the NLCS, knocking off the No. 4 team in Philadelphia along the way. The 2023 season gets crazy though: the top team in Atlanta and the No. 2 Dodgers got punched out of the NLDS, and the No. 3 and 4 teams both didn’t win their own divisions and had to play each other in the Wild Card Round. Texas won that and ran all the way to the World Series, where the beat an Arizona team that had… a negative run differential. In 2022 we get a similar scenario where the Astros had the third-best run differential and won it all, but they played a Philadelphia team with just a +62 mark there, whereas we get a middle-ground 2021 World Series between the fourth-best Astros and the seventh-best Atlanta (but the sixth-best team, Toronto, didn’t even make the postseason).
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Suffice to say, overall run differential isn’t particularly helpful for predicting who wins it all. The postseason has too much randomness built into it to allow the top four teams from consistently meeting in the LCS, and often allows a middling team to get hot at the right time to make it farther than anyone anticipated. So if we want to narrow down to records in close games, how are the Yankees faring? To make it a little easier to track, I’ve expanded our criteria to four runs or less, avoiding what Baseball Reference refers to as blowouts with five or more run leads by the end of the game, and found the Yankees with a 57-52 record. That doesn’t sound ideal, so let’s compare this to their AL competition: the Blue Jays are 66-43, the Tigers are 53-44, the Astros are 63-49, the Mariners are 59-49, and the Red Sox are 58-56. For the NL field contenders, the Brewers are 57-45, the Phillies are 62-43, the Cubs are 59-47, and the Dodgers are 59-57.
So, if you were trying to gauge the field from this perspective, the Phillies look like a favorite emerging from the NL while the Blue Jays have worked their magic in close games and could ride that to a Fall Classic berth. Of course, winning big counts just as much as winning by a little, but with the margins increasingly scrutinized and the mistakes more costly than ever in October, the Yankees look like they have an uphill battle if the bats don’t erupt. That is also, naturally, a season-long view of their record, and the Yankee rotation looks stronger than it perhaps has all season entering the final weeks with a decently balanced offense from the top-through-middle spots supporting it, so perhaps they can turn around this poor overall performance in close affairs.
Chuckster21 asks: Volpe, IIRC seems to thrive after rest/schedule breaks. Putting aside other important factors for the moment like platoon splits, could that suggest he’s a good long term fit as a bench piece and not a starter?
Because of how committed the Yankees have been to playing him, we don’t really have a huge sample size for this, but Volpe has shown noted short-term improvement after being forced to take breaks, whether they were from the schedule or injury. Now that he’s seen the bench for a bit for the first time, he’s popped back into the lineup twice and gone 3-for-8 with two doubles and driven in one run. Nothing to write home about, but the first game he came back for being a 2-for-4 game with a walk and said RBI was mildly amusing.
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The problem throughout his career has been inconsistency, and every hot streak that he’s managed to find has almost always been followed by a month-long ice bath, but could he find that fabled consistency at the plate with inconsistency making it onto the field? The Yankees acquired Jose Caballero for this role, and he’s got the talent for it, but now with him taking the majority of the starting time Volpe will get a trial run at being the bench option leading into the postseason. The problem is his lack of reps at third and second base, something that he could work on developing over the offseason but warrant keeping him around the lineup whenever Caballero needs to cover Ryan McMahon or Jazz Chisholm Jr. Is this the long-term solution? Volpe’s injury now throws a shadow over everything that occurred to him this year, but the team does have to have a stronger contingency plan for 2026 and beyond at shortstop — the answer can’t solely be him anymore. We’ll get to test this theory out for real if he’s expected to see something more akin to 75-80 percent of the starting time there next year out of the gate.