YFSF

Top 50 Sox Seasons #2: Ted Williams, 1941

.406/.553/.735, 1.287 OPS, 606 PA, 185 H, 147 BB, 37 HR, 120 RBI, 335 TOB, 12.3 AB/HR, 235 OPS+
All-Star starter, ML Player of the Year, MVP – 2

.406.

You know what it is. No labels. No context. You don’t even need to be a Red Sox fan or a particularly serious baseball fan. You hear it; you know it. .406. The magic number.

But 1941 was about so much more than just .406; one could say Williams was so good that year, he managed to overshadow even himself.

Opening Day! Jays-Yanks Gamer I

As we will no-doubt be reminded ad nauseum during the broadcast, this gray and drizzly afternoon will mark the beginning of the end for the beloved behemoth that is Yankee Stadium. We have arrived at the final opening day for the old ballpark in the Bronx. The Yankees, however, begin a new era a year before they abandon the House of Ruth. In a preview of what will come next year, the team has replaced reliable old battleax Joe Torre, with a new-fangled doppelganger of the same name. What will the Girardi era bring? One hopes a return to the glory of the past. Today we'll get our first look at Girardi the tactician. How will he handle his young pitching staff? Are we in for NL-style baseball? The offense looks powerful, but the Pinstripers will live or die with the performance of their pitching staff, which balances some rapidly aging vets and some very young blood. Getting the start today is the one pitcher at the fulcrom of that lever. Chien-Ming Wang comes off a pair of 19-win seasons, and a pair of playoff flameouts. He'll face perennial Cy Young candidate and warhorse Roy Halladay, of the Blue Jays. We're putting up the game thread early, so comment away. This fan is ready on day one. Play Ball!

Update: Today's game PPD by rain. Rescheduled for tomorrow at 7:05.

Changes at the Top: The New YFSF

Opening Day is a time for a new beginnings, and we're proud to announce one of our own. As our handsome new banner indicates, we've made a subtle change to our identity. Henceforth, this site will be known simply as YFSF. This is a lot cleaner than our ungainly our old locution, which was a bear to spell out and a challenge to other sites that link here. Regular readers know it's always been how we refer to ourselves. (Think of Trans World Airlines morphing into TWA.) We also feel a lot more comfortable with the "vs" out of our name. While the site originated as an email exchange and then public airing of debate between a Yankee and Red Sox fan, it has developed into something encompassing more than just baseball's greatest rivalry. We believe in the dialectic process, but the kind of debate we foster here transcends a tawdry "us vs. them" mentality in favor of an objective, open-minded, and thoughtful analysis. YFSF will still be devoted to the rivalry and its protagonists (though not exclusively; the change in title suggests the expansive purview that has always characterized the site), but we all write here and we hope you visit precisely because it is better than the typical zero-sum Yankees-Red Sox material found elsewhere on the web and in the broader media. So YFSF it is from here on. Welcome to the new YFSF, the same as the old YFSF, but not quite.

Incidentally, in order to see our new banner you may have to force your browser to reload this page and/or clear your history/cache.

The Editors

Dream Team, Emphasis On the Dream

Tony Massarotti says the Yanks' and Sox' reluctance to trade Johan Santana could cost them when Toronto's deep rotation takes the AL East crown this season. Like many people -- including myself -- have done, Massarotti compares a potential Santana deal to the 1997-98 Pedro Martinez trade-and-sign the Red Sox pulled off -- a move that changed the franchise.

Don’t people remember? Back then, the Cleveland Indians were the elite team in the AL, the kind of power the Red Sox are now. The Indians had won two AL titles in the span of three years. After losing the 1997 World Series in seven games to the Florida Marlins, the Indians had the chance to acquire Martinez from the Montreal Expos in exchange for a budding young phenom named Jaret Wright.

Never mind the slightly inaccurate rendition of history (Jaret Wright, at least according to Baseball America, was not as highly thought of as Clay Buchholz -- or even Carl Pavano, whom the Sox sent over for Pedro), this is  a nugget I hadn't known.

Can you imagine the team Cleveland could have had in 1999? Manny Ramirez's 165 RBI, .333/.442/.663 season, Jim Thome's 141 OPS+ and Pedro Martinez joining a young Bartolo Colon (127 ERA+) to lead the rotation. Wow. Chalk that non-trade into the "Oops!" column.

Top 50 Sox Seasons #3: Pedro Martinez, 1999

23-4, 2.07/0.923/.210, 213.1 IP, 313 K, 37 BB, 13.2 K/9, 1.6 BB/9, 8.5 K/BB, 6.8 H/9, 243 ERA+
Postseason: 3 G, 2-0, 17 IP, 6 BB, 23 K, 0.00/0.647/.089
CY Young, All-Star starter and MVP, MVP – 2

We all as Red Sox fans must have done something right to have been granted the privilege of watching this skinny Dominican throw a baseball.

From the beginning of the season, Pedro was a revelation – proving that his 1997 was no fluke, and that the tastes of dominance he’d shown us the year before were just that: Mere tastes. The main course was so much better. For the first and only time in my life, I remember commentators realistically wondering whether a pitcher could win 30 games. Through 79 games in 1999, Martinez had won 15, and he entered the All-Star game the unquestioned best pitcher in the game.

Schroedinger's Streak

The New York Times ran an op-ed piece today authored by Samuel Arbesman and Steven Strogatz of Cornell University that details the authors' efforts to use a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871-2005 in order to replay the history of baseball 10,000 times with the goal of determining the likelihood of Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak. I don't pretend to have anywhere near the level of smarts required to fully understand what they did, let alone weigh in on whether or not the methodology used was sound. I do fancy the idea that at the instant this simulation was complete, thousands of anti-blogging/anti-statistician sportswriters cried out at once in terror and were suddenly silent.

The upshot, as best as I can fathom, is that it isn't unlikely that in the course of baseball history that someone did what he did, but it is unlikely he did it (56th most likely — creepy), and even more surprising he did it the year in which he did.

It's fun navel-scratching material to ponder on the day prior to when we actually get back to playing the games.

The Good Book

A few weeks ago, the editors of the Los Angeles Times Book Review asked me to write a short piece on the Baseball Encyclopedia, mythology, and the fragility of the historical record. It's in today's paper. You Could Look It Up. It was a special pleasure to interview David Neft, the Encyclopedia's original editor, whose thoughts about records and typographic qualifications echo my own:

"I don't believe in asterisks. Period. The record is the record. The record is the achievement. You may not like the person who holds the record. You may think he cheated. It doesn't matter. He's got the record."

Top 50 Sox Seasons #4: Carl Yastrzemski, 1967

.326/.418/.622, 1.040 OPS, 680 PA, 189 H, 91 BB, 44 HR, 121 RBI, 360 TB, 79 XBH, 284 TOB, 193 OPS+
MVP, ML Player of Year, All-Star starter and MVP, Gold Glove

There’s a simple reason why this is one of the top two offensive seasons in Red Sox history – most of us are likely Red Sox fans because of it.

We all know the story. A dissatisfied Tom Yawkey, never recognizing the team-building flaws that continually thwarted his efforts to win a championship for Boston, is tired of losing money on the Red Sox. Attendance is sinking – Fenway draws just over 800,000 in 1966, an average of just more than 10,000 fans per game – as is the team, finishing ninth out of 10 AL teams. He begins thinking seriously about moving out of Boston, leaving the Hub of the Universe with no big-league teams.

Then came Yaz.

The Awesome Awesomeness of Being Awesome

It's a new season, so we are blessed with a plethora of new stats at Baseball Reference. They are:

• The addition of a new season -- 1956 -- to the game-by-game data. Retrosheet just a few months ago added that to their list, so box scores, gamelogs, splits and more specialized stats are now available for the last 52 seasons. Here's Ted Williams' 1956 season. And Mickey Mantle's monster year.
• The addition of win probability stats to the box scores. This helps B-R compete a bit with Fangraphs, whose charts depicting the moment-to-moment roller coaster of any given game are a must-see throughout the season. Here's the Mother's Day Miracle, which shows that when the Sox opened the ninth down 5-0, they had less than a half-percent chance of winning. And when Julio Lugo stepped to the plate with two outs, the bases loaded and the score 5-4, there was still only a 29 percent chance of victory. The box scores also include the Top 5 plays by increase (or decrease) in Win Probability Added, and the pitchers' WPA and Leverage Index in their box score lines.
• Also added to box scores is pitchers' strike data (Contact-Swinging-Looking), and batted-ball data (GB-FB-LD-?). Both can be found with the more traditional pitching line statistics.

Something to waste a few hours with this weekend.

The Short and the Long of It

It's a new day in Yankeeland. Brian Cashman and Joe Girardi have set the team's opening day roster, and defying expectations, have chosen to forego a longman. By placing Andy Pettitte retroactively on the 15-Day DL, the Yanks made room to carry Jonathan Albaladejo, Brian Brunney, and Ross Ohlendorf, at least until the 5th game of the season, when Pettitte will be due to return. One of those men, perhaps two, will likely head back to the farm at that time, but until then, Joe has additional flexibility and the space to allow the newbies to find themselves in the Bigs. Smart move. With a frontline of Mo, Joba, Farns, and Hawkins, Loogy Billy Traber, and those hard-throwing righties, the Yanks have a potentially formidable pen.