Something has been bothering me about the New York Yankees over the last few years. The team hits the really hard, but other than Aaron Judge has almost uniformly poor hitting outcomes.
For example, Anthony Volpe hit two balls very hard last night, both around 100 mph with expected batting averages of .370 and .490 respectively. The probability that both would end in an out were about 18%. In isolation, that’s not extraordinary.
Here is where the 2023 team ranks in average exit velocity. Pretty good! 5th best in baseball.
But exit velocity isn’t everything. Here is where the team ranks in xwOBA. They are still above average, but fall to 11th overall. The Yankees are a little worse at finding that sweet spot launch angle that leads to high value balls in play. But they should still have an above average offense.
And here is where the team ranks in wOBA, which is derived from the actual outcomes, rather than just estimates based on exit velocity and launch angle:
What the hell? I thought that the Yankees were at least above average? Instead, the team is 6th worst in baseball, abutting some truly terrible teams.
This problem isn’t new to 2023 either. The scatter plot compares the average expected batting average and actual batting average of all teams from 2021-2023. The dotted regression line represents a perfect match between the two. Dots above the line represent teams that performed better than their batted ball data suggest. Dots below the line represent teams that performed worse.
The 2023 Yankees have the largest gap between estimated batting average and batting average of any team over the last three years. The 2022 team is a little better, with a slightly below average gap. But the 2021 team is also in the bottom 10%.
Okay, maybe this is just batting average. Maybe the Yankees, aided by the dimensions of their home stadium, go for home runs. Here is the same figure for wOBA and xwOBA:
The finding is basically identical. The 2023 Yankees are the third worst team in actual vs expected wOBA, behind the 2023 Tigers and Royals.
If it were one season, I’d be the first person to chalk it up to bad luck. There is a great team of pure random chance in sports and some teams just look bad because they are unlucky. Some of the biggest overperformers are the unexpected breakout teams of 2023: the Reds, Diamondbacks and Rangers. I’d expect them to regress back to the line (regression to the mean) going forward.
But after three season, it’s a trend. Something is causing the Yankees to have worse run outcomes than their batted ball data suggest.
What could those causes be? I’ll probably test this further when I have some time in the future, but here are my hypotheses:
The Yankees are really easy to defend, because their best hitters hit the ball hard all of the time.
The Yankees are slower than most teams, reducing infield singles and stretch doubles (although this doesn’t explain 2023, when the team is actually pretty fast)
Yankee Stadium’s anti-doubles park factor hurts them a lot, particularly righties.
But really, I’m not sure. All I know is that something is broken. What do you all think?