In January, the New York Daily News published a column speculating on which starting pitchers the Yankees could add during July’s trade deadline. Seven months away. Before a pitch had been thrown at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida. Before Joe Kelly and Tyler Austin reignited the bitterness in a decades-old rivalry. Before Sonny Gray […]
Author: Lance Brozdowski
The Yankees’ Target: An Evolved Gerrit Cole
Whether or not the majority of Yankees fans would sign off on a trade for Pittsburgh Pirates’ ace, Gerrit Cole, the possibility exists. Chronicling the assets presumed to leave New York for the cost-effective starter gives you a picture of how foggy details around the “progressing” negotiations seem to be. On December 16, the Pirates were […]
Evolution, Cortisone, and Aaron Judge’s Shoulder
Aaron Judge’s season thus far resembles a graph many of you embrace as mathematically inclined baseball nuts, the rest running away, scorning the advance of statistics in this great game. Our visual model is the cosine wave. Starting in the positives from square one, it dips below zero into the abyss, only to remerge and reach the […]
The Red Sox vs. Aaron Judge
Aaron Judge went 1 for 18 across four games versus the Boston Red Sox. No, it wasn’t because of the Home Run Derby. That explanation – to use one of many terrible workplace buzzwords – is low hanging fruit. We’ve seen writers like Devan Fink of SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score break apart that myth, leading […]
Reacting to Mid-Season Prospect Lists
Calendars shedding another page as they embrace July not only catalyzes heat waves in the Northeast, but also the publishing of mid-season prospect lists. It’s a chance for analysts to recant past criticisms from the preseason and present the masses with prospects who converted their winter efforts into helium in their rise to relevancy. This season has been […]
Is Judge Breaking Projection Systems?
It’s not the awe-inspiring “breaking” we’ve seen from Miguel Sano as he snapped his bat like a twig in 2016. Or the much more humorous attempt at breaking that we’ve seen from the likes of Yasiel Puig, seeking, and failing to accomplish the same feat. This breaking is much more subtle, a metaphor for confusion that emerges when something […]
Implications of a Torn UCL: The Gleyber Torres Story
I may have jinxed it. Buzz around the Bronx picked up so much a few weeks ago that I felt it was inevitable Gleyber Torres’ would make a resounding entrance into a lineup second only to the Houston Astros in OPS. My series of posts – It’s Not Gleyber Time… Yet & It’s Almost Gleyber […]
It’s Almost Gleyber Time
Revisiting topics in the sports journalism universe can best be thought of as those Russian nesting dolls. Beautifully crafted to inconspicuously fit over one another, I’ve always found great satisfaction in believing they’re tangible representations of time. Sometimes we’re reminiscent of better days upon removing a shell, while otherwise we’re more than happy to convince […]
Aaron Judge is coming back to Earth…kind of
It was just a matter of time. Sometimes it happens discretely, unnoticed until an 0-for-16 stretch provides us with a casual small sample size to overreact to. Other times it’s sudden, buoyed by an other-worldly week of at bats that make the following week’s productivity seem relatively worse than it actually is. Then there is Aaron Judge’s May. […]
Luis Severino, the New King of Velocity
After averaging 98.3 mph on his fastball in Sunday night’s marathon of a game, the same Luis Severino that went down with a tricep strain a year ago Friday, causing many of us without retrain to give up on a 22 year old arm, currently sits atop the velocity leaderboards on his fourseam fastball (starting pitchers, min. […]