On Friday night, the phenom, who was already responsible for the Yankees’ first run thanks to an infield hit, stepped up to the plate against reliever Jim Johnson in the bottom of the seventh inning—Johnson came into the game after manager Mike Scioscia the Angels’ starter Andrew Heaney. Johnson retired Miguel Andujar for the second out of the inning and was trying to get Torres for the final out. The first pitch was a called strike and the next three offerings from Johnson missed the plate and the rookie didn’t bite.

Johnson threw Torres a 95 mph pitch that was low and outside and Torres hit it to right center to give the Yankees a 2-1 lead.

Torres is now batting .333/.393/.646 with nine home runs in 108 plate appearances. Every time you think he can’t get better, he does. In a fun twist, the last 21-year-old to hit a home run in four straight games is Torres’ teammate Giancarlo Stanton who did in 2011 with the Marlins.

Photo credit: Brad Penner / USA TODAY Sports

On Monday night against the Texas Rangers, Tanaka surrendered two home runs to bring his season total, thus far, to 11. He has given up five in his last three starts. He gave up one in the rain-shortened game last week against the Nationals, and two against the Red Sox on May 9. Tanaka only has two starts without giving up a home run; April 23 in a 14-1 win against Minnesota and in the 6-5 victory over Houston on May 3.

Tanaka has made 10 starts and while the Yankees only have two losses in those starts, before Monday’s win against the Rangers, he pitched three straight no-decisions and allowed 10 earned runs. His HR/9 is hovering around last year’s mark and last year, he surrendered 35 long balls, a career-high since coming to the U.S.

Per Baseball Savant, Tanaka relies on six pitches. A slider, splitter, four-seam fastball, sinker, curveball, and a cutter. As you can see, he threw his slider a lot more during the first month of the season. Now he throws both his slider and splitter around 31% of the time.

Both home runs on Monday night were off his splitter. On May 9, Mitch Moreland’s home run was off a slider and Andrew Benintendi’s was off a sinker.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant

Tanaka’s given up home runs the most with his slider (4), his sinker is next (3) and he’s given up two apiece on his four-seamer and splitter.

Here is where all 11 of Tanaka’s home run pitches landed in the zone. As you can see, six of them were right in the middle of the zone while the other five were just a bit lower but still in the zone.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant

This heat map also shows exactly where Tanaka’s home run pitches landed in the zone. When his four-seamer is flat, his splitter doesn’t drop and when his slider and sinker also don’t move enough, batters are going to hit them well and out of the park.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant

I took a look at where in the count Tanaka’s has given up his 11 home runs and here are the results:

Tanaka has given up three home runs with the batter behind in the count.

• Adam Jones hit one off Tanaka’s slider on an 0-1 pitch on April 5
• Zack Cozart hit one off Tanaka’s slider on an 0-1 pitch April 28
• Andrew Benintendi hit one off Tanaka’s slider on an 0-1 pitch on May 9

See a pattern?

He’s given up three with the batter behind in the count.

• J.T. Realmuto hit one off Tanaka’s four-seamer on a 3-1 count on April 17
• Mitch Moreland hit one off Tanaka’s sinker on a 2-0 pitch on May 9
• Joey Gallo hit one off Tanaka’s spiltter on a 2-0 count on May 21.

He’s given up two home runs on a 1-1 count.

• Anthony Rendon hit one off Tanaka’s sinker on May 15
• Rougned Odor hit one off Tanaka’s splitter on May 21

And finally, first-pitch home runs.

• Randall Grichuk hit one off Tanaka’s four-seamer on March 30
• Hanley Ramirez hit one off Tanaka’s slider on April 11
• J.D. Martinez hit one off Tanaka’s sinker on April 11

At least Tanaka’s spreading the wealth, so to speak. I was a little surprised that Tanaka has not (to this point) yielded a home run with two strikes. I guess that’s one positive because nothing is more frustrating to watch than a pitcher getting the batter to two strikes and then giving up a home run.

Last season at this time, Tanaka had given up 14 home runs; even giving up four in a start to the Astros on May 14, 2017. He made 30 starts last season and he had 10 games in which he surrendered multiple home runs and 10 starts in which he escaped unscathed by the long ball. So he’s not on pace to eclipse last year’s total but all he needs is a couple more multi-home run games and he’ll be back on track.

I’m not sure what the solution is or if there even is one. Sometimes you can’t help when your pitches don’t do what you want them to do. If every pitcher could control their pitches all the time, baseball would be kind of boring because strikeouts would go up even more and games would be low-scoring affairs. The bottom line is, Masahiro Tanaka has always been somewhat homer-prone while playing in the Majors and as he ages, it’s getting worse.

Photo Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports

As it turns out, the Yankees are really good at these things. Their pitchers AND hitters are the among best in baseball at generating positive three true outcome (TTO) results. Let’s check the team leaderboards for each TTO stat through Saturday’s action.

Home Runs

The Yankees’ big bats are only just getting started, but they’re already third in MLB in HR, two off the lead. They hit 241 of them last year and then traded for Giancarlo Stanton, so they ought to be at or near the front of the pack all season. Their pitching staff is roughly average at HR prevention, having yielded 10 thus far. Their net total is +3, good for 7th in baseball.

There are other factors here, of course. Each team has only played 7-10 games so far (the Yankees have played 9), so there are small sample size considerations. Park factors vary greatly and are probably a big reason why the Giants pitching staff has only given up a pair of long balls all year. Early April weather is a major variable as well. Still, the Yankees are a net positive, and that’s a very good thing when we’re talking about the most game-altering event possible in any plate appearance.

Walks

Yankee hitters are the most patient in the league (tied with Arizona), leading the way with 43 walks. Shockingly, Didi Gregorius leads the team with 8 after collecting only 25 free passes in all of 2017. The pitching staff is middle of the road, sitting 15th in MLB with 29 walks allowed. Altogether, they have a net +14 walks, 5th best in MLB.

Strikeouts

Here’s where the pitchers shine. The home run hitters are usually strikeout prone, and Stanton and Judge have 26 already. However, the pitching staff is the best in baseball at inducing Ks. Chad Green and Aroldis Chapman have struck out 19 of the 37 batters they’ve faced! Their net +27 strikeouts are second only to Boston

*-Net K is reversed from net HR and net BB because K is good for the pitcher while the other two are good for the offense.

Put it All Together

There’s really a fourth true outcome, HBP, that has the same impact as walks. It doesn’t happen that often, but it’s a true outcome all the same because only the pitcher and the batter can control it. Combining all four of these net outcomes, the 2018 leaders look like this:

The Yankees, while not being the net leader in any one of the TTO categories, have a healthy advantage over the rest of baseball in combined net TTO. This passes the sniff test, as the top 5 teams on this leaderboard are 29-12 this season.

However, not all of these outcomes have an equal weight. Homers and walks are both good outcomes for the batter, but a home run is REALLY good while a walk is just a little good. Knowing this, the creators of FIP assigned weights to each outcome to accurately reflect their impact on a game. We’ll borrow from the FIP formula to weigh our TTO leaderboard as well:

wTTO = (Net HR*13) + (Net (BB+HBP)*3) + (Net K*2)

The same teams comprise the top 5, but the order is jumbled a bit. The Yankees are still out in front, and their lead looks much more impressive. Given their level of talent, they should be able to stay near the front of the league all season, and the wins will surely follow.

For the first time in baseball history, the average MLB team hit more than 200 home runs; in fact, they averaged 203.5 home runs per team. The league average fluctuates greatly from year-to-year and even more so across eras. For comparison, here are the MLB team average HR for the last 6 seasons.

Homers increased 69% from 2014 to 2017. Going further back, we can see even greater differences. The average team hit 93.1 HR in 1976, 151.7 in 1961, and 56.6 in 1943, to pick just a few examples. Looking at every MLB team’s HR total from 1920-2017, the overall average is 129. (Prior to 1920 hardly anyone hit more than a handful of homers, which is why it’s known as the Deadball Era.)

HR is a counting stat, so we normally just celebrate who blasted the most baseballs over the fence. We don’t often think about HR relative to league average. Doing so would show that the 2017 Yankees’ 241 HR is not that special when the league average is as high as 203.5.

Standard Deviations and Z-Scores

To measure HR relative to the league, we’ll need to calculate the standard deviation of the league average for each season. This tells us how spread out each team’s HR totals are from each other in a given season. Then, we can find the Z-score for each team, which is how many standard deviations their HR total is away from the mean.

For 2017, one standard deviation away from the mean of 203.5 was 22.7 HR. The Yankees led MLB with 241 HR, which gives them a Z-score of 1.65. This is actually one of the lowest Z-scores for a league-leading team in history! 2017 was the first season since 1989 in which the HR leading team had a Z-score lower than 2. In fact, the only team to ever lead the league in HR with a lower Z-score was the 1959 Milwaukee Braves.

The Yankees’ 241 HR in 2017 was equal to the 1925 Giants’ 114. Baseball was really weird back then.

The Best of Home Runs

Let’s try an experiment. If Giancarlo Stanton had played for the Yankees last year and added 59 home runs, the team total ascends to an even 300 HR (we’ll ignore the fact that other players would’ve lost playing time and hit fewer home runs with Stanton in the lineup). That would obliterate the MLB record of 264 home runs set by the 1997 Mariners. The 2017 Yankees + Stanton brings the Z-score to 3.63, which is much more impressive. But how would this hold up against the best home run hitting teams of all time? For that matter, how do the 1997 Mariners fare relative to the league?

Here are the top 10 Team HR Z-scores from 1920-2017:

Unsurprisingly, the 1920 Yankees have the highest Z-score ever. The league average that year was 39.4 HR, and Babe Ruth had 54 all by himself. The second place team was the Philadelphia Athletics with 64, and every other team hit less than the Babe.

More recently, the 2010 Blue Jays’ had the third best Z-score. This means that their 257 HR was more impressive than the 1997 Mariners’ record of 264. Ken Griffey Jr., Jay Buhner, and friends actually had the seventh best team HR season ever, and not the best.

The Worst of Home Runs

What about the other end of the spectrum? If we can use standard deviation and Z-score to find the best home run hitting teams we can also use them to find the worst. Here’s the bottom 10 by Z-score:

It looks like we really did see an almost-record last season, just not a good one. The 2017 Giants were the second worst team in history at hitting home runs. It’s important to point out that Z-score doesn’t account for park factors, and their home stadium repressed offense overall by 9%. Even still, they failed to produce a single 20 HR hitter during a season in which homers exploded around the league.

Let’s talk about those 1980s Cardinals. The league average was 146.7 HR in 1986, yet they only managed 58. This gave them a -3.70 Z-score, the worst ever. Three years later they produced the fifth worst HR Z-Score. Not pictured above is the 1987 Cardinals, who just missed the chart with the 11th worst HR Z-score.

The amazing thing about these Cardinals isn’t just the consistency with which they failed to hit dingers, it’s that they were still a good team! Led by the speed and defense of Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, and Vince Coleman, the 1987 Cardinals finished 95-67 and took the Twins to the seventh game of the World Series! Other than the 1987 and 1989 Cardinals, the only team to finish over .500 with a bottom 10 HR Z-score was the 1979 Astros (the 1986 Cardinals were 79-83).

This Kinda Sucks

This is not fun. It’s much more enjoyable to revel in the brutish destruction of baseballs perpetuated by Judge and company. We’re not better off knowing that the 2017 Yankees were one of the least impressive league-leading HR teams in history. This whole experiment has been a buzzkill. Here’s something to cheer us all up:

All statistics other than standard deviations and Z-scores courtesy of Baseball-Reference.

Photo Credit: Adam Hunger-USA TODAY Sports

The biggest news to this point in the week is Masahiro Tanaka’s injury. He’s back on the disabled list for an injury to his throwing arm and the Tommy John chorus is louder than ever. I wrote about Tanaka at length during the first week of the season and stand by everything I said. It’s possible he ends up on the operating table by the end of May, but that doesn’t mean the team made a mistake avoiding surgery last year. #TanakaWatch2015 is in full swing and Nick Ashbourne kicked off our extensive coverage here this week.

The other main story this week is the countdown to 661. It’s unofficially “A-Rod Week” here at BP Bronx but given his penchant for dragging out these home run milestones, it might turn into “A-Rod Month” if he gets stuck at 659 or 660 for a while. Your newsfeed is already flooded with A-Rod this, A-Rod that, but please be patient as I give you my two cents on the impending milestone.

I am among a select 79,762 people to ever live. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and despite my father’s childhood ties to the Yankees, I grew up a Giants fan. In recent years this allegiance resulted in a superstitious belief in even year magic, a constant stench of garlic on my breath, and a growing collection of rings. During childhood though, my memories of baseball boil down to an affliction for rally monkeys and a montage of milestone home runs from Barry Bonds. On September 17, 2004, that 39-year old behemoth launched a ball into the bleachers becoming the third player to ever hit 700 home runs. And with that swing of the bat, I became one of 79,762 to ever witness such an event in person.

Over the past eleven or so years, Alex Rodriguez has done a pretty good job as the Yankees very own Barry Bonds. Ever since he first donned a Yankees jersey in 2004, he’s slowly worked his way up the career home run leaderboards, crossing off record after record, toppling hall of famer after hall of famer. His one-two steps to catch and overtake significant home run milestones play an integral role in recent Yankees history, just as Barry’s influenced my early life. As Rodriguez approaches Willie Mays’ record of 660 home runs, the parallels between him and Bonds run deep.

Both started their careers elsewhere — Bonds in Pittsburgh, Rodriguez in Seattle and then Texas. Both piled up MVP trophies — Bonds got five in San Francisco, Rodriguez got two in New York. Each career was tarnished by steroid use and despite being the best hitter ever at each of their positions, Bonds and Rodriguez face uphill battles to get a plaques in Cooperstown.

At a franchise level, the comparisons again hold. Throughout Bonds’ prime in San Francisco he was surrounded with veteran talent in an effort to constantly compete for a World Series. For Rodriguez and the Yankees of the last ten plus years the same has been true. In both cases, the teams feel like they underachieved, only able to parlay consistent contention into one World Series appearance during the players’ careers (Giants lost in 2002, Yankees won in 2009). The dynasty for the Yankees came, and for the Giants is currently coming, during the early part of a more humble, fan-friendly player’s career – Jeter and Posey. The final key home run milestones were and will be toppled during a period of franchise mediocrity – the Giants won 70-something games during the last three years with Bonds, the Yankees likely 80-something with Rodriguez’s final few.

As for the records themselves, Rodriguez topping Willie Mays’ 660 could be construed as poetic justice for Bonds surpassing Babe Ruth’s 714. For Giants fans, Willie Mays, is the greatest baseball player of all time. He patrolled center field better than anyone, he hit for both power and average, and the team continues to celebrate him to this day. Babe Ruth on the other hand was the greatest player of the greatest franchise of all time. He holds the top spot on the list of all-time Yankees, and according to career offensive WAR is the best hitter of all time (Bonds second, Mays third, Rodriguez twelfth).  Mays is Ruth for the Giants, and Ruth is Mays for the Yankees. When admitted steroid-user Alex Rodriguez hits 661 and passes the Say Hey Kid, it will be a sad day for me, but might serve as retribution for when a juiced up Barry Bonds passed Babe Ruth’s 714.

The one key difference between Barry and Alex is their local perception. At the time Bonds hit his final four milestones, home runs 661, 700, 715, and 753, his steroid use was alleged, but not confirmed (the Mitchell Report was released the winter after he retired). Due to the rumors and his general arrogance, the general public might have hated him. But in the confines of San Francisco, out of either unconditional love or general naïveté about his PED use, Barry Bonds was still a beloved figure and celebrated appropriately.

For A-Rod, these last few years have been rough in New York. Since admitting in 2009 that he used steroids during his Texas years, his relationship with the city and the team was strained. In the years since, his steep decline, involvement in the Biogenesis scandal, and the resulting record-setting suspension turned him into a pariah amongst fans, media members, and even his own general manager. Hot start to this season aside, his status as such is etched in stone.

Right now Rodriguez is only slightly older than Bonds when he hit 661, but Bonds continued to put up OPS’s over 1.000 until he was 42. For Alex, this will likely be his last significant home run record (700 is a ways away) and as fans, we should embrace the chance to see him break it. Up until he hit his final home run, stadiums were packed to see Barry Bonds break home run records. As the picture below from Monday details, Alex Rodriguez is not getting the same treatment, even in his home ballpark. For the next day, week, or however long it takes him to hit two more big flies, I urge fans everywhere to celebrate the history Alex is about to re-write. Take some time out of your day to appreciate Al from Miami for being one of the greatest hitters in the history of baseball.

Two first place teams in the Bronx. I’ve seen bigger crowds at The Trop. pic.twitter.com/nfQDUh74dV

— Sweeny Murti (@YankeesWFAN) April 27, 2015

Photo Credit: Kim Klement/USA Today Sports