Facts 1, Sean Casey 0

On Monday the Yankees announced they hired former MLBer (and not insignificantly, long time friend of Yankees’ Manager Aaron Boone) Sean Casey to be their new hitting coach after parting ways with former hitting coach Dillon Lawson over the weekend.

Casey came out figuratively swinging in a video he posted yesterday in which he said, among other things, when postseason times comes around…

“The teams that can’t hit, that have great OPS guys with low averages – they’re bumped, they’re out in the first round. Those guys that rely on the home runs? Those teams, they’re out. The guys who have high batting averages? They hit good pitching.”

Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s start with this:

There is no such thing as a “high OPS guy” who is NOT a good hitter. If you think there is, you don’t know what OPS is.

More specifically, what Sean said about batting average and OPS vis a vis the postseason, is factually incorrect.

In the 2022 postseason, there were 11 series. The team with the higher OPS in each series went 10-1, virtually the polar-opposite of “bumped out in the first round!” However, three teams last postseason had a higher batting average than their opponent in the series but lost the series anyway – two of them – St. Louis and Toronto – were quite literally, “bumped in the first round”.

And in today’s society, just when you think you can’t be shocked by someone’s lack of self-awareness, the third team to have a higher batting average than their opponent and lose the series last postseason was the Cleveland Guardians, who lost to the (checks notes) Yankees.

I’ve been around the block a few times, so I know how these conversations typically go. Even when you have a discussion based on the other person’s terms of engagement and ground rules (in this case, Sean wanted to talk about OPS and batting average), despite showing that what they’re claiming is factually incorrect, they’ll just do some combination of moving the goal posts, cherry picking from a smaller sample size and making straw men. (As most of Casey’s defenders did last night on social media.)

Normally, that’s when I disengage because that isn’t someone who wants to have an adult conversation – but for today I’ll play along.

I’ll go two steps further. I’ll change the sample to just individual games instead of series, and I’ll remove doubles, triples, and base on balls from the argument.

Yes, you are correct – doubles, triples and base on balls are great for the offensive side and are included in OPS but are completely ignored by batting average. But Sean wants to exclude them and talk batting average so let’s exclude them for discussion’s sake. Let’s use only batting average and home runs, because I’m a swell guy and I want to see Sean succeed.

Whoops, sorry Sean, bad news.

In the 40 postseason games last season, teams that outhomered their opponent won 85% of the time. Teams that had a higher batting average in the game won 76% of the time – certainly not bad, but yeah, winning the home run battle is quite obviously better than winning the batting average battle in the postseason.

We can do this all day: Home runs, doubles and triples are better than singles and walks are very good, both in the regular season and in the postseason. When you cite batting average you are literally claiming that statement is false.

For all I know Sean Casey may turn out to be a very good hitting coach – I certainly hope so. But if he is, it won’t be because of his public nonsensical stance about batting average, OPS, home runs and the postseason.

Did I miss anything? Let me know. Leave a comment below or yell at me @mybaseballpage1 on Twitter and/or the “My Baseball Page” on Facebook.