Tis the season…
That is, the season in which real life responsibilities tend to supersede my baseball word rants. So today, let’s play some catchup with recent Yankees news we should touch upon.
First, Devin Williams is a very good relief pitcher, and the Yankees are going to miss him. I shouldn’t need to remind you that you should ignore a pitcher’s ERA, but I will. ERA is often the result of wonky happenings to a pitcher and is even more often due to team defense – far less of a pitcher’s ERA has anything to do with the pitcher than most folks realize.
To wit;
Among 147 regularly used relief pitchers in 2025 (minimum 48 innings), Devin Williams astounding 2.95 xFIP was the 8th best in MLB. His K% was elite (also 8th best), his K-BB% was elite (92nd percentile), and his 95th percentile expected batting average against shows that when batters did put it in play against him, it was rarely hard hit or in the air – and very rarely both.
Folks who thought Williams was bad last season simply have a imperfect understanding of how to measure pitching performance. (No disrespect intended…)
Hal Steinbrenner doesn’t speak publicly too often – and it’s still too often.
Silver Spoons recently went on and on about how the Yankees may need to cut payroll because they lost money in 2025. Needless to say, this is highly unlikely, and even if it is, it’s irrelevant. Professional sports teams are not businesses like you, or I would own that need to turn a profit in order for us to get paid.
Pro sports teams, are by and large, investments for ultra-wealthy men who watch their investment appreciate – in part due to taxpayer funded infrastructure, cost controlled labor for the first six years of their most valuable employees careers, and various forms of socialism for the wealthy.
In Hal’s case, when he inherited his investment/hobby in 2010 after his multiple time convicted felon father passed away, the team was worth $1.6 billion – today it’s worth $8.2 billion.
And with his usual lack of any recognition of reality, Hal at one point mentioned that we lay people don’t understand that he has to make annual bond payments to New York City as part of stadium costs – even in 2020 when there wasn’t much baseball!
You know, because you and I didn’t need to pay our bills in 2020…(eye roll)
Of course, he didn’t point out (thankfully Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus did) that bond payments are in lieu of taxes – which saved Silver Spoons $38 million.
Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments and/or yell at me on the MBP account on Bluesky.
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