Lots of things went right last year in the Yankees’ run to the American League Championship Series.

This wasn’t one of them.

The player you see here is Dustin Fowler, who was making his major-league debut for the Yankees. Fowler, in a haunting echo of Moonlight Graham, never got to bat in that game; he had been due up in the top half of the second. Fowler suffered an open rupture of his patellar tendon on the play and required emergency surgery.

During his recovery, he was traded to the Athletics in the Sonny Gray deal.

How Fowler is expected to develop as a player in the wake of his injury is a worthy line of inquiry; however, it’s not the one I’ll pursue here. Rather, my interest is in the lawsuit that Fowler filed against the White Sox in the wake of his injury — a lawsuit that remains pending.

Fowler’s suit, on the surface, is pretty simple. Fowler has sued two parties — both Chicago White Sox, Ltd. (the limited partnership that owns the White Sox) and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (the Illinois government agency that actually owns Guaranteed Rate Field, where the White Sox play). The complaint alleges two counts, one against each Defendant, and sounds in both simple negligence and a peculiar creation of Illinois law known as “willful and wanton conduct.” Essentially, Fowler alleges that, although the wall into which he crashed was padded, an electrical box located there wasn’t.

Here’s the relevant passage:

Let’s start with the obvious question: whither the electrical box? It’s hard to tell from the video. A still image from the above provides some sense, but it’s also easy enough not to notice.

In fact, the Chicago Tribune reported after the game that video seemed to show Fowler missing the exposed electrical box, which is there to provide wifi to fans. Based on that video, the Tribune reported in the same story that no changes would be made to the stadium.

The Tribune, however, appears to have been a bit premature in their reporting. Later image seemed to suggest Fowler did make contact with the electrical box. (You can see the best ones via Newsday here.) The fact that the box is so hard to see — it’s designed to blend in with the wall — is actually part of Fowler’s lawsuit.

So we know the box is there, and that — it appears, at least — Fowler’s knee did impact it. So that leads to the second question: are the White Sox and the ISFA legally responsible?

Last year, Nathaniel Grow took an excellent look at workers’ compensation for professional athletes. Like in many states, Illinois has a law which says that, for the most part, you can’t sue your employer for an injury you suffer on the job. That’s the reason workers’ compensation exists. In Fowler’s case, though, while he is suing for an injury that occurred on the job, he is not suing his employer. As a result, this isn’t a workers’ compensation issue, and Fowler’s negligence claim isn’t barred on that basis.

Michael McCann did a nice run-through of Fowler’s suit back when it was first filed, and I encourage you to read it in full. But negligence law in torts is a lot more complicated than it might seem, and since I’m an Illinois lawyer, I figured I might examine this from a more local perspective. To establish negligence, a plaintiff generally has to plead and prove all of the following:

1. The existence of a legal duty owed by the defendant to the plaintiff;
2. The breach of that legal duty by the defendant;
3. That the breach by the defendant caused an injury to the defendant; and
4. That the injury is a real and cognizable harm.

Lawyers generally turn these elements into the shorthand of DBCH, which is short for duty, breach, causation, and harm. Illinois follows the traditional negligence standard, with those same four elements: “To state a cause of action for negligence, a plaintiff must plead the existence of a duty owed by the defendant to the plaintiff, a breach of that duty, an injury proximately caused by the breach, and damages.”

The tricky thing with negligence suits is twofold, though. First, you are basically punishing a defendant for what it did or didn’t do even though those actions weren’t intentional. That means that, every time you find for a plaintiff, you are necessarily saying the defendants have to undertake an obligation to protect people that otherwise wouldn’t exist. That, of course, has real social and economic costs, so courts tend to be wary of pushing the creation and application of legal duties too far. Second, because we’re talking about unintentional conduct here, there are a lot of defenses to negligence that don’t apply anywhere else in the law. These are things like contributory or comparative negligence (sometimes called comparative fault), assumption of the risk, and others which vary by state.

The first question, then, is whether the White Sox and ISFA owed a legal duty towards Fowler. In this case, there are two types of possible duties. (Actually, there are more, but we have limited space here.) There could be a “duty to warn.” That would mean anything from a sign down the right-field line saying “beware of box,” to actually telling Fowler about the box’s existence before the game, to just painting the box a bright shade of yellow so it stands out. On the other hand, there could be a “duty to protect” Fowler, with things like padding on the box or just the complete relocation of the box to somewhere outside the field of play.

Obviously, all of these points relate to the defendants, because the defendants are the ones with control over the box. That doesn’t always happen in negligence cases. What that means, though, is that a court will have to decide whether the law imposes a duty on ISFA and the White Sox either to warn players or protect them from hidden on-field hazards and — if so — how far that duty goes. Many states have accepted what’s called the “Learned Hand Rule” as the gold standard for whether to impose a duty on a defendant. Named for Judge Learned Hand (yes, that really was his name), the Learned Hand Rule uses what’s called “law and economics” to determine whether a duty should be imposed on a defendant. I personally think of the Learned Hand Rule as the “FanGraphs Method” of Negligence. Professor Doug Holden explains why:

This formula lists three factors:

1. Probability of harm (or likelihood of injury) and = P
2. Gravity of harm (or seriousness of injury) as weighed against = L (loss or liability)
3. Burden on defendant (or injury sacrificed) to take adequate precautions = B.

Therefore, if B < P x L, then you have unreasonable behavior. If you have unreasonable behavior, then there is a breach of duty.

This is a useful little algorithm for identifying breach of duty. In practice, however, judges don’t like to sit and calculate such variables like Learned Hand did. So somewhere along the line, the Learned Hand rule went from functioning as a mathematical calculation to serving as a guidepost to then becoming the rule that a party has a duty to all persons who could suffer a “reasonably foreseeable” harm as a result of the former’s actions.

Illinois follows that “reasonably foreseeable” standard. So, in this case, the question is whether it was reasonably foreseeable that a player like Fowler would injure himself on the electrical box. Given that much of the rest of the wall is padded, it’s clearly foreseeable that a player could be injured by colliding with an unpadded wall. By extension, it seems reasonably foreseeable that an unpadded box could also cause harm. Therefore a duty does exist to take adequate precaution. And theoretically, since the burden on the defendant is minimal — like spray-painting the box yellow or a few feet of padding — the Hand formula weighs in favor of Fowler, too.

Next is whether the ISFA and White Sox breached their legal duty to Fowler. To that point, we know they didn’t pad the box. We also have no reason to believe they warned Fowler, either. Of some relevance here perhaps is a doctrine in the law called “res ipsa loquitur.” Res ipsa loquitur basically means that if a defendant exercises exclusive control over an object — like an electrical box — and the object harms someone, the law presumes the defendant was negligent even in the absence of evidence of negligence. Here, I think there is that evidence of negligence, though: the existence of the padding elsewhere. Remember when we discussed protective netting that I explained the “voluntary undertaking doctrine”?

Here’s a refresher:

The Illinois Supreme Court, for example, explained in Nelson v. Union Wire Rope Corp. that, where a company voluntarily does something it wasn’t legally obligated to do, that company is liable for failing to do so reasonably. In some states (like Illinois, for instance), this is known as the voluntary undertaking doctrine.

If the ISFA and White Sox voluntarily undertook to protect fielders by padding the wall but didn’t pad the box, that’s negligence because they failed to complete the job reasonably.

Next are causation and harm. Did the box cause Fowler’s injuries? Well, the impact is what tore his knee open. I could talk about proximate cause and cause-in-fact, but we don’t really need to here. Because the injury was foreseeable and a direct result of an impact with the box, causation’s probably satisfied.

So what defenses do the ISFA and White Sox have? Their primary argument is probably going to be that they didn’t owe Fowler any duty. But in an Illinois court, that’s unlikely to hold water simply because Illinois courts have adopted the reasonable foreseeability standard. And they could argue that Fowler assumed the risk of being injured, but it’s hard to argue that running into things is part of baseball the way being hit by a pitch is. And they can’t argue that Fowler wasn’t injured, because even though he’s back and playing, his injury was very real, which in and of itself entitles him to damages under Illinois law.

So they tried something else. Shortly after Fowler filed his lawsuit, the ISFA and White Sox removed the case to federal court. The White Sox then moved to dismiss the case, arguing that it was preempted by the CBA. The White Sox invoked the Labor Management Relations Act (“LMRA”), a federal law stating (in Section 301) that federal courts, and federal law, govern all employment disputes where the rights of the parties have been collectively bargained. As the White Sox argue, “Plaintiff alleges that he was injured as a result of an incident that took place only because he was employed as a Major League Baseball Player pursuant to a highly regulated contractual employment relationship that specified all of the rights and duties of the respective parties – including with respect to Players health and safety.” Here, the White Sox point to Article XIII of the CBA, which governs players’ safety and health.

Here we return to the issue of “willful and wanton conduct” cited at the outset of this piece. In Illinois, under a case called Ziarko v. Soo Line Railroad, willful and wanton conduct represents something more severe than just negligence, but not so severe as intentional conduct. It’s akin to recklessness. And generally, in Illinois, you can’t disclaim willful and wanton conduct by contract. Moreover, Fowler argues, the CBA doesn’t actually cover situations like this, which means the CBA doesn’t preempt Fowler’s claims.

On that basis, Fowler wants the case sent back to state court.

This is one case where both sides appear to have strong arguments, and there’s ample case law going both ways. I tend to think Fowler has the better of the argument, but I don’t see this as being a clear-cut issue, particularly given the unusual set of facts. Many of the cases cited by both sides, like Stringer v. NFL, concerned situations where the player was injured by or on his own team’s facilities or lack of care. And even there, courts often split the proverbial baby, allowing some claims through and not others. The issue is currently being briefed, and Judge Gary Feinerman will rule sometime in June or July.

Meanwhile, Dustin Fowler hasn’t yet exhibited the form that made him a top prospect when he debuted last June. After a 138 wRC+ last year at Triple-A, he has just a 84 wRC+ for Oakland’s highest affiliate this year through 97 plate appearances. On the plus side, he’s already stolen five bases.

The Yankees’ biggest splash at the trade deadline last season was the acquisition of Sonny Gray. The Bronx Bombers thought they had acquired a frontline starting pitcher to pair with homegrown ace Luis Severino and Splitter Aficionado Masahiro Tanaka.

But Sonny Gray, after the trade in 2017, posted a 101 xFIP- and 107 FIP- — this after having produced a 75 xFIP- and also 75 FIP- with Oakland before the deal.

Sonny Gray, since the beginning of 2018, has a 132 xFIP- and 115 FIP-. Sonny Gray, on Wednesday night, gave up three earned runs, a home run, and walked five in 4.2 innings, recording a 6.67 xFIP in the process. Sonny Gray, the Yankees version, has been bad.

One, of course, is curious as to why he’s been bad. What happened to the guy who, at the time of the deal, could boast a 3.25 FIP, 8.7 K/9, 1.175 WHIP, and 3.13 K/BB ratio, numbers that were much more in line with his 2013-15 run with the A’s? On the surface, it appears Gray joined the Yankees and reverted to his troubled 2016 self. After all, after the trade, Gray’s home-runs allowed spiked, from 0.7 per nine to 1.5 per nine. Perhaps as a result of wariness, his walks spiked from 2.8 per nine to 3.7 per nine, as well.

It’s a plausible theory, but it’s also insufficient.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the fifth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Max Fried, Tommy Kahnle, and John Smoltz — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Max Fried (Braves) on His Curveball

“I learned my curveball when I was pretty young, maybe nine or 10. It started out as more of a knuckle curve, although I didn’t really spike it. I would kind of curl my pointer finger down on the ball.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a slider in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the fourth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Andrew Cashner, Drew Pomeranz, and CC Sabathia — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Andrew Cashner (Orioles) on His Sinker

“I got cut with a knife in 2013, in the offseason. I cut the flexor tendon in my right thumb. That was when I really learned a sinker. After I got cut, I had to learn a new pitch.

“My slider wasn’t the same pitch after that. I had a hard time getting extension with it, getting out front. The cut healed, but the tendon was tight. I think it just took time for the tendon to lengthen. It’s a feel pitch and it just never felt the same. It took a long time, but I’ve got [the slider] back now.

“The good thing is that I gained another pitch. And the sinker isn’t just arm-side run. Once you can learn to locate it back-door, it’s almost like a reverse slider for s lefty. You throw it at the hip and it comes back.”

Drew Pomeranz (Red Sox) on his Curveball

“It would have to be my curveball. Everybody I play with is like, ‘How the hell do you throw that?’ That’s because I flick it forward. I don’t turn my wrist like a normal person does.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a game that will be remembered more for a bench-clearing seventh-inning brawl between the beasts of the AL East — we’ll get to that, you blood-lusting rubberneckers — Gary Sanchez scored some points with a few swings of the bat himself on Wednesday night against the Red Sox. While the early struggles of reigning NL MVP and Bronx newcomer Giancarlo Stanton have gotten more attention, it was the Yankees’ 25-year-old catcher who owned the dubious title not just as the team’s coldest hitter, but as the majors’ single worst batting title-qualified player in terms of both wRC+ and WAR. Whether it was the intimate confines of Fenway Park, the struggles of the Red Sox pitching staff, or the inevitability of positive regression, by the fourth inning of the Yankees’ 10-7 victory, Gary got his groove back, at least for one night. Sanchez clubbed two homers and added a double, driving in four runs and more than doubling his season totals in hits, homers, and RBI.

Sanchez, who last year led all major-league catchers with 33 homers and a 130 wRC+ while batting .278/.345/.531, began the 2018 season in a 2-for-36 skid. Through Tuesday, his positive contributions at the plate could be counted on Mordecai Brown’s pitching hand: an RBI double off the Blue Jays’ John Axford on Opening Day, a two-run homer off the Rays’ Blake Snell on April 4, and a hit-by-pitch against the Orioles’ Darren O’Day on April 5. He went 0-for-17 between the first two hits, and 0-for-15 between the latter one and Wednesday’s game. Since he hadn’t drawn a single walk, that hit-by-pitch juiced his batting line all the way to .056/.081/.167. That’s a -42 wRC+, which is something closer to an ASCII approximation of a smashed fly than it is a comprehensible comparison to league average. He entered Wednesday as one of eight qualifiers with a negative wRC+

Sanchez had some good company in this particularly decrepit Small Sample Theater: a guy who hit even more homers last year (Morrison), two of the game’s best defensive center fielders (Kiermaier and Buxton, who is apparently constitutionally incapable of hitting major-league pitching before May 1), a top prospect (Brinson), and so on.

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Giancarlo Stanton still looks like Giancarlo Stanton. He’s a gigantic human being who possesses a fierce swing that inflicts damage upon baseballs when his bat makes contact. The problem in the early part of this season is that his huge swing is making slightly less contact than it did a year ago when he was the National League MVP.

Stanton has swung at 116 pitches this year and has whiffed 48 times, per Baseball Savant. Based on his fantastic 2017 season, we would expect to see about 34 whiffs. While a difference of 14 whiffs over 250 pitches doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s the difference between normal, awesome Stanton and this abnormal version of Stanton that has struck out in 40% of his plate appearances.

To better understand just what’s going on with Stanton, let’s try to take the early-season numbers we have and separate normal Stanton from abnormal Stanton. To start, here is a table showing some statistics from his career, from last season, and from this season to spot the problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know that, just yesterday, the Yankees allowed 14 runs. They allowed eight runs the game before that. They allowed seven runs two games before that. By park-adjusted ERA, the Yankees presently rank 20th in baseball, which is not very good. This is hardly the time to celebrate the pitching staff.

On the other hand, by park-adjusted FIP, the Yankees presently rank fifth in baseball. By park-adjusted xFIP, the Yankees presently rank second in baseball. By strikeout rate, they’re first. The Yankees have been great! They just haven’t gotten the results. Perhaps this *is* a good time to celebrate the pitching staff.

Yet this isn’t really a celebration at all. Rather, it’s an observation. It might be an observation of a good thing, or it might be an observation of a bad thing. Could even be an observation of an ultimately insignificant thing. But, the Yankees’ pitching staff? Collectively, they’re out there on an island. There’s no other pitching staff like it.

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I wrote last week about how, based on the early evidence, Patrick Corbin is McCullersing. That is, of course, a reference to Lance McCullers Jr., who has taught us that, if you have a really good pitch, you should just throw it a whole bunch more. McCullers has a great curveball, so he throws a lot of his curveball. Corbin has a great slider, so he’s started to throw a lot more of his slider. It’s a strategy that’s almost stupidly obvious, but it’s taken a while to catch on. Such is the power of baseball tradition.

There’s another way to think about this. You can throw more of a good pitch, but then, all the pitch rates have to add up to 100%. So if you’re throwing more of one thing, that has to come at the expense of something else. Typically, what we see is more secondary stuff, at the expense of fastballs. And this is how we get to talking about Masahiro Tanaka. Tanaka already pitches for a team that’s opted to de-emphasize the heater. But even within that context, Tanaka is extraordinary. Tanaka is working away from his hard stuff. He’s been doing this for a while already, but he’s gotten to the point where he’s throwing hard pitches as if he were a knuckleballer without a knuckleball.

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It’s fair to say that the Yankees’ 2018 home opener didn’t go quite as planned. New York City’s heaviest April snowfall since 1982 forced the postponement of Monday’s scheduled 1 pm game against the Rays, and it was made up on Tuesday afternoon under soggy, frigid conditions. In his first official game in pinstripes, Giancarlo Stanton recorded a platinum sombrero — 0-for-5 with five strikeouts — and was booed by moronic ingrates, and the vaunted Yankees bullpen blew a three-run lead. Then Didi Gregorius, who had already hit a three-run homer that created the short-lived lead, broke the game open with his second three-run blast, and later tacked on a two-run single that turned the game to an 11-4 laugher. It was an impressive, two-curtain call day for a player who often flies beneath the radar amid the Bronx Bombers’ bigger names.

Not that anyone should worry about Stanton (who launched a 458-foot homer in his first plate appearance on Wednesday), but Gregorius can relate. Tasked with replacing the iconic, Cooperstown-bound Derek Jeter as the Yankees’ shortstop, he was burdened with the weight of massive expectations and heard the Bronx boo birds and chants of “Der-ek Je-ter!” frequently in early 2015. Gradually, Gregorius has settled into the job, to the point that he’s almost overlooked, whether the point of comparison is the Yankees’ modern-day Murderer’s Row (with Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez and now Stanton), a work-in-progress infield brimming with young talent and versatility, or an incredible shortstop cohort featuring Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, Corey Seager, Xander Bogaerts, Trea Turner and now Manny Machado, all in their age-25 seasons or younger.

The 28-year-old Gregorius doesn’t quite belong at their level, but over the past three seasons, he’s a solid seventh in WAR at the position, including a career-high 3.9 WAR in 2017 (also seventh):

By WAR, Gregorius has been the most valuable Yankees position player in that span, though to be fair, that’s only because of his head start on Judge and Sanchez, who arrived for good in late 2016.

Born in Amsterdam in 1990, the grandson of Juan Gregorius, a star hurler in Curaçao in the 1950s and the son of Honkbal Hoofdklasse pitcher Johannes (Didi) Gregorius Sr. of the Amsterdam Pirates, Mariekson Julius Gregorius was raised in Curaçao from age 5, and signed by the Reds as an amateur free agent in 2007. He debuted in the majors in September 2012, but with his position blocked by Zack Cozart, he was dealt to the Diamondbacks in December of that year as part of a three-way, nine-player blockbuster involving Cleveland-bound Trevor Bauer and Cincinnati-bound Shin-Soo Choo. At the time, Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers audaciously compared Gregorius to the man he would eventually replace:

When I saw him, he reminded me of a young Derek Jeter. I was fortunate enough to see Jeter when he was in high school in Michigan. He’s got that type of range, he’s got speed, more of a line-drive-type hitter, and I think he’s got the type of approach at the plate and separation to where I think there’s going to be power there as well.”

After cracking the Baseball America Top 100 Prospects list in the spring of 2013, Gregorius scuffled over the course of two seasons as the Diamondbacks’ regular shortstop, hitting a combined .241/.314/.368 for an 85 wRC+ with a meager 1.8 WAR. He even spent two months back in Triple A early in 2014. After Towers was fired in September 2014, it was hardly a coincidence that Yankees GM Brian Cashman, under whom Towers had worked as a special assignment scout between GM stints in San Diego and Arizona, dealt for Gregorius in another three-team deal in December of that year.

Despite the impossible task of filling Jeter’s shoes in a figurative sense, Gregorius quickly illustrated that he could cover far more ground at shortstop than the aging superstar, whose glovework was generally notoriously overrated. While he’s had his own ups and downs in his three seasons at the position, he’s been a massive improvement upon the Captain and fill-ins such as Eduardo Nunez and Jayson Nix, who got the bulk of the work during Jeter’s injury-shortened 2013 season:

Over the last four years of the Jeter era, Yankees shortstops (all of ’em) averaged a godawful -19 DRS and -15 UZR. Over the first three years of the Gregorius era, those averages have been boosted to -3 DRS and +3 UZR. I’ve dispensed with the rounding here, but that’s a 17- or 18-run per year improvement, or nearly two wins per year. Excluding 2013, Jeter averaged 1.6 WAR over his final three full seasons, with Gregorius doubling that average during his tenure.

Indeed, though he’ll never be the on-base machine that even the latter-day Jeter was prior to his October 2012 broken ankle, Gregorius has advanced markedly as a hitter during his pinstriped tenure, from an 89 wRC+ in 2015 to 98 the next year and 107 last year. The power that Towers envisioned has indeed emerged, as his ISOs have increased from .105 to .171 to .191 in those three years, with his homer totals climbing from nine to 20 to 25. And no, that’s not just Yankee Stadium at work; while 29 of his 54 homers during that span came at home, he’s got an 86 wRC+ there (.251/.292/.415) compared to 110 on the road (.300/.335/.448). That split is driven by groundball and flyball rates that are basically reversed (38%/42% at home, 42%/37% away), a 51-point BABIP gap (.265 versus .316) and a substantial strikeout split (15.4% versus 11.8%).

Gregorius’s game has its dings, most notably an anemic walk rate (4.4% from 2015-17, 13th-lowest among the 232 hitters with at least 1,000 PA) borne of a tendency to chase (39.1% O-Zone rate, also 13th) en route to a .313 on-base percentage (56th lowest in that same set). Even so, the overall package — which includes a few extra runs per year on the bases — has developed into such a solid one that he’s become the cornerstone of a Yankees’ infield that’s otherwise unsettled. Heading into 2017, Gleyber Torres, Jorge Mateo and Tyler Wade all ranked among the team’s top prospects after spending a substantial portion of 2016 playing shortstop for either their High A or Double A affiliates. Mateo is now an Oakland Athletic via last July’s Sonny Gray trade, Wade is a utilityman whom Cashman envisions as the team’s Ben Zobrist, and Torres is the heir apparent at second base.

Gregorius, in his first year of arbitration eligibility, is making $8.25 million and has two more years under club control. And while he may not get the attention of Judge, Sanchez or Stanton, he’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon — except, perhaps, out of Jeter’s shadow, one step and one season at a time.

Whatever their other uses, records are valuable for the drama they’re capable of facilitating. Wondering if Player X or Team Y will surpass a standard established by their predecessors is part of how many enjoy baseball. While each era is distinct in some ways — Dazzy Vance’s 21.5% strikeout rate meant something very different in 1924 than it would have in 2017 — the raw numbers still possess their own considerable weight.

Some records seem nearly insurmountable, others less so. At the moment, the Mariners’ single-season record of 264 home runs, set in 1997, is seeming particularly vulnerable. And it wouldn’t be surprise if the Yankees were the ones to topple it.

Provided they remain healthy, Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, and Giancarlo Stanton are going to do plenty of damage. There are lots of yet-to-be-launched home runs littered elsewhere on the roster, as well. The game is trending toward the optimization of launch angles, the ball might be juiced, and the Yankees have unreal power.

I suspect we are all curious to observe the individual damage Stanton, the reigning NL MVP, will do in his new home. He’s going from Marlins Park and its 80 home-run park factor for right-handed hitters — 100 is average — to Yankee Stadium’s 124 right-handed HR factor. He’ll be able to splinter his bat and hit homers to right and right-center at New Yankee. Read the rest of this entry »