How could you know that Aaron Judge is strong? If you have access to Baseball Savant, you could see he’s one of just four players in Statcast’s limited history to hit at least three batted balls in the air at 115+ miles per hour. You could see he ranks tied for fifth in average exit velocity on non-grounders. If you have access to Aaron Judge himself, you could ask him to help you move furniture. The simplest thing is to probably just look at him. Look at him in person. Look at him on TV or on the Internet. He’s strong. Not surprisingly strong, like some world-class little rock climber. Obviously strong, like a man who spends his free time mindlessly juggling crates.

Because of what he is, Judge is capable of extraordinary feats of strength. In that way, he’s similar to Giancarlo Stanton, who once used a home run to destroy part of a scoreboard. When Judge makes perfect contact, with a perfect swing, he can send a baseball farther than almost anyone else. Judge achieved a more subtle feat of strength on Wednesday afternoon. Look at this stupid impossible dinger.

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I could begin this post by invoking one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s most celebrated novels, but the notion of framing a conversation about Michael Pineda in the context of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been beaten as thoroughly as one of the latter’s victims. I could use Mr. Talbot and the Wolf Man, instead, or Bruce Banner and the Hulk. It doesn’t really matter, though. Whatever set of characters one prefers, the point is the same: there are two versions of Pineda, one proficient and mild-mannered, the other prone to tragic outbursts.

Indeed, just last week Craig Edwards suspected that Pineda was at it again, giving up runs in bunches while somehow also producing elite fielding-independent numbers. Yesterday we saw the the complete other end of the spectrum, as Pineda took a perfect game deep into the seventh inning against Tampa Bay while looking like the truly most optimal version of himself. Barring a continued ricochet between starts, we won’t continue to bring you updates with every outing that he makes. Yet what we saw on Monday looked almost like a totally different pitcher.

“Almost” is the operative word there. Pineda still got swings and misses, and still didn’t walk anybody. His slider, however, was quite simply otherworldly. He didn’t do the typical Pineda thing and hang one — not until the moment he lost the perfect game, at least. He buried it, and it plunged all the way down to the molten core of the planet.

Pineda racked up 11 strikeouts all told, cruising through 6.2 perfect innings before Evan Longoria doubled. His 7.2 innings were the most by any Yankee starter so far this year.

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If you’ve spent any time thinking about Michael Pineda, you’ve probably spent some time trying to figure out what’s wrong with Michael Pineda. He strikes out a ton of guys, walks very few, and posts FIPs better than league average. He also gives up a lot of home runs, has trouble with runners on base, and can’t seem to keep his ERA anywhere near league average.

Pineda’s season debut yesterday against Tampa Bay appeared only to offer more of the same. Despite recording a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 6:0 against 18 batters, Pineda ultimately allowed four runs in just 3.2 innings (box). While one game isn’t going to tell us much, yesterday’s performance didn’t do anything to suggest that this year’s version of Pineda is going to differ much from last year’s.

We didn’t always write articles trying to figure out what was wrong with Michael Pineda. Back in 2014, when Pineda was just returning from a series of injuries that kept him out for most of three seasons, Jeff Sullivan praised Pineda for his aggressiveness and improved command despite a somewhat lengthy layoff. The following spring, Eno Sarris examined what appeared to be a nasty changeup that could serve him well. Jeff Sullivan followed up a month later to discuss the possibility that Pineda was benefiting from increased velocity while also managing to locate his fastball and change in the right spots. That piece was written right after Pineda struck out 16 Baltimore Orioles without yielding a walk. For the rest of the season, Pineda put up an okay 3.92 FIP and a bad 5.02 ERA, which he essentially duplicated last in 2016.

So last season, Eno took a look at Pineda, writing two pieces in one day. The first highlighted Pineda’s command, which maybe was inferior to what Pineda had exhibited previously. The second noted Pineda’s problems with runners on base, which could have been a product of pitching from the stretch. Sarris also hypothesized that Pineda might be too afraid of conceding walks with runners on. Finally, this past offseason, Nick Stellini stepped up, noting that Pineda had tended to throw a lot of fastballs in the middle of the zone (which got hit really hard) and many of his sliders out of the zone (which were balls). On their own, both Eno’s and Nick’s ideas have merits. Let’s combine their hypotheses and see what happens.

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TAMPA, Fla. — In the fourth week of July last year, while hosting Baltimore, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman reached an agreement to send Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs. It would be the first move in a partial dismantling of the club, a rebuild in New York representing one of the rarest roster-construction projects in baseball. But Cashman, and Cubs president Theo Esptein, had to wait. They had to wait for approval from Yankees ownership.

With the framework having been agreed upon, Chapman was still a Yankee as he entered a game on July 23rd against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium. He pitched the ninth and 10th innings.

“Chapman went two-plus innings, not something normally [that occurs] if you are going to execute a trade” Cashman told FanGraphs. “[Steinbrenner] waited 72 hours to green light it as he discussed it with his family. It was not an easy decision. I was keeping Theo on hold, essentially. I told him ‘I will let you know if ownership says ‘yes’.’ I said ‘I am recommending it. We’ll see what happens.’”

Chapman was still a Yankee as the club boarded a charter flight on July 24th to play a series in Houston. When the Yankees arrived in Houston, ownership had OK’d a type of plan rarely seen in New York. In a rare tactical retreat, the Yankees traded instant gratification — the hope of sneaking into the playoffs as a Wild Card — for the delayed variety. The Yankees had passed the Stanford marshmallow experiment. For Cashman, it had taken more than a year to lobby to adopt such a strategy, an approach that some believe has positioned the Yankees for their next sustained run of excellence.

The Yankees enjoy a No. 2 ranking in Baseball America’s recently released organizational talent rankings, after ranking 17, 18, and 18 in the three previous seasons, respectively. And the Yankees should have plenty of financial flexibility in the 2018-19 offseason, with a relatively paltry sum of $70 million in guaranteed salary on the books for ’19.

“It’s not the first time I’ve suggested that,” Cashman said of retooling. “It’s the first time ownership actually agreed to do it.”

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TAMPA, Fla. — From the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem like the Yankees are having all that much fun. This spring Yankees manager Joe Girardi said the voluminous red mane of Clint Frazier had become a “distraction” so the Yankees made the problem disappear.

Good morning, @Yankees fans. The Yankees barbershop is open for business…first customer, @clintfrazier. pic.twitter.com/9dM8r5bVwa

— Yankees PR Dept. (@YankeesPR) March 10, 2017

FanGraphs’ own Nicolas Stellini wrote about the Yankees’ “War on Fun” several weeks ago.

So a couple weeks back when I was in Yankees camp, I was curious to enter clubhouse and get a sense if these guys are having any fun or if the volume of media, the franchise’s tradition and expectations, and the military-style grooming standards prevent light-heartedness.

While I suspect the industry is a long ways away from quantifying the value of clubhouse chemistry and culture, it was interesting that the Cubs and Indians seemed to have a lot of fun en route to capturing league pennants last season. And in college football, all-about-fun Clemson beat serious-all-time Alabama in the championship game. Maybe fun is making a comeback. Back in January I wrote about that time Dabo Swinney met Joe Maddon and how they learned they were more similar than they were different.

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The American League East is going to be tough this year. The Yankees are projected to win 81 games and yet still finish last, is how tough. That same win total, for example, would place a team in a tie for second in the AL Central’s projected standings.

There are reasons to be more bullish on the Yankees than the projections suggest. Plenty of smart people around the team are. The young core, consisting of Gary Sanchez, Greg Bird, Didi Gregorius, Aaron Judge, and Clint Frazier, provides a fair amount of upside. If the bullpen proves to offer as much depth as it is does excellence at the top, you’d have two-thirds of a really good team.

About the rotation, though. First, there’s the front three. Opening Day starter Masahiro Tanaka has been great since he signed with the team — among the majors’ top-20 starters by most metrics. Michael Pineda remains an enigma, a pitcher with elite strikeout-minus-walk rates paired with bottom-tier ball-in-play results. Even with his contradictions, though, Pineda can still provide value for a team that scores runs. At 36, CC Sabathia isn’t a front-line starter anymore, but a discovery of a cutter last year may have given him a few more years of usefulness on the back end.

And then what? Who will finish out the rotation this year? Who will step forward between Luis Severino, Bryan Mitchell, Chad Green, Luis Cessa, and Jordan Montgomery? If they’re any good, they could help fuel a surprise team in a tough division.

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We spent the latter half of last year drooling over Gary Sanchez, and rightfully so. The phrases “raking” and “mashing” and “laying waste to all that stand before you” were all invented by Greek philosophers to describe what Sanchez accomplished last year. When he first arrived, though, Sanchez’s success caused us to recall the 2015 success of one Greg Bird.

Bird had been called up to replace Mark Teixeira, and he hit well enough to help get the Yankees to the Wild Card game. He started that game at first base — partly because the Yankees lacked a legitimate right-handed option at the position to play against Dallas Keuchel, but also because Bird had acquitted himself well in his 46 games in pinstripes. Sanchez obviously far surpassed Bird’s own accomplishments. And because Bird missed all of 2016 while recovering from offseason shoulder surgery, the memory of those 46 games faded into the mist.

This spring may have been a good reminder of what Bird can do.

Spring-training statistics aren’t a good indicator of what will happen once we hit Opening Day. Batters are facing pitchers who either aren’t ready to be in the big leagues just yet or big-league pitchers who haven’t yet fully ramped up to being ready for the long haul. We’re going to throw out Bird’s high batting average and the handful of home runs that he’s hit, at least partially. We’re throwing them out in the sense that you can’t extrapolate them out over a full season (pay no attention to the Sanchez thing I just wrote, nothing to see there) and use them as the basis of a projection.

But certain metrics become reliable in a sample of one. A pitcher who throws a single 100-mph fastball is likely to throw another one — or, at least, another of similar velocity. A pitcher who throws five consecutive 90-mph fastball is unlikely to hit 100 mph on the sixth. In each case, the number is a manifestation of physical ability.

One equivalent to fastball velocity for batters is power on contact. Every one of Giancarlo Stanton’s improbably giant home runs is a testament to his impressive physical capacities, something he’s likely to replicate in the future. Likewise, one recognizes that Dee Gordon — who record one of the lowest peak exit velocities last year — is unlikely to cobble together a 30-homer campaign based on the evidence of his best effort.

In other words, one or two batted balls can provide a great deal of information about a hitter’s true talent. One or two batted balls like this one:

And this one, as well:

Again, this isn’t a matter of Bird launching dingers off half-prepared pitchers still trying to refine their mechanics. It’s a matter of how well the man is driving the ball. Bird’s shoulder injury was a labrum tear, and those can be tricky. There was reason to be concerned about Bird’s capacity to drive the ball, even after going to the Arizona Fall League for a tune-up.

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TAMPA, Fla. — Aaron Judge knew what his offseason objective must be. Everyone did. While his power is obviously rare among even major-league players — Jeff Sullivan recently detailed how difficult it is to exaggerate — so are his contact issues. Over his first 95 plate appearances with the Yankees, he posted a Joey Gallo-like strikeout rate (44.2%).

As the table below illustrates, Judge also recorded one of the lowest in-zone contact rates among players with 90-plus plate appearances.

While Judge posted these numbers in a relatively small sample, some of the players who accompany him here illustrate the challenges a batter faces when he has trouble making in-zone contact. His plus-plus raw power won’t matter if it doesn’t translate to game action.

So this winter, Judge did what many 25-year-olds do: he spent much of the day staring at his phone, and spent much of that time searching through videos. But unlike most 25-year-olds, this YouTube-ing (mostly YouTube research, he said) was done with a professional purpose in mind: to find ways to better keep his bat in a position to make quality contact.

“I was usually on my phone before bed or before I went to hit. It could be anytime, anywhere,” Judge said of his video research.

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The masses are encouraged by Bryce Harper’s spring. Everyone’s looking for a big bounceback season, so it seems like a good thing that Harper is second in spring-training home runs, with six. Well, Greg Bird is looking for a bounceback season of his own — not because he was bad in 2016, but because he wasn’t anything in 2016. Surgery’ll do that to a player. After Wednesday, Bird is right there with Harper, at six home runs. Let’s just continue to try to ignore that Peter O’Brien is ahead of both of them, with seven.

Out of sight usually means out of mind, as fandom goes, and Bird, for a while, was sort of a forgotten young Yankee, what with the group emergence of Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge, Tyler Austin, and so on. It’s nothing Bird could help, but labrum surgery kept him from playing, and it was all he could ask for to have a successful spring. Suffice to say Bird is back in the picture. Suffice to say he’s generating at least as much enthusiasm as anybody else. Through 47 exhibition trips to the plate, Bird’s hitting .439, with a four-digit slugging percentage. He’s been the very best spring-training hitter, and while that’s not something anyone actually cares about, there is significance here. It would sure seem that Bird’s shoulder is fine.

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A half-dozen years ago, the Yankees developed a plan. As a team that had consistently exceeded the luxury-tax threshold, the Yankees were paying an extra 50% on every dollar over Major League Baseball’s competitive-balance tax rate. Their financial commitments also made them ineligible to recoup some of their revenue-sharing money. As a response, the club resolved to reduce spending ahead of the 2014 season, aiming for a payroll figure below the $189-million threshold. That would reset their tax rate to less than 20% in 2015 and reduce their commitments to revenue sharing.

That never happened, though. In 2013, the team failed to make the playoffs and, despite the major gift of having Alex Rodriguez’s salary removed from the books, the plan was scrapped and a massive spending spree undertaken. Four years after the plan was discarded, the Yankees will once again have that same opportunity. This time, they’re in a much better position to execute it.

While the prospect of saving a lot of money in salaries and taxes is enticing even for a team with as much money as the Yankees, the prospect of reaching the playoffs and driving up attendance is also financially beneficial — and probably more enjoyable, too. That’s likely the logic that informed the Yankees’ offseason spree a few years ago. After the club had Alex Rodriguez’s salary removed by suspension, the team went out and signed Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Masahiro Tanaka for Derek Jeter’s final year. The result: a payroll once again over $200 million. The team drew more fans, but fell a bit shy of the playoffs. They secured a Wild Card spot in 2015 but promptly lost to the Astros.

Fast forward to the present, and the Yankees once again have a payroll that will exceed $200 million by season’s end — well above the $195 million competitive-balance tax amount for this season. They also don’t have a great shot at the playoffs according to our projections, which forecast them for 79 wins and a 14% chance of qualifying for the postseason. Just how long of a rebuild the Yankees can stomach remains to be seen, but here are the contracts coming off the books next season.

Among the players listed here, only Pineda figures to be worth the money he’s owed this season. The departure of Tanaka might hurt, too, even with a $22 million salary attached. In 2018, the Yankees will owe Ellsbury, Tanaka, Starlin Castro, Aroldis Chapman, Brett Gardner, Chase Headley and Brian McCann (a portion of his salary with the Houston Astros) a total of $101.2 million. Raises in arbitration to players like Didi Gregorious, Dellin Betances, Aaron Hicks, Austin Romine and Adam Warren might add another $20 million. If we conservatively figure another $15 million for player benefits, that places the club’s post-2017 commitments at something like $135 million, meaning the Yankees have about $60 million to make improvements while still remaining under the competitive-balance tax.

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