WS Preview: The Yankees Are Good

It’s finally here. Baseball takes the stage with two worthy contenders for the title, as the defending champs match up with the best team in baseball. The Phillies and Yankees both deserve to be here, and hopefully, we’ll get our first really good series of the playoffs.

That said, there’s an ugly possibility lurking for those hoping for a seven game, knock-down, drag-out fight to the finish – this Yankees team is capable of making this a very quick knockout.

The Phillies are a good offensive team, with some terrific hitters and a deep lineup. But the disparity in run production is still significant. The Phillies posted a .340 wOBA as a team, good for fifth best in baseball. That translates to +62 runs above average as a team, the best mark of any club in the National League. They are a good group of hitters.

The Yankees posted a .366 wOBA, which translates into a staggering +198 runs above average. The Red Sox were the only team within 100 runs of the Yankees in wRAA, checking in at +122. New York was 110 runs ahead of the third best offense in baseball, by linear weights. The 26 point gap between the Yankees and Phillies in wOBA is essentially equal to the gap between the Phillies and the Astros.

The disparity won’t be quite that dramatic in the head to head match-up due to the same rules being applied to both teams in regards to the DH, but that just diminishes the difference from ridiculous to huge. As good as the Phillies lineup is, the Yankees are just better.

Philly will have to make up that gap with their run prevention, but that’s easier said than done. The biggest flaw on the Yankee team is the back end of their rotation, which is the part of the roster most marginalized in a playoff series. The Yankees managed to hand 83 percent of their ALCS innings to CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera, while leaving just 17 percent for everyone else. They probably won’t be able to repeat that mark in the World Series, but Philadelphia hitters should still expect to see that quartet 75 percent of the time.

The one real area where the Phillies have a distinct advantage is on defense. Their defenders will bail their pitchers out of jams, while Yankee hurlers are left to do that on their own. But that alone won’t be enough to overcome the advantages New York has – the Phillies are just going to have to get some guys to play over their heads.

In a short series, anything can happen. Even with the talent advantage on the Yankee side of things, the Phillies still have something like a 40 percent chance to win the series. But as much as I’m hoping for a classic series with seven close games, there remains a distinct possibility that the Yankees could just blow the Phillies out of the water. They’re that good.