HOUSTON — Sorry, I admit it, I just have no handle on the 2014 Yankees, even with six weeks of spring training in the rearview mirror and the regular season opening Tuesday.
The truth is, I can’t even begin to make an educated guess about 2014 because I have yet to come to peace with what those 85 wins in 2013 mean.
Was that playoff-less 2013 the beginning of the end of a historic run? Or was it a sign the Yankees’ culture is so solid that even in a season when pretty much everything goes wrong, they will still figure out how to stay alive for a playoff spot until the very end?
They spent half-a-billion dollars in the offseason to reload and are just taking it on blind faith that no team will suffer injuries like they did in 2013 in consecutive seasons. That is the formula — that money plus health plus that strong core culture will make them October-worthy again.
Yet the oddsmakers see the Yankees in the 86-87 win range as the third choice in the AL East behind the Red Sox and Rays. Maybe part of that is about Tampa and Boston, not to mention Baltimore. Those four teams all won at least 85 games last year, each can do it again. I have a feeling if you played the division out 100 times, each would finish first a whole bunch and each would finish fourth a good deal.
It is just another way in which these are not Hal Steinbrenner’s father’s Yankees. The days of having weak sisters at the bottom of the AL East to serve as props for the Yankees to maul have vanished.
For in their long run of success, the Yankees generally could depend on beating up the bottom of the AL East. An unbalanced schedule in which division teams play six series against each other was reinstituted in 2001, and from then through 2013, the Yankees were a combined 308-158 against the bottom two teams in the AL East or an average of 26-13 per year.
If you play 13 games over against the bottom two teams in your division, you just have to play 13 over against every other team to win 94 games.
In 2013, the Yankees finished tied with Baltimore at 85-77, eight games over .500, and if you are looking at how they got there, they played nine games over (14-5) against the Blue Jays, the lone team to finish behind them in the AL East. But the Yankees were the punching bag for the top two teams in the AL East, going 13-25 against the Red Sox and Rays.
So, again, was that an indicator that Boston and Tampa Bay have broken free of the Yankees, that they are now the AL East alpha dogs? Or was it a one-year aberration? In the head-to-head matchups, the Red Sox and Rays played to their strengths. Boston, with its powerhouse offense, went 13-6 against the Yankees, averaging 6.3 runs per game. Tampa Bay, with its dynamic pitching, went 14-5 against the Yankees, holding them to 3.4 runs per game.
This is where the offseason-spending-spree-plus-better-health theory comes into play. The Yankees simply do not feel they are the same team as last year. They bought Masahiro Tanaka, believe CC Sabathia is in far better physical condition than last year and Michael Pineda has overcome his shoulder problems. Those three, plus Hiroki Kuroda and Ivan Nova, pitched well in spring, giving an indicator that what was a worry heading into February could play as a strength from April through September.
And the offense has received a complete overhaul. Consider that of the nine players who took the most plate appearances against the Rays last year, just one, Brett Gardner, remains a starter this season and he had .918 OPS against Tampa (the others were Robinson Cano, Ichiro Suzuki, Lyle Overbay, Vernon Wells, Eduardo Núñez, Travis Hafner, Chris Stewart and Jayson Nix). Wells and Hafner aren’t even playing any longer, and only Cano is a starting player anywhere else (Overbay is expected to platoon at first in Milwaukee).
The Yankees scored 650 runs last year in 162 games or 20 fewer than they did in 1994, a season in which they played just 113 games due to a labor stoppage. The antidote, they believe, is Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, Kelly Johnson and Brian Roberts plus healthy seasons for Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira plus a full year from Alfonso Soriano.
The Yankees cannot win the AL East without playing more competitively against the best of their division. They believe they will carry over the good culture which brought those 85 wins despite their 2013 misery and combine it with better health and what they bought to return to being a divisional alpha dog.
That is the formula as the 2014 season begins.