It's Not the Yankees, It's Me
I was watching the Yankees' game against the Dodgers recently which they had lost 8-2 and I was again thinking about my frustration with baseball. I want to understand if that frustration is justified and can be backed up with data or it stems from my being too emotional and too involved in this team. Baseball is great because it has a ton of data and it is mostly free to access. I am turning to data to answer my question.
I don’t have a rich history with baseball, certainly not as rich as Americans have with their national pastime. I started watching baseball in 2017 mostly out of boredom, becoming suddenly frustrated and disgruntled with football (when I say 'football' I mean European football called 'soccer' in America).
Baseball got me hooked. It had a lot of numbers to describe the game, and I like numbers. I also found baseball's nature to be reminiscent of life, which is full of randomness and volatility. Many times on the baseball field nothing would be happening or would be moving very slowly then suddenly everything would explode with a loud double to right field or an opposite-field home run. Just like in life. It took me a few years to realize that you cannot follow baseball like you would most other sports. Watching a baseball game is only one - and not the most important or rewarding - part of following this sport and enjoying it.
But back to how it all started for me. It took me a few days to figure out the rules and find the team to root for. I was looking at names and uniforms and cultural connections but ultimately it all came down to games I was able to watch at the time and emotions I would feel while watching them. The Yankees back then were a team of young Aaron Judge who was mashing homers (and still does to this day); of legendary CC Sabathia and Brett Gardner; of young promising pitchers in Luis Severino and Jordan Montgomery; of flame-thrower Aroldis Chapman and Tommy "Tight Pants" Kahnle and Dellin Betances. I liked the Yankee Stadium, its look and feel, and how Michael Kay’s voice sounded. I liked Bronx apartment buildings in the background and trains passing by behind the bleachers every now and again. Obviously, I could not have gone to the baseball game with my father or anything like that, which would predetermine my favorite baseball team, but I still needed to feel the environment, the atmosphere rather than make a cold logical choice or follow someone else's fandom. So, I've chosen the Yankees, a dull choice, a hype choice but for good, even poetic, reasons.
Obviously, due to me living in Europe I could mostly watch day games live. I would watch a few night postseason games later but it was hard for me to stay up till 4 am at night. Back then - now too, who am I kidding - I took every loss personally and I lived and died with every pitch screaming at the TV. I enjoyed every win too, scaring people at home, who would flinch nervously every time I banged my hand on the table when the Yankees scored a run. Deep inside though I always felt like I was getting the worst part of the product and missing all the fun that seemingly happened in night games.
So where is the truth? From 2017 to 2025 have the Yankees been worse in day games than at night? Let's look at the data1. Here is their win % per season (excluding 2020, which was shortened due to COVID):
There is nothing in this table that immediately draws attention. It could go either way, they can be better or worse in day games. Running a few statistical tests confirms that but let me illustrate it with the chart:
Those overlapping red and blue cones every season are the evidence; specifically, there is only ~29% probability that the Yankees actually play better in day games than at night meaning the observed difference is likely due to chance and randomness. 2021 season stands out, yes, but run enough season-by-season checks and one of them will look like an outlier simply by chance. My frustration while watching the Yankees games is mine alone. The baseball gods are lamenting the stupidity of an ordinary fan in me who blames the team for his troubles but who himself is the source of his own suffering. That is not to say that the Yankees cannot be frustrating - they still haven't won a World Series while I support them but that is an entirely different matter...
Which leads me to the next logical question: if the Yankees are not as exasperating as I thought they were then were they actually a good team while I watched them? (I am not a baseball analyst so I am using very simple, primitive ways to look at it but let me try anyway).
One of the most reliable ways to win baseball games is to outscore your opponents. Do the Yankees do that? Yes, they did in all seasons but one!
The Yankees are consistently at the top when it comes to offensive metrics:
Their starting pitching is not all hot and red but still pretty good considering major injuries to Gerrit Cole or Carlos Rodón in recent years:
Their relief pitchers are decent too:
Simply digging into this brings up a lot of memories which I tend to forget in the anxious minutiae of everyday life of a baseball fan. In those years Aaron Judge became perennial MVP front-runner; he also broke the American League home run record in 2022 with 62 bombs. Giancarlo Stanton was acquired from Miami and although often injured he managed to deliver quite a few moments of awe including in post-season. Gerrit Cole, one of the best pitchers of his generation, was signed to a record contract. Max Fried and Carlos Rodón have joined the team. The Yankees consistently have one of the top payrolls in the league. They have almost reached the World Series in 2017 when nobody expected them to. They have been to the World Series in 2024. Every season they are in playoff contention, albeit this contention became easier the last couple of seasons. In 2026 they are again in the top ranks in the league with some exciting young pitchers like Cam Schlittler who has a good chance to win the prestigious Cy Young Award.
There is no way to conclude from the data that my experience of watching the Yankees is annoying because they are a bad team or they play worse in day games in particular. The reason for my frustration is irrational: the true fan’s soul yearns for the Yankees either have a first in baseball history 162-0 season or that they put the strong team without any flaws on the field every single year. But these are unreasonable expectations of any fan of any team (and the Yankees especially, now that I know how their fans usually are). The bigger question in all of this is how I can shift from being a fan blindly rooting for a team to a reasonable and passionate baseball afficionado who also supports the Yankees.
My occasional beef with baseball is its volatile, unpredictable nature. You wait for a Gerrit Cole start and he cruises for 5 innings but then allows a couple of home runs. In my mind he goes from The Best Pitcher Who Ever Lived to WTF Was That, Gerrit? in the blink of an eye. Over the course of the full season or a career things even out, everything ultimately regresses to the mean - god, I hate statistics sometimes - but the truth is a fan in me wants the Yankees to win every single game. With that attitude you are ultimately left with nothing but being a live witness of a game of chance, randomness, which will be making you miserable over and over in perpetuity.
Baseball is a game of time and sample sizes. Baseball season runs every day from April to, hopefully, October. Every day you go through the same feeling of being irked by mundane things like pitches missed that lead to home runs or errors made that cost you the game or hitters who cannot hit to save their lives. You do that over and over every day for seven months without seeing or wanting to see a bigger picture sometimes. That is why baseball is so much more like life than any other sport. Not because of the success and the failure baked in it but because in the daily grind you don’t always smile to the rising sun but you are annoyed by all the unpleasant things that are happening to you right now. You don’t care about pitcher's season ERA that much because that is a postmortem diagnosis; you want him to strike them all out now. You don't care if a hitter eventually climbs back to his normal levels of production when he hasn't hit for two weeks and just popped up to first baseman to strand three runners in a tie game. You want to feel great right now not after you are dead when you won't care one bit about what you have or have not been. You wade through baseball games like hobbits through the trees of the Old Forest and you think it will never end. You cannot, like in football, watch a game and then have a week to forget about it. Baseball is not that kind. But it, on the other hand, teaches you patience in making conclusions and forming opinions; it teaches you not to bang your head against the wall after every loss or think that your team is the best team in history after every win. Just give baseball some time and it will right the course and show you the truth and provide you with perspective on the times that have passed. You only need to be open to it.
You can watch baseball games every day and, I swear, in every single one you will see something on the baseball field that has never happened before or last happened in 1898 or simply amuses you and makes you laugh. You need to be able to enjoy every minute now but also appreciate all those past moments that have ever happened. Once you reach that level of baseball fandom, you will be fine and you will find a million baseball topics to talk about and a million reasons to love this beautiful game. Next time I watch the Yankees, I will try to remember that and just enjoy the game, appreciate my favorite team and relish the sport that I, by pure chance, - isn't that ironic? - discovered nine years ago.
- Data used in this post is from Retrosheet and Fangraphs
