Jimmy Sez

This post is part of a series that includes material originally written for  The New York Yankees All-Time All-Stars  but had to hit the cutting room floor prior to publication. For other posts in the series you can search for the label "Author's Cut" on this site. “Our manager has taught us what we have to do to win. Everyone on this team plays hard and is ready to perform when he calls on them.” – Derek Jeter Like Casey Stengel before him, Joe Torre getting hired as Yankee manager was a head-scratcher. After a long and productive career as a player he transitioned right into managing where he excelled at losing consistently. By the time he reached the Yankees he was the sad clown of baseball, and nobody expected those fortunes to change in The Bronx. Yet, just like Stengel did, he shocked the baseball world and helped crown the Yankees the unquestioned kings of the diamond again. His cool demeanor and sober approach to baseball’s daily grind was tailor made for th...

This post is part of a series that includes material originally written for  The New York Yankees All-Time All-Stars  but had to hit the cutting room floor prior to publication. For other posts in the series you can search for the label "Author's Cut" on this site. In  Volume 1  of this WAR Primer series we gave an overview of the run components that make up the base of the WAR and WAA calculations. Here we'll dig in deeper as to how those run totals are converted to wins. As with the previous volume, if reading this leaves you wanting more, Baseball Reference's  WAR Explainer  is highly recommended. WAA - Wins Above Average Number of wins added by the player above that of an average player. In order to arrive at WAA, we start with the run components already described in Volume 1 and include one more not touched on yet. The last one is a positional adjustment known as Rpos. It’s no secret that throughout baseball history, players at certain positio...

This post is part of a series that includes material originally written for  The New York Yankees All-Time All-Stars  but had to hit the cutting room floor prior to publication. For other posts in the series you can search for the label "Author's Cut" on this site. “ The greatest manager who ever lived. ” – Waite Hoyt The Yankees have come to be known as the gold standard of excellence in baseball, but that wasn’t always the case. The first 15 years of the franchise’s existence was marked by near misses at best and complete futility at worst. Miller Huggins was hired as manager in 1918 to help change those fortunes, and while his impact wasn’t immediate, he eventually would mold the Yankees into a world class team. Undersized and ultracompetitive as a player, Huggins was the same as a manager and transformed what was a team of mercenaries into a tight-knit group of competitors. More than anyone, Huggins was responsible for setting the foundation of a winning cul...