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...

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. Ranking each Yankee player by position throughout the team's long history was no small task. To make the decisions easier, WAR (Wins Above Replacement) and its close relative WAA (Wins Above Average) were the two main performance metrics used. At a high level, the concept of these metrics are simple. They attempt to quantify how many of his team's wins a player was personally responsible for. Before we can start to think about wins, though, we need to start with runs. There are three main run components that are used in the wins calculations for position players and they are readily available online thanks to the wonderful folks at  baseball-reference.com  - an invaluable resource for anyone interest...

This post is the first in 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. “He had incredible motivational skills and he could get players on a team to rally around each other like it was us against the world. Billy was so aggressive, he made us feel as if we were all in a bunker together and that baseball was all about war.” – Willie Randolph Baseball is often referred to as a thinking man’s game, but to Billy Martin it was visceral. Whether he was playing or managing, the typical game involving Martin would have his fingerprints, or fists, all over it. To him, baseball was about forced action and reaction, heart and will, and proving to the opposition with every move that he had a stronger desire to win than they did. As effective as his approach could be, it didn’t come...

Hello and welcome to Jimmy Sez, a blog that will mostly be dedicated to content on the New York Yankees. There's been no shortage of Yankee blogs floating around the internet,  some  of  which  I have contributed to over the years. So what's this one all about? I'm so glad you asked! A couple of years ago I got an email from an editor at Lyons Press who was looking to publish a series of books chronicling all-time All-Star teams in professional sports. It turns out I had written an article doing  just that  for the Yankees back in 2014 and he wanted to know if I was interested in expanding that into a full-length manuscript. I immediately said "yes", paying no mind to the fact that I knew nothing about writing a book. I'd figure that out later. This was my golden opportunity to write a book about my favorite team. For about a year thereafter I stumbled my way through writing that full-length manuscript. While nobody I've ever met would consider me word...