PokГ©mon Battle Revolution - May 7 09 A
using any Water attacks. This team looked pretty imposing when I saw the battle begin. There's a Grass starter, a Water starter, and a Fire ...
Yankees win! The Yankees ... win?
Win a lot of games, whether they're winning the World Series (as they did last year and have done six of the past 12 years) or even when they're not making the playoffs (as they didn't in 2008, for the first time since 1993 -- years in which they won 89 and 88 games, respectively).
So they'll win a lot of games. Will they win the franchise's 30th ( thirtieth!) to be! -- you are probably aware that the site provides a statistically-analyzed list of each player's "Most Similar" players, for career, by career at the conclusion of each season by player age, and most interesting for our purposes, for active players, "Similar Batters through [Last Season's Age]." Defense does NOT play a role in these similarity scores, though somehow, most players' "Most Similars" play the same or similar positions. Kudos to Sean Forman, Genius Tsar of BBRef, for developing this reference base.
What it allows us to do is to see how the Most Similar Player to each person on a team's lineup has been, historically -- then we can look up how they did the very next season. It's not a defensible scientific method, to be sure, but it's kinda fun and cool, and gives us a new way to talk about baseball's most talked-about team, the defending World Champion New York Yankees.
For our purposes -- and you will see when exceptions arise -- we are going to limit our listing of "Most Similars" to players who primarily manned the same position. For example, Alex Rodriguez's Most Similar player, surely to nobody's surprise, is Henry Aaron. But Hank was an outfielder, occasional first baseman and designated hitter, so we will move down the list presented by BBRef to find a third baseman ... well, you'll see. On with the show!
Each player is listed below by his projected position in 2010, his 2009 season age, and the player (at the same position) listed as his Most Similar by BBRef. Bauxites ... meet your Alternate Universe 2010 New York Yankees!
STARTING LINEUP