Why Yankees Fans Shouldn't Panic After Yamamoto Deal?
December Articles
My 2023-2024 NFL Power Rankings
Without a doubt, this NFL season has been one that has had a lot of fans frustrated. Whenever a team seems to rise above the rest as the clear favorite, they seem to falter. Personally, I don't get the frustration. The product is better, and the regular season is a lot more dramatic and unpredictable. This unpredictability makes for a very interesting power ranking. When it comes to the power ranking, (at least for this year) you can throw the records out the window. It is all about the eye test and what each team has done lately. When I constructed my own power rankings, I also considered the teams that have dealt with adversity the best throughout the season. It should be noted that there are only ten teams on my power rankings, and they have to be one of the fourteen teams that I believe will make the playoffs. I went through every team's remaining schedule and came up with my prediction for who will make the playoffs and what their final records will be. Here are my fourteen teams:
January Articles
February Articles
The Yankees May Have the Next Michael King
One of the negatives to this Yankees offseason has been the depletion of pitching in their system. In two deals for Alex Verdugo and Juan Soto, the Yankees traded away six pitchers with the most notable being Michael King to the San Diego Padres. The departure of Michael King is a huge one. For the past two years, King has been one of the better relief pitchers in baseball, and at the backend of the Yankees' miserable 2023 season, King was beginning to emerge as a solid starting pitching option. Now the Padres are the ones who hold that option, and the Yankees are left with searching the market for starting pitching. Through many small moves this offseason, the Yankees have given themselves many options to fill the void in their bullpen. Guys like Cody Morris from the Cleveland Guardians and Cody Poteet from the Miami Marlins are intriguing, but perhaps the best option is a guy that the Yankees already had in their minor league system. This pitcher is 24-year-old Will Warren, who is currently in AAA and has many similarities to Michael King. In 2023 over 129 innings, Warren went 10-4 with a 3.35 ERA. The year before, he had a 3.91 ERA in the same number of innings. Warren is obviously a consistent pitcher, which is one of the qualities that make Michael King so great, though overall consistency is far from the only thing that compares these two pitchers.
September Articles
Drunken Reality
There haven’t been many instances over the course of this season where I have been proud of Aaron Boone. I find him to be a little soft in terms of his management of the team, focusing more on the feelings of his players than the success of the team. But over the weekend I found myself applauding him. In response to Alex Cora, who insinuated that he had put Brayan Bello in Saturday's game just to throw at Aaron Judge and get revenge on the Yankees for Gerrit Cole hitting Rafael Devers in the first inning, Boone said “We’ve got too many important things going on in front of us to really get caught up in that.” It was the correct response whether the Yankees were in the right or wrong. It gave hope that Boone’s eyes were on the big picture, and not on how other people viewed him. It makes the subtly condescending comment a heck of a lot sweeter when considering that the Red Sox were the ones who overreacted. First of all, if Gerrit Cole were to have tried to intentionally hit Devers in the first inning, then he wouldn’t have done it with a cutter tailing in. He would have done it with a four-seam fastball at Devers back. Second, Alex Cora attributed Gerrit Cole intentionally walking Devers in the fourth inning as the reason for how he was able to justify that Gerrit Cole hit Devers intentionally in the first. The only problem with that logic is that Cole made himself look pretty pathetic, throwing up four fingers and waving Devers to first in the fourth inning when, at the time, he had a no-hitter going. A person who is willing to do that would also be willing to do it in the first inning. Cora’s comments were circumstantial. He saw an opportunity to light a fire under his team, and he took it. Unfortunately for Cora, his team didn’t respond on Sunday, and he wound up just embarrassing himself. It was a rare management win for Boone.
The 2024 Yankees Offseason: A Lesson in Team Value vs. WAR
After the Yankees made their blockbuster move last offseason acquiring Juan Soto from the San Diego Padres in exchange for Michael King, Drew Thorpe, and a few other pieces, it felt like it would be a necessity for the Yankees to re-sign him, especially considering the Yankees lackluster offensive performance in 2022, culminating in a missed playoff appearance. But surprisingly when Juan Soto decided to head to Queens and join the cross-town rival New York Mets on a revolutionary, market-resetting fifteen year, seven-hundred and sixty-five million dollar deal, Yankees fans oddly found themselves a little more relieved than would have seemed possible given their “please stay, Soto!” chants at the backend of the year.