Reason for optimism: The addition of Starlin Castro continues an unmistakable trend -- the Yankees are getting younger.
Reason for pessimism: The Yankees are still a really, really old team.
In 2015, American League teams gave up at least one run in the seventh inning 26.5 percent of the time, and the league's collective runs allowed in the seventh inning was 4.31. There was nothing particularly notable about that scoring pace; it was more runs than were scored in the second inning, nearly the same as the fifth inning, and less than teams scored on average in the sixth. Given that AL teams scored 4.32 runs per game overall, the seventh inning came closest to representing an average game's run environment.
It turns out the Yankees, through the runs-allowed lens, had about as average a pitching staff as is statistically possible; they gave up 4.31 runs a game, a mere one-hundredth of a point off the league standard. Yet, in the sixth and seventh innings, the Yankees turned into the Colorado Rockies, yielding 5.5 and 5.11 runs per nine in those frames, respectively. That single statistic, less than their attempt to emulate the Kansas City Royals, is almost certainly what drove New York to trade for Aroldis Chapman during the offseason.
Chapman, who arrives with a 100-plus mph fastball and a lifetime ERA of 2.17, won't be pitching the seventh inning of course -- but the resulting shift in bullpen assets puts the Yankees in position to reduce the pace of seventh-inning scoring, putting it on par with their eighth and ninth innings at 3.07 runs allowed. Shaving two runs per nine innings over the course of a season full of seventh innings would save 45 to 50 runs a year -- which means Chapman would effectively add close to five wins in value.
For a team that won 87 games last year, that would appear to put New York on pace to win more than 90 games this year. While that's surely a scenario Yankees fans would like to see play out in 2016, there are a number of problems with that line of thinking. Chief among them? Relying on huge bounce-back years from a number of your oldest players isn't so much a foundation to build on, as it is a last hurrah.
How old are the Yankees?
People talk all the time about records that will never be broken, but I'm not sure this one ever gets mentioned. Last year, per the calculations at Baseball Reference, the age of the Yankees offense (based on the weighted average of at-bats) topped 30 for the 22nd year in a row (it was 31.2 years). Why is that an apparently unbreakable streak? Because 30-year-old lineups by this metric are rare in a single year. In 2015, no team other than the Yankees had a lineup that averaged 29.5 years old.
Leading the Yankees to second in the majors in scoring were Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran -- 35, 40, and 38 years old, respectively, at the end of last season. They had above-average seasons, but a review of the splits casts doubt as to whether it will happen again. Teixeira only got to the plate 119 times after the All-Star break and hit .175 in August. A-Rod recorded his most home runs since 2008, and most plate appearances since 2007 (!), but his success was front-loaded -- perhaps due to his time off; he hit .216 after the All-Star break.
Aging curves start to look really ugly for older players, and even if you're wildly optimistic about these three in particular, it's safe to say that last year's production -- highlighted by their 83 combined home runs -- will be virtually impossible for the trio to improve upon. Realistically, the Yankees could hope for Starlin Castro to provide them with enough of a marginal offensive increase at second base, and also hope to get a bounceback year from Jacoby Ellsbury, to stay in the top 10 teams in runs scored.
As previously alluded to, the bullpen improvement helps run suppression in two ways.
First, the unit's ERA -- a middle-of-the-pack 3.70 last season -- has room for improvement. A more subtle uptick will occur if they also take some of those innings from the mediocre rotation that had so much trouble getting through the sixth and seventh innings, as illustrated above. All of that could be helpful, but the team's fortunes may have the best chance for improvement if the rotation itself became better.
Yankees fans can take solace in the fact that when the starter with the most starts and innings pitched has the highest ERA on the staff, as CC Sabathia (4.73 ERA) did last year, it usually doesn't happen two years in a row. That's because the former ace will either return to form, or, frankly, he'll lose his spot in the rotation. Sadly, last year wasn't an aberration for Sabathia, who hasn't had an ERA below 4.73 since 2012. The rest of the rotation is unquestionably solid, even if it lacks a true ace. Depth is a problem though; if Sabathia or anyone else loses time, Ivan Nova (coming off of a 5.07 ERA campaign in 2015) is slated to fill in.
For three years running, Joe Girardi has led the Yankees to a final record better than their underlying results would predict. While that makes me legitimately leery about shorting the Yankees, I take solace in the fact that if I do take the "under," given the age of the lineup, I'm basically going along with Father Time -- and it's almost universally acknowledged that he's undefeated.
A market of 86.5 games is just enough cushion to warrant a play based on the projection, but anything lower would be a pass, because a couple of other "over" plays in the division are related to this number.
2016 projection: 83-79 (fourth, AL East)
Bet recommendation: Under