Were the 2006 Yankees an All Time Great Team?
Where It All Started
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Beginnings
It all started so innocently.
Back when I was in high school, I stumbled across a website called Baseball Primer.
I’m not entirely certain how I found Baseball Primer. I remember that I was a fan of Retrosheet back in those days. In fact, I can remember printing out the old Strange and Unusual section from Retrosheet and reading those while eating my lunch in the hallway near the orchestra room (I played violin in high school instead of sports).
I’m guessing that my discovery of Baseball Primer had something to do with Retrosheet, or with something related in the fledgling online baseball community.
Baseball Primer
Baseball Primer was absolutely crazy in the early days.
In the grand old Usenet tradition, commenting in the old days was completely anonymous. I believe you could set up a password to accompany your username, but there was little point in doing so.
The most popular part of the website was called Clutch Hits, a place where people would post baseball related articles that would attract endless comments. This screenshot, taken from an Internet Archive page archived on April 30, 2001, gives you a little idea of what the website looked like in the glory days:
I would have been 16 years old at the time, and was simply fascinated with the site.
It was kind of like 4chan for baseball fans, though without all (er, most of) the objectionable stuff. There were memes galore, and legendary threads. You can find some of the lore on the archived version of Wiki Gonzalez, which once served as the repository for the history of the community. If you understand what the question “Are you the biggest idiot ever?” refers to, then I can proudly say that you are one of us.
Like everything zany and crazy, though, Baseball Primer mellowed over time. Forced registration became a thing, and notorious trolls were eventually banned. The website itself rebranded in 2004, changing its name to Baseball Think Factory, which is how it is known today.
The Graveyard
Sadly, most of what made Baseball Primer a wild and exciting place died off as the years went by.
Many of the most famous and celebrated posters went on to careers in and around Major League Baseball. I remember frequently reading posts from the likes of Tom Tango and Voros McCracken. Dan Szymborski’s Transaction Oracle blog was not only the only place to find his famous ZIPS projections for years, but was also home to some of the greatest transaction related humor I’ve ever read. I can remember Eric Enders posting preview photos and pages from his World Series book, which was published over 20 years ago now. I feel old.
Going through the pages of Baseball Think Factory these days feels like a graveyard. Numerous blogs are referred to that simply no longer exist. If you spend enough time researching sabermetric topics, you will eventually come across a link to some old and long forgotten Baseball Think Factory page that disappeared years ago.
It’s a shame, really. A lot of history was in those pages, and yet they’ve all blown away with the wind. Not everybody has the time or patience to professionally publish books containing their ideas and findings. Baseball Primer was a way for us to bounce ideas off each other. I wish those ideas had been archived in a more proper fashion.
There were famous threads over the years. We’ll never forget the infamous PETCO thread (I recommend skipping the archived version and just catching the highlights), or any of the other extremely long threads that developed. Some of the political threads in the later years of Baseball Think Factory were so bad that people started leaving the site: I, for example, never really returned to frequent reading and posting after the insanity of the 2016 election. You can find some of the greatest hits here if you’re bored enough.
But this isn’t about those threads. No — this is about a specific thread that was forgotten over the years, a thread on an old blog that no longer exists, a thread that only exists in part on the Internet Archive.
We’re going back to the past. Watch out for the bones.
The 2006 Yankees
Once upon a time there was an old Baseball Think Factory blog called Count the Rings.
In addition to occasionally flaming the Red Sox Therapy posters, Count the Rings also produced self-congratulatory content like the following:
Now, you’re probably wondering what in the world this has to do with anything. Who thinks that the 2006 Yankees were a great team? Why would anybody in the world care about some random thread praising a team that seems to have not really been all that good?
There are two things here that you won’t notice at first glance:
Those projections are actually closer to reality than you think.
This thread evolved into something far more spectacular.
Murderer’s Row
First off, let’s take a quick look at the 2006 Yankees.
As baseball fans, we really don’t like to admit this, but we’re biased. We tend to only think of teams that won in the postseason as truly great.
Going back to this thread made me realize this simple fact. The truth, you see, is that the 2006 Yankees really did have an incredibly impressive offense.
The Yankees had a 97-65 record in 2006, good enough for first place in the AL East. This was the 9th year in a row that the Yankees had won their division. Aside from 2000, they won over 90 games in each of those years. By the way, the 2000 Yankees went 87-74, making up for it by winning the World Series.
The Yankees scored 930 runs in 2006, giving up 767. This isn’t necessarily dynasty territory, by the way. American League teams scored 804 runs on average in 2006, ranging from the 930 runs the Yankees put up to the meager 689 runs that Tampa Bay managed to tally.
The Yankee pitching staff clearly disappointed in 2006. This was the year that the Tigers gave up only 675 runs en route to a World Series appearance, as you may remember. The Yankee staff was headed by Chien-Ming Wang (王建民), who had the first of his two great seasons. My wife is from Taiwan, and I can recall seeing Chien-Ming Wang merchandise all over Kaohsiung during my first visit to the island in those days. Wang was flanked by a 42-year-old Randy Johnson and a 37-year-old Mike Mussina; Mussina was clearly above average, Johnson a tad under (but who can blame him at that age?).
But the hitting — the hitting was really something.
The projection by Larry Mahnken in that article above was almost right on, and that’s the scary part. Let’s go batter by batter:
Johnny Damon at CF had a .285 / .359 / .482 line, which actually slightly exceeded Mahnken’s prediction.
Derek Jeter hit .343 / .417 / .483, which was a clear improvement on the prediction. In OPS+ terms, this was Jeter’s second best season, behind his stellar 1999 season.
A-Rod hit .290 / .392 / .523, performing just a hair under that projection.
At age 37, Gary Sheffield only managed 166 plate appearances, missing most of the season due to a wrist injury. Sheffield’s .298 / .355 / .450 line was still better than the projection. If you’re looking for who his replacement was, it was most likely Bobby Abreu (outfield replacements are kind of a difficult thing to figure out due to frequent position shifting). Abreu put up a .330 / .419 / .507 line in 248 plate appearances, which was even better.
Jason Giambi’s average wasn’t great, but his other stats were stellar: .253 / .413 / .558 with 37 home runs. The batting average was slightly under Mahnken’s prediction, but everything else was right on: another impressive feat.
Hideki Matsui also missed most of the season with a wrist injury, managing only 201 plate appearances. Perhaps the Yankees should have invested in wrist braces. Matsui hit .302 / .393 / .494 in his limited action, still better than Mahnken’s prediction. His “replacement” was likely the young Melky Cabrera, who “only” hit .280 / .360 / .391: perhaps a bit less power, but still extremely good.
Jorge Posada hit .277 / .374 / .492, also outperforming Mahnken’s prediction.
Bernie Williams managed .281 / .332 / .436. Giambi wound up as the DH and Williams spent most of his time in right field and center field. Still, the time in the outfield didn’t hurt Williams’ bat at all.
Robinson Cano had a breakout year in 2006, hitting .342 / .365 / .525. Mahnken didn’t see that one coming at all.
If the lineup had a weak link, it would have been Andy Phillips, who played at 1B while Giambi did the designated hitting. His .240 / .281 / .394 line seems to me like something out of 1908. But that’s not an awful line for somebody hitting 9th.
In short, if you ignore the pitching (and defense), the 2006 Yankees actually did have one of the most awesome lineups of all time. Of the 12 offensive players I just listed, only 3 had an OPS+ of under 100 (i.e. under average): Bernie Williams at 96, youngster Melky Cabrera at 95, and then Phillips at a woeful 72.
If you were to compare the 2006 Yankees with other famous Yankee lineups, you’d see what I’m talking about. Here are the 2006 Yankees counting only those who qualify for rate stats (which I think is calculated here as 2 plate appearances per team game):
Now, in contrast, here is the 1939 Yankees lineup:
The 1939 Yankees had a higher high end, but a lower low end. I think I’d rather have Andy Phillips than Babe Dahlgren, and Frank Crosetti was certainly no Derek Jeter. Aside from them (and for the defense), these two teams are surprisingly comparable. Well, if you ignore Joltin’ Joe, that is.
What about the 1927 Yankees?
Okay — obviously very few teams in the history of baseball have Ruth and Gehrig in the middle of the lineup. However, the supporting cast of the 2006 Yankees actually looks a bit better than the rest of the famous 1927 team.
Now, to round things out, here are the 1961 Yankees:
I actually think the 2006 Yankees might have been able to beat the 1961 Yankees. I see a lot of holes in this lineup, even though Mantle had a crazy year and Maris hit his 61 home runs.
In other words, we very well may have seen one of the greatest offensive teams of all time in the 2006 Yankees. And we didn’t even know it.
So What?
I’m not writing this to show off my arcane knowledge of a 2006 team that lost in the first round of the division series.
There’s actually more to all of this than meets the eye.
By the third page of that late December 2005 thread, the discussion turned to a comparison of all-time great baseball teams. Just as I was doing above, people started wondering how the 2006 Yankees might compare to their 1998 counterpart — or to the 2001 Mariners, or to the 1995 Indians, or to a bunch of other teams.
And then the discussion took an interesting turn:
I know that it’s kind of hard to read these old style threads, back before people had thought about actually creating collapsible threads to show which messages were replies to which. SG in ATL offered to use Diamond Mind Baseball (surprise surprise!) to create a league to test which of these teams truly was the greatest team of all time.
And we’re going to leave this discussion here.
When we pick this thread up again, we’ll look at the teams that our savants of baseball supremacy discussed.
There’s a lot to unpack here, including common (and somewhat uncommon) arguments against certain teams and eras, confusion about normalization methods, and abuse of the weaker parts of the Diamond Mind Baseball game engine.
It was an epic experiment, though — and one that is sadly lost amidst the sea of lost websites and forgotten discussions.
We’ll do our best to keep its spirit alive.