If Major League Baseball was like the National Basketball Association, the New York Yankees would likely be World Series favorites by virtue of adding four-time Silver Slugger Award winner Juan Soto in a trade this offseason with the San Diego Padres. Soto, former AL MVP Aaron Judge and reigning AL Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole are arguably the top big three in the sport today.
The problem is, this isn’t a team like the 2009 Yankees — the last iteration of the Bronx Bombers to reach and win the World Series — that has insane depth beyond their big three, which is necessary in baseball. Sure, the 2009 Yankees had Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and CC Sabathia. They also employed Mariano Rivera, Mark Teixeira, Robinson Canó, Jorge Posada, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Andy Pettitte and A.J. Burnett to form one of the deepest and most star-studded teams in modern MLB history.
Many projection systems have serious questions about whether key pieces in the Yankees lineup and starting rotation will be able to repeat their prior successes. Among those is ZiPS, often relied upon as the top preseason projection model.
2024 ZiPS Projections: New York Yankees https://t.co/SCgbtTDYgy
— FanGraphs Baseball (@fangraphs) January 19, 2024
For those unfamiliar, MLB.com offers this synopsis of what ZiPS aims to do:
“The system uses statistics from the previous four years for players from ages 24-38, and it weights more recent seasons heavier. For younger or older players, it uses weighted statistics from only the previous three years. The system also factors velocities, injury data and play-by-play data into its equations.”
“sZymborski Projection System (ZiPS)” MLB.com
Sound interesting? Let’s do a deep dive on the 2024 Yankees ZiPS projections.
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