A caller broached the topic of whether the Yankees have been confirmed to be overachievers amid their July swoon after lukewarm expectations before the season began, and BT surprisingly had some agreements with the caller’s sentiments.
“I think the Yankees’ start was almost a disservice to the expectations from fans because that’s not really who they were,” BT said during Thursday’s show. “I ever really thought that they were special.
“It was fun, and they were dominating, but I always thought there was going to be a resetting of how we evaluated them.”
But BT did have some pushback on the idea that the Yankees are blatant overachievers, especially since some fixtures in the lineup are arguably underachieving based on their career norms.
“If you could rattle off like five Yankees that statistically overachieved and those numbers would kind of regress to the mean, I would say the Yankees are a paper team,” BT said. “The Yankees have obvious flaws. The Astros have a better team…but has Rizzo overachieved? He’s hitting .230. Gallo? Hicks? You want to tell me Cortes? Maybe. I would say early Taillon was obviously an overachievement….but where is the statistical overachievement? There really is none, which tells you what you see with this Yankee team is real, and they have to add to it, and then they’ll be fine. They’ll have a chance.”
Tiki pushed back on the caller’s take that Aaron Judge was one of the Yankees’ overachievers, and that his MVP-caliber season is status quo to his typical production when he’s healthy.
S”tart from his rookie season when he hit 52 home runs,” Tiki said. “If he had been healthy these last six years, would this be seen as an overachievement or just the natural growth of a superstar? To me, it’s just the natural growth of a superstar.”
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