It’s a baseball truism that you can’t win a division in April, but you can lose one. Well, the fact that April’s in the rearview mirror notwithstanding, the dynamics of MLB’s pandemic-shortened 60-game season will test baseball’s conventional wisdom to the extreme.
Looking at the quality of the Yankees’ competition based on FanGraphs’ updated projected standings, the first half of the season stacks up to be a relative crucible. Over the first 30 games, the collective projected winning percentage of the Yankees’ opponents is .514. In the final 30 games, that drops precipitously to .