Is the Yankees’ homer problem really a problem?

The way I’ve seen fans and media tell it, the Yankees are killing themselves by hitting too many home runs. That is, too often they’ve done the best thing any batter can do at the plate. There are, in fact, not one, but two articles in the Daily News this morning (by Mark Feinsand and Christian Red) lamenting this very woe.

That all sounds very silly. The Yankees have hit a lot of home runs this year, and it has led to one of the top offenses in the league. Yet, for some reason, the preponderance of home runs is a bad thing. I suppose that’s because they’re not going to maintain their current pace, which is for 324 home runs. When the home runs stop flowing, the logic goes, the Yankees will face trouble scoring runs. Yet this blatantly ignores what we’ve all learned from years of watching baseball.

The team you see on the field will change in the course of the next few months. The players might remain the same, though there’s a good chance we’ll see changes there, too. But the manner in which the team plays will always be changing. As they say, the team they field in April isn’t the same as the team they’ll field in July. That’s because hitters go through fits and starts, peaks and valleys, slumps and streaks. Yes, their home run pace will slacken. But the concern over the team seems to ignore that other aspects will get better.

For an illustration of this point, we can turn to SG of Replacement Level, who looked at the Yankees’ BABIP and xBABIP to this point. Unsurprisingly, the actual team BABIP, .243, is considerably lower than what one would expect given the team’s batted ball profiles. Their xBABIP sits at .322. So while the home runs trend downward, the Yankees’ other hits will trend upward. Then they’ll start scoring runs with singles and doubles in addition to the homers.

We don’t even need to delve into advanced statistics to prove this point. To be worried that the Yankees rely too much on the homer is to worry that Curtis Granderson will OBP .250 on the season, that Nick Swisher will continue hitting .219/.289/.250, that Mark Teixeira won’t heat up as the weather does, that Brett Gardner had the flukiest of fluky years in 2010, that Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter are completely cooked. Maybe one of those things is true, but I even doubt that. Streaks and slumps happen. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the season they’re a bit more noticeable and too much ends up being made of them.

This type of thing happens every year. At some point people say that the Yankees don’t do this, or the Yankees don’t do that. Maybe it’s true for that moment in time. But as the season progresses the team changes. Players who slump early start to streak. Guys who hit a ton of homers might cool down, but that doesn’t mean they become unproductive. It’s just that some of those homers stay in the park — which means some go for doubles instead. The Yankees offense as a whole, though, will be just fine. To think otherwise is to ignore years of experience watching a 162-game season unfold.