Thursday, December 31, 2015

2016 is a Leap Year & the New York Yankees


If you didn't know the year 2016 is going to be a bit of a special one. It's Leap Year where every four years, basically, we have 366 days in our year instead of 365 days like in a traditional year. The reasoning behind this is because, and you can Google the exact numbers if you'd like but for the purposes of this post they are really just irrelevant, the year on the calendar is roughly 365 days and five hours and change. If we didn't do the leap year the calendar would simply get farther and farther behind the longer the timeline. Anyway, I said all that to say this. It's Leap Year, what does that mean for the New York Yankees?

Well if history is any indicator of the future the 2016 season may be a good one for the New York Yankees. In recent memory, recent memory being any year I have been alive, we have seen a leap year in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. How did the Yankees fare in those seasons?

Let's ignore the 1988 Yankees. They finished with just an 85-76 record and finished in 5th place within the AL East Division. They were terrible and George Steinbrenner was just about to be suspended. Billy Martin and Lou Piniella were the managers and the team was stocked full of talent including Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson. It just didn't work out.

The 1992 Yankees is the team that started to show the fans some glimmer of hope. Buck Showalter was the manager, Bernie Williams was coming through the system, J.T. Snow was showing promise and the team looked like they far outplayed their 76 victory season.

In 1996 and 2000 the Yankees won the World Series. During the 2004 season there was a strike and the rest of the ALCS and World Series was cancelled despite the Yankees being up 3-0 over the Boston Red Sox an the Yankees missed the playoffs completely in 2008. This was the first time the Yankees had missed the postseason since the 1994 strike-shortened season. The 2012 Yankees made it all the way to the ALCS before Derek Jeter broke his ankle and the Yankees were swept away by the Detroit Tigers.

In closing the Leap Year Yankees is a very mixed bag of results here. The team could miss the playoffs entirely, suffer devastating and historic losses in the playoffs, or win the World Series. Nobody knows, that's why we play the games.

Disclaimer. The Yankees could go out and lose 162 games next season. They could also win 100, this post was for fun and hopefully you all treat is as such. Thank you. 

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Sorry for the Capatcha... Blame the Russians :)