My Hypothesis About the Yankees and Player Development
- E.J. Fagan
- Aug 13
- 3 min read
By E.J. Fagan
August 6, 2025
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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission.
Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.
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We don’t know a ton about how much Michael Fishman, David Grabiner and the analytics department works, but we have heard a few things again and again about its role in player development. Basically, the Yankees are focusing too much on a few basic metrics like exit velocity for hitters, resulting with hitters who struggle to hit in the major leagues.
The latest of these was from Clint Frazier,* who has joined us in the podcast world:
*I’m always going to be a little skeptical of disgruntled former employees talking about their former bosses. I’ve also always gotten a pretty strong showboater vibe from Frazier. Take his opinion with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Now, I should note that Frazier’s time in the Yankee minor league system is basically ancient history. Things could have changed since the late 2010s. But, given how a bunch of their talented players are struggling to hit in the majors, I think that it’s worth exploring.
I have a hypothesis about the Yankees, and specifically about AGM Michael Fishman. He’s a pure math guy, with a degree in mathematics and a pre-Yankees background in fantasy baseball. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been impressed with the guy during the few times that he’s spoken in public.
I am also a math guy, but my PhD is in the social sciences. I specialize in measurement and teach PhD research methods. Unlike fields like mathematics and physics, social scientists have to contend with the complicated nature of human behavior.
One of the first things that social scientists teach students is that human behavior is reactive, meaning that by studying them we often change their behavior. A classic consequence of reactivity is Goodhart’s Law, which states that when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.
The best example of Goodhart’s Law is how standardized testing regimes lead to “teaching to the test”, where teachers and schools spend too much time optimizing students for the evaluation measure and too little time focusing on the outcome that is important: learning. Test scores improve but learning does not.
Exit velocity, barrel rate, xwOBA (or the in-house Yankee equivalents) are metrics. They correlate strongly with batted ball outcomes. Therefore, you would expect hitters with better metrics to be better hitters. There’s nothing wrong with that! In fact, the Yankees were able to pick up some useful players like Gio Urshela and Luke Voit because other teams hadn’t figured this out yet.
It might follow that you can use these metrics to guide player development. You want to get better? Do things that improve the metrics! We know that the metrics correlate with good outcomes, so things that improve the metrics must also improve the outcomes, right?
Wrong! The second that players become aware of the organizations’ criteria for success, they react to it. Maybe they sell out for more exit velocity. Maybe they develop an approach that works against not-so-great minor league pitchers but is exploitable by the best ones (or by attentive major league scouting), creating good rates on average that are unrepresentative of future results. Maybe they neglect other skills that help you win ballgames but don’t increase the metric like situation hitting.
All of the sudden, the correlation between the metric and the outcomes that you care about breaks down. Players and coaches are developing to the test, not the actually underlying outcome that you care about. Goodhart’s Law has struck again.
That’s just a hypothesis. The truth is that we in the outside world have very little information about the internal operations of the Yankees player development. But if the Yankees called me up and asked me to diagnose the cause of their player development issues (call me! I only charge $250/hr to consult), I would look there first.
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it's a reasonable hypothesis
and it reflects the traditional baseball wisdom that there are naturally gifted hitters, that they are a distinct minoritt and that a good baseball player will generally require two or three seasons of exposure to major league pitching before learning how to be a good big league hitter.
the Yankees have been known, in earlier decades, as an organization that slowly and deliberately brought prospects along before putting them on the big league roster.
there were obvious reasons for this, beginning with having a more than average supply of reasonably competent players on the 25 man roster, and, in consequence, fewer urgent needs to fill.
Thank you EJ, you proved my point that running things by analytics, and virtually ignoring tried n true real baseball things does not work. Besides Clint, there is Ben Ruta, and even David Cone who all have stated truisms publicly, each in their own way and context about the effects of putting analytics first, second, & third.
Being that I was told first hand by an Ex Yankee something very similar to what Frazier has stated, I place a level of credibility on Frazier's comments. Also, I see no motive for him to make any false statements, especially since he did not comment on the Indians, Cubs or White Sox systems, all organizations he played for, all organizations that also severed their ties with him. He singled out 1 organization, the same organization that many others have issues with over the last decade or so.