I'm taking the over. Yanks with their pitching alone will contend all season. Bullpen by far the best in baseball and can make all games 6 inning contests if they need to.
...the effectiveness of the Yanx BP will be predicated on whether or not the starting pitching as a whole, can stay healthy and make the relievers relevant. If not, the BP may be burned up by July. ...and of course, the offense will also have to pull its weight, because the pen is more important when pitching with a lead in the late innings as opposed to being behind. ...Ellsbury and Gardner and Headley will have to improve over last year and Tex and ARod need to have numbers close to what they had last year and both avoid the injury bug. ...in a perfect storm, yeah, this team can win...but will they?...between CC, Tanaka, Nova, Eovaldi, Tex. returning from injury/surgery and whether some players will have bounce back years, not to mention some of the older players being another year older, realistically, I think there are just way too many unanswered questions.
Ellsbury needs to stay healthy, and that alone can dramatically improve the offense......Yanks also have a pretty fair hitter playing 2b this time around and should surely hope/expect Gregorius to continue to grow.......and it's NOT unreasonable to expect Headley to cut down significantly on his errors while also picking up his offense (a bit)... The kid Sanchez could very well earn the backup catcher's job and also see a few ABs on occasion at DH and display his widely regarded hitting skills........let's also keep in mind- The KC Royals' SP weren't known for going "deep" into games and I happen to believe the Yanks will ALSO have a better deeper middle relief corp than the 2015 Royals. Yanks will have a couple young pitchers with live arms fighting for middle relief - Lindgren, Pazos, Montgomery, Pinder....ect... If Arod and/or Tex go down or slow down with injury or old age I'm fairly comfortable the Yanks will have competent options within the system or quite possibly resort to a "veteran" part time stop gap option. Could be a fair chance if/when Arod goes down, Yanks move Beltran to primary DH duty and call up Judge or Ben Gamel who HAS played both corner outfield positions and has hit WELL. http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.cgi?id=gamel-001ben Heathcott/Williams are also in-house options to fill an open outfield slot if Beltran were to take over for a fading Arod or some other injury to an outfielder occurs....and also Hicks. These are not (imo) "pie in the sky" long shot "cheerleader" possibilities. I believe it's called - an organization which does have a couple of pretty decent youngsters and prospects who have shown promise at the ML level and the minor league level.
