It's been a decent if unspectacular 1st half and now that the Yankees have come down to Earth it hopefully won't be a repeat of last season where we could never catch them and spent the entire second half looking to the wild card game.
We actually have the best record in baseball as the only team (just barely) above .600 as nobody has really dominated in the early going.
The offensive numbers are quite good as usual and we did have to suffer the better part of the month without reigning AL MVP Jesus Avalos. The pitching is decent but not great outside of Dave Rose and maybe Brad Villarreal, but we're making it work. The defense is typically subpar but not quite as bad as it's been in some other years. Barela at 3B is killing us in the field but we've been trying to get Lee and his 60 glove in the lineup and play Barela at 1B or DH while we can and Chinchilla and Alex Brown are plus defenders in the middle. The OF defense is shaky as J.Avalos is not a great CF but neither are Lozada or E.Avalos.
It's a measure of how great Jesus Avalos is that he missed about a month and still is far and away tops in WAR on the team. Jose Lozada has been our unsung hero at the plate with a lot of key hits of late, and you can make the argument that Lee should be playing 3B every day with Barela on the bench as he has better numbers offensively and defensively. I would point out though that most of Lee's ABs have been against LHP which he crushes so I doubt his slash line would look this good with a steady diet of RHP. But I can't ignore Barela down there at 0.2 WAR and now that he hit his milestone homer I will be phasing him out some. One thing that's helped us is that we've gotten good contributions from the bench in Lee, Machado and Whittaker in particular. Even the seldom-used Tsujimura is slugging .600.
There is a fair amount to like on the staff. Dave Rose is Dave Rose of course, and Melvin Lopez has been a godsend since being claimed on waivers (although I don't expect that .253 BABIP to hold up with our mediocre D). The bullpen has been largely very good with our back-end guys in particular thriving so the rebuild there has been a success. I'm not sold on Tim Johnson, and if we can trade for one more quality starter I'd feel better.
It's a bit top-heavy but this is the best shape our farm system has been in quite some time, ranked third overall by BNN. Of course we have two top-10 prospects in potential two-way guy Samuels, whose future really lies in his bat, and Whitaker, who is an ace in the making and might help us down the stretch. Mattila was the guy I thought would help this year but he's on the shelf for the rest of the year with shoulder inflammation. Clarke meanwhile has turned into a steal in the 6th round of this year's draft and is already considered a top-100 prospect with 50/70/70 potential. And down there at 9th and 299 overall is Rodriguez, who could be our CF before long (he's an elite defender at the position already and has a decent 60/50 potential bat that he's not that far from).