There are legitimate reasons to worry about the fitness of a baseball team.
You can worry about their inability to get on base, their problems fielding balls without incident or the fact that the pitching staff finds the strike zone as often as Wile E. Coyote catches the Roadrunner. Mets fans are pretty familiar with such a state of affairs.
Yankee fans of recent vintage don't have so much experience with those kinds of dire straits, which may be why people keep trying to get them to believe that there are problems where none exist. Anthony McCarron of the Daily News tries to do that on Tuesday with a concerned article about the amount of home runs the Yankees have been hitting thus far this season.
McCarron points out that the Yankees are scoring 62.3 percent of their runs via the longball, a total that has them on pace for a new season record for home runs in a season as well as a record for runs generated by homers.
At the same time, only two Yankees are hitting over .300 so it is clearly time to start worrying about whether the Yankees will be able to score runs this season on days when the ball isn't flying over the fence.
Or it would be if they didn't have a very well rounded lineup capable of doing everything you could want over the course of a season. The numbers look a bit crazy right now, but only the truly ignorant or insane believe that 14 games gives you a true read on the way an entire season is going to play out.
Brian Cashman says as much -- "We have full capabilities. We just haven't shown it yet." -- and so does history.
Remember 2009, when the whole baseball world was crying about the way the Yankees and the new stadium were ruining the game with their full-frontal assault on responsible homering?
You'll recall that year ended without any new home run records being set and with a playoff run that was marked by the Yankees finding different ways to score every single night. McCarron tries to use history a different way by citing the fact that nine of the top 14 homer-hitting teams didn't make the playoffs, but doesn't follow up on that as he should.
Those teams fell short because they couldn't do other things. The power-happy teams that did win, including the 2009 and 1961 Yankees, did so because they could do other things.
Sports
If the 2011 Yankees don't fulfill their fondest wishes, it is going to be because of their pitching not because of their preference for hitting the long ball.
You already knew that, though, so why bother wasting any more time discussing it when you can yell fire in a smokeless room?
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
