OPS w/RISP

Over at Circling the Bases, Matthew Pouliot's stat of the day yesterday was team's OPS with runners in scoring position. Overall, the Yankees ranked 18th, but in realtion to the total OPS, they had the third largest lag in the league with .53, behind only the Diamondbacks and the Nationals (those numbers have obviously changed as of today).

I think as fans, we have all at a certain point been frustrated with the Yankees' recent inabilty to get "clutch" hits and drive runners home, so I decided to try and get some historical perspective on this. 

Using Baseball-Reference, I took it all the way back to 1989 and charted the team's OPS, OPS w/runners in scoring position and winning percentage.

Here are a few things that jumped out:

• Between 1989 and 2007, there were only three years in which the team's OPS w/RISP was lower than the team's overall OPS. However, that was the case last year and is so far this season as well. Is this more than a small sample size fluke? Is it a trend developing? 
  
  
• Total OPS has a fairly strong correlation to winning percentage, with the expection of this year. 
  
  
• Take a look at the increase in total OPS from 89-94. Sure, the team was getting better winning percentage-wise, but can you think of another thing that was starting to happen throughout baseball at that time?  
  
  
• Interestingly, the 2009 Yanks have almost the exact same OPS as the 1998 team (.817 to .818), however in '98 that number with runners in scoring position was .860 compared with .793 this year.
  
  
• That .860 figure is not the highest on the list. That would be the .862 belonging to the 2002 Yankees, who scored almost 100 fewer runs that the '99 team due to a lower total OPS. 

Any other observations? 

The Jackson Report: 5/4/09

I'm certainly down with that OBP. Now how about a little more power?

Games: 19
AB: 72
Hits: 28
Average: .389
OBP: .464
SLG: .486
OPS: .950
Runs: 17
HR: 0
RBI: 12
Doubles: 3
Triples: 2
SO: 18
BB: 9
SB: 7
TB: 35