The Yankees just swept a team in fourth place in their division and outside of playoff contention. They’ll look to do that once again early next week. While all of this is true, a run of games against the St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays is as good a moment as any to stress the importance of context, regardless of whether you’re going to be facing two teams with similar records in similar spots.

It would be easy to simply point to the Pythagorean win-loss record of these two clubs, the Cardinals at 59-65 and the Rays at 67-57, in order to argue who is clearly the superior team, but we won’t do that. Yankee fans know better than anyone else this season about the dangers of a binary approach to the whole Pythagorean win-loss/actual win-loss record.

It all starts with starting pitchin

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