Introducing Pinstripe Alley’s 2019 Yankees season preview

Roger Angell once wrote that a simple box score has the capacity to elicit “...the same hallucinatory reality, that pickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”

Baseball, above any other sport, lends itself to storytelling. A box score tells the story of an individual game; an article highlights narratives throughout a season; a book details an entire career’s highs and lows.

Storylines have an inextricable connection to baseball, and for that reason, it makes sense to use that as the basis for our 2019 Yankees season preview. Rather than examine individual players, rehashing the material already covered in season-ending report cards, it makes for more interesting reading to cover actual stories.

Five separate stories compose this preview series. They cover the 2019 Yankees from a variety of angles. They look at the macro-level, wondering if the Yankees have the best chance to win the World Series, to the granular and specialized, such as the expectations placed on Miguel Andujar. In between, every major story surrounding the team will get explored.

For easy access, a full post tracker is included below. When a story gets published, a link here will go live.

The 2019 season is the Yankees’ best chance to win the World Series (Monday, March 18)
Aces Wild: A case for Luis Severino and James Paxton as top starters (Tuesday, March 19)
The Yankees are finally ready to unleash the Big Three on baseball (Wednesday, March 20)
Have the Yankees assembled the best bullpen in baseball history? (Thursday, March 21)
All eyes are on Miguel Andujar (Friday, March 22)

In preparing to launch the preview, I want to express my gratitude to those who put this series together. The authors, of course, deserve credit for their hard work on these long pieces. Jake Devin, Kento Mizuno, Josh Diemert, and Brett Borzelli all contributed to the collection. They logged countless hours thinking, researching, writing, and rewriting.

As editors, Caitlin Rogers and Jake painstakingly combed through the pieces, making sure they read as clearly as possible. Their hard work has spared the site from a number of embarrassing mistakes, not just in this series, but for every article they touch.

Dan Brink, Pinstripe Alley’s resident graphic designer, created the art work for the series. He may work predominantly behind the scenes, but his pieces steal the show. You have definitely seen them before.

Like Home Run or Bust, this preview series makes for an ambitious undertaking. As storytellers, we will have succeeded if we conjure up the same emotions Angell did when describing a box score. So, come on in to the stadium and find your seat. We have stories to tell.