Murderers' Row, Part II?

Adding A-Rod, Sheffield could put 2004 Yankees in elite company

By Jacob Luft, SI.com

Joe Morgan's Big Red Machine set the modern standard. Tony Triolo/SI Top Lineups of All Time Rk Team Year RCAA 1 Yankees 1930 344 2 Yankees 1927 338 3 Yankees 1931 298 4 Yankees 1939 289 5 Yankees 1936 287 6 Yankees 1932 279 7 Yankees 1928 275 8 Reds 1976 273 9 Yankees 1933 253 10 Athletics 1933 225 RCAA: Runs Created Above Average

Adding Alex Rodriguez would do wonders for any lineup, in terms of perception and production. For the Yankees, it has vaulted their already stout collection of sluggers into potentially historical status. Murderers' Row, here we go again.

Casual fans and pundits everywhere are wondering: Is the 2004 Yankees lineup the best of all time?

To answer that, we need to first figure out what the best lineups -- top to bottom -- are in baseball history. But how should we do that?

Going strictly by the traditional statistics -- runs, home runs, batting average -- is not reliable because of the vast differences in style of play from era to era. A .301 batting average in 1930 means you were just average. A .301 average in 1968 won Carl Yastrzemski a batting title.

Surely, in these enlightened times, we can find a plausible way of determining the best lineups of all time. This is where Lee Sinins' Sabermetric Encyclopedia comes in. Sinins has come up with a statistic called "Runs Created Above Average." It breaks down how a player is valued by determining how many more runs he adds to his team than does the average player. It takes into account the ballpark he plays in and the level of offense in the league that year.

RCAA also detracts runs for subpar players, which makes it a good tool to measure the value of a lineup from top to bottom. For example, the 1999 Indians were one of only seven teams to score 1,000 runs in a season. But taken as a whole, they do not rank anywhere near the top of the all-time list in RCAA because they had Enrique Wilson (hello, Yankees?) dragging them down with a minus-21 and Einar Diaz posting a minus-16.

Now, the top-10 list of all time is a little boring because it consists almost entirely of the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig-Joe DiMaggio Yankees of the 1920s-'30s. Even after accounting for the high level of offense in that era, those lineups truly were the best of all time. There is just no getting around that.

No matter how much destruction A-Rod's Yankees rain down on the American League, it is highly doubtful they can crack the top 10. Since we're in the 21st century, we need a more modern frame of reference. Let's look at the top 10 teams in RCAA since 1969, the year divisional play began and the mound was lowered.

It's the Big Red Machine and everybody else. Last season, the Braves led the NL in nearly every offensive category but still fell 70 runs behind the 1976 Reds. Much like the 1927 Murderers' Row Yankees were for the first half of the century, the '76 Reds should be the benchmark for teams in the past 50 years.

If you add up the three-year averages for the nine Yankees' regulars, it comes out to an RCAA of 264. Gary Sheffield's hefty average of 56.6 replaces Karim Garcia's mighty contribution of 0.6. Replacing Alfonso Soriano with A-Rod brings a net gain of 42. But reserves and injury replacements should take about 30-40 runs away from that total, so we are looking at a best-case scenario somewhere in the 230 range.

The 2004 Yankees aren't quite the Big Red Machine, but they're close. In any case, they'll have more than enough firepower to lay waste to AL pitchers this season.