I figured I would take you behind the curtain.

I appreciate you being a member of Sports+, and I want to give you what you cannot receive in the newspaper, which leads to this long, in-depth column that I must deliver on Monday so it is there for you on Tuesday morning.

But because of the length, it is difficult to do all the work on Monday, especially a Monday such as this week, when I was doing TV at the MLB Network during the day and then covering the Pirates-Mets game at night. So when I think of items I want to explore, I try to knock out a few parts of the column early.

So this Sunday morning, I did a deep dive into what the Yankees should do in the big picture and long term with Clay Holmes, who can be a free agent after next season.

Now, this kind of broke one of my cardinal rules. When young reporters ask for advice, one of the pieces I give is: Don’t write about relief pitching for the early edition of the paper.

The early-edition article is written before a night game begins, so the reporter is blind to any details of the game. So if, for example, you write about how great a reliever is going and he blows the game, a reader gets the paper in the morning knowing the outcome and wondering why you stupidly wrote so glowingly about a player who failed miserably. Better just to avoid.

And here I was taking several hours Sunday morning to research and write on Holmes. But he had been so good since May 6 (three runs, 34 1/3 innings, 0.78 ERA, .454 OPS against) and this was an issue I had wanted to tackle for a while. So I just hoped he either wouldn’t get into the game or, if he did, he would have a clean inning.

Which led to another rule: This is why I don’t root for anything. Because ultimately I don’t care who wins or loses. I am rooting for myself. And when you root for yourself, it becomes more stark than ever that you have absolutely no control over the outcome, so just don’t waste energy on it. Yet I was at Citi Field on Sunday afternoon and watching the play-by-play results of the ninth inning in Miami as Holmes allowed five runs and blew the game.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, I thought you might like a glimpse behind the curtain. But also because I get to explain what I don’t get to explain to people who get the early edition of the paper when I have written about someone who then went out and performed to the opposite of my tone. I am going to give you the untouched version of what I assembled because even with Sunday’s collapse, I do believe the Yankees have this big-picture issue with Holmes coming.

Thanks for joining me behind the curtain. Now on with the regular portion of the show:

Brian Cashman has been getting bashed for one bad move after another as an autopsy is underway in real time to investigate why the Yankees are heading toward their most discouraging season in three decades.

I want to concentrate on one of his better moves because it involves a player who will be part of a substantial decision the Yankees have to make, perhaps as early as this offseason.

On July 26, 2021, in a transaction that hardly demanded mention on the back page, the Yankees dealt Diego Castillo and Hoy Park to the Pirates for Clay Holmes, who in four seasons with Pittsburgh had appeared in 91 games with a combined 5.57 ERA. His ERA as a reliever in 87 games was 5.25 — the worst in Pirates history for any pitcher who had appeared that often.

The Yankees tutored Holmes to abandon his curveball and throw his terrific sinker more, and the before-and-after has been startling. In 134 games in relief for the Yankees, he has a 2.18 ERA. The only relievers in Yankees history who have appeared that often with a better ERA are Hall of Famers Mariano Rivera (2.06 ERA as a reliever) and Goose Gossage (2.14).

The one area where the Yankees have excelled in recent seasons is maximizing performance out of their pen. Ian Hamilton, Michael King and Wandy Peralta — like Holmes — were minor acquisitions who have been major relief contributors.

The Yankees could believe off of that success that they can take a good arm that specifically has one dominant pitch and transform that pitcher into a quality reliever — and thus should avoid getting into the big-money, long-term deals with bullpen pieces. The end games on long pacts did not go well, after all, with Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman.

Among the disasters that have contributed to the Yankees’ downturn this season was the decision in spring training 2019 to break general Yankees protocol and extend Aaron Hicks and Luis Severino before they reached free agency.

It could have been worse. The Yankees tried to do the same with Dellin Betances, but never really got close to a deal. Betances would hurt his shoulder near the end of that camp, then tear his Achilles in his only game that season and would never again be near the pitcher whose 2.37 ERA is fourth on that Yankees relief list behind Rivera, Gossage and Holmes.

That they are good at churning out relievers combined with lessons learned from Britton, Chapman, Hicks and Severino — and nearly Betances — could scare the Yankees away from trying to do long-term business with Holmes before his 2024 walk year.

But let’s take a step back and look at that Yankees bullpen. Peralta is a free agent after this season. He is the lone capable lefty, and the Yankees — as with lefty hitters — just have not developed lefty arms in their farm system. Is Ryan Anderson, Edgar Barclay or Matt Krook capable of taking a giant step from unknown to lead lefty? (Nick Ramirez is not a primary lefty reliever.)

So the Yankees will have to decide whether to try to retain Peralta, who has struggled with walks and against righties this season. Kenyan Middleton, who was obtained before the trade deadline, also is in his walk year.

Like Holmes, Jonathan Loaisiga will be in his walk year in 2024. He is less of a long-term candidate because of his inability to stay healthy. Tommy Kahnle will be in the second and final season of his contract. King has battled health issues and might be lining himself up to try to be a starter again. The Yankees should have Scott Effross fully healthy after Tommy John surgery, but there are always concerns about how a pitcher returns from surgery.

Albert Abreu seems to be filling the Esmil Rogers role — the Yankees holding onto an out-of-options reliever believing they could harness his big arm. The Yankees released Rogers at the trade deadline in 2015 finally convinced they couldn’t maximize him. The same probably would have happened this season with Abreu if the Yankees were able to stay close to healthy in their pitching staff. Regardless, it is hard to see him as a part of the 2024 pen, unless he becomes the pitching Joey Gallo or Josh Donaldson with this administration believing underlying metrics rather than their lying eyes.

Ron Marinaccio took a step back this season. Perhaps to work his way back into the majors, Luis Gil, who has missed this season after Tommy John surgery, can return as a hybrid reliever next season. And some of the prospect arms will fall from starting to relieving roles — with Clayton Beeter a prime candidate.

The Yankees will have to decide from all of that whether they annually will be able to construct a quality pen or whether they would be best served to have an anchor to build around. And is Holmes that anchor?

This is where we get into “whose career do you got?” in trying to find an equivalent to Holmes. I don’t think it is fellow Alabaman David Robertson, who had longevity and success (among other items, he is ninth on that all-time Yankees relief ERA list at 2.75). Robertson was a Yankees draft choice who was stellar almost immediately in the majors.

I believe a better choice is Ryan Pressly. Like Holmes, he is a righty who was obtained at the trade deadline (in 2018 by the Astros) in exchange for two non-factors. Pressly was better with the Twins than Holmes had been with the Pirates. But like Holmes would with the Yankees, he went to an advanced pitching program that changed his repertoire and increased his effectiveness: The Astros convinced Pressly to throw his slider and curve more often and his fastball less.

The result is that Pressly became an All-Star and a championship closer. Through his first 134 regular-season games as an Astro, Pressly had a 2.07 ERA in 130 2/3 innings (remember, Holmes through Saturday had pitched in 134 regular-season games as a Yankee with a 2.18 ERA).

In March 2019 — before his first full season with the Astros and prior to beginning his walk year — Pressly signed a two-year, $17.5 million extension that became three years at $27.5 million with a vesting option. He was about to begin his age-30 season. Holmes would be beginning his age-31 season next year.

Pressly had a longer runway of success going back to his Twins days and was a better strike thrower. Holmes has proven to be durable and not cowed by the New York market. He has thrown eight shutout innings in the postseason. Holmes has shown adaptability, mixing in his slider even more this season to reach by far the best strikeout percentage (29.7) of his career.

Pressly had the kind of durability, consistency and postseason excellence that the Astros extended him again before last season at two years at $30 million with a chance for it to be three years at $42 million if his 2025 option triggers. I would suspect Holmes’ camp would be seeking something more in line with this extension than with Pressly’s first extension.

Do the Yankees think that Holmes is Pressly-esque and not, say, Betances, and will they try to build their near-future pens around their current closer?

POSTSCRIPT: With the four earned runs yielded in his five-run blow-up, Holmes’ Yankee career ERA moved to 2.44. That is now sixth in team history for at least 134 games pitched in relief behind not just Rivera, Gossage and Betances, but also now Tom Gordon (2.38) and Sparky Lyle (2.41).

And, of course, I am never writing early about a reliever again.

Now that I have taken you behind the curtain, I kind of like it, so here we go again.

A daily column in the newspaper is supposed to be approximately 750 words. It has to fit in a certain space and allow room for a headline and a picture and other stories.

One complaint I see a lot from readers is a version of: “Why didn’t you include (fill in the blank) in your column?” The answer often is you cannot tell the history of the world in 750 words. It is not a lot of land, and you are trying to build the best house possible within the confines of that lot. There is just so much history, news, quotes, attempts at humor, point of view, etc. that you can shoehorn in.

The thing is, the way my brain works when it comes to baseball, 750 words is often a brief thought. I tend to overthink and over-report. The editors are nice enough to let me stretch to 800 words at times during the week (it is more on Sunday), sometimes even a bit more than that. But you get the point. Generally I want to build more house than I have land on which to construct it.

From Citi Field on Sunday, I wanted to explore something that has been rattling in my brain for a while: In a copycat league, why do teams not try to emulate the Braves?

Notably, Atlanta’s coaching staff is not filled with guys who got the job by doing social media videos on the best swing planes that they leveraged into college jobs and then catapulted to the majors with their version of a Ted Talk that just dazzled a front office constantly looking for the cutting edge. The Braves coaching staff is stuffed with former major league players who have become longtime coaches and in the case of Ron Washington and Walt Weiss are former major league managers.

Their manager, Brian Snitker, had been in the organization since 1977 before being named skipper in 2016.

The Braves don’t load-manage. Only six players had started every one of their team’s games in the field (not including DH) this season through Sunday, and four were Braves (Ronald Acuña Jr., Ozzie Albies, Matt Olson and Austin Riley) — Albies then was headed to the IL on Monday due to a hamstring strain. And of the other two (Freddie Freeman and Marcus Semien), Freeman is a former Brave who was mentioned by Weiss as someone who helped form the team’s bedrock of accountability and toughness to get on the field every day.

The word “culture” is thrown around a lot. That is culture.

The main point I was trying to drive home was not to disparage analytics. If your team is not at the vanguard of metrics, sports science, etc., I pointed out, it is very difficult to win. But if the large majority of clubs are following a similar blueprint, then it is harder to find areas to separate from the competition. “Moneyball” at its core was about finding undervalued assets. And the Braves are finding big advantages in areas that might be called “old school.”

So much of what is promoted these days — for both players and those that tutor them — are showcase events rather than games. To the same end, players are taught how to maximize individual skills such as throwing harder, hitting harder and spinning a ball with more revolutions. What is missing is the context of how to apply the individual skills better to what the moment of the game and the moment of the season is screaming is needed. An organization that does both can gain an edge. 

Anyway, there was so much more that I wanted to say in that column and, well, you know 750 words. So I figured I would use this space to offer some additional stuff that I couldn’t get to:

• Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos walked into a good situation. When he was hired in November 2017, Acuña, Albies, Freeman, Riley, William Contreras, Max Fried, A.J. Minter, Mike Soroka and Kyle Wright (among others) already were in the organization.

But this regime clearly has made it better through whatever tactics — kindness, cajoling or strong-arming — they use to get players signed to team-friendly long-term deals. There are advantages that the Braves have that, say, the New York teams don’t, including a low state tax in Georgia and a less stressful environment on and off the field.

Anthopoulos also has made crafty moves. The Braves are never looked to as a model farm system, yet they bring helpful (or better) players through regularly: Michael Harris and Spencer Strider finished 1-2 in the NL Rookie of the Year last season, and Bryce Elder became a regular starter this year. And they have what is available to make trades.

Consider that in Oakland’s teardown, no club did better than the Braves. The Mets did well to turn two so far negligible prospects into one year of Chris Bassitt. The Yankees disastrously turned four prospects into Frankie Montas and Lou Trivino, whose extra value was they were under team control for this season as well (except neither has pitched an inning this season).

The first offseason the Yankees doubled down on Anthony Rizzo, the Braves traded four prospects (none of whom has yet bitten them) for Olson. Last offseason, despite having a strong catching combo of Contreras and Travis d’Arnaud, they included Contreras, Manny Pina and four more prospects yet to bite them in a trade for Sean Murphy. The Yankees stuck with the strong defensive duo of Jose Trevino and Kyle Higashioka rather than, say, boldly combine Trevino with top prospects to get the biggest kind of difference-maker you can have in the game — an elite two-way catcher such as Murphy.

Murphy leads all catchers in Wins Above Replacement (Fangraphs). Olson is second among first basemen to the player he replaced, Freeman.

• Which reminds us that the Braves are willing to move on from players. They won a championship in 2021 with Freeman and shortstop Dansby Swanson as vital core pieces. When the prices reached where they did not want to go, Atlanta let both leave in free agency. The Braves nevertheless are en route to a sixth straight NL East title with the best record in the majors.

Again, to use the Yankees as a counter-example, they didn’t win a championship, but would not let older players such as Rizzo and DJ LeMahieu go out the door. And when it came to shortstop, among other items, they took on Donaldson’s onerous contract to misread that Isiah Kiner-Falefa could handle shortstop in New York.

The Braves made a minor trade with the Brewers at the outset of the 2021 season to get Orlando Arcia as a utility infielder, a role he particularly handled well last season. Still, when spring training began, the expectation was a prospect such as Vaughn Grissom or Brendan Shewmake was going to replace Swanson.

But as Weiss told me, Arcia offered a certainty the Braves had with Swanson: someone who definitely could field the position at a high level. And the Braves saw upside in his bat, plus he was entering his age-28 season and in his background was being among the top prospects in the game. He has rewarded the Braves with an All-Star season in which he has played excellent defense, as expected, and hit way better than anticipated.

• The Braves are not alone in the NL East in doing things in a way that does not fit the current mainstream. The Mets also have to contend with the Phillies.

I have listened for years to many of the cool kids who help run organizations criticize Dave Dombrowski for several things, including that he gets owners to spend and then leaves places in shambles when he departs and that he ignores analytics. But even if that were all true: There is an art in getting owners to spend. How quickly would the Angels and White Sox, for example, sign up for a few years of shambles to also have a few years of winning.

And for what it is worth about the shambles, Dombrowski during his Red Sox tenure brought in Brayan Bello, Triston Casas, Kutter Crawford, Jaren Duran and Tanner Houck — and did not trade them in attempts to win.

The modern belief about team-building is to be open to anything because the key to winning is either to score more or give up less. No doubt. Got it. Terrific overall philosophy.

But Dombrowski is a literalist. He goes after (and generally gets) what he needs. At the trade deadline last year, his Phillies badly needed to improve their defense, which Dombrowski accomplished by adding Brandon Marsh and Edmundo Sosa. He wanted to improve rotation depth this year and as many contenders said the price was just too high, the Phillies obtained Michael Lorenzen, who in his first two Phillies starts allowed two runs in 17 innings, including a no-hitter.

And Dombrowski accomplished that with what is generally perceived as not a strong farm system. He did it by acting boldly and definitively — like Anthopoulos acts with the Braves.

This is not the common way decision making is done now. But it is effective for these two organizations. And the Mets have to compete against it.

We haven’t tackled Manager of the Year here all season. I usually don’t put much stock in it because it usually is a narrative honor going to the manager of the team that outplayed its preseason predictions by the most.

What the award never acknowledges is simply who manages best. It is much harder to know what decisions were available over a course of a season and how many times a manager picked the right personnel and strategy.

My sense is that Milwaukee’s Craig Counsell does the most with personnel and strategy every season, yet he has never won the award, finishing second three times.

Check the narrative for those runner-up years: In 2018, Counsell finished behind Atlanta’s Brian Snitker, whose club did the flip-flop from 72-90 in 2017 to 90-72 and the NL East crown. In 2019, Mike Shildt, in his first full year on the job with the Cardinals, won the NL Central over Counsell’s Brewers after missing the playoffs the previous season. Counsell actually received more first-place votes, but didn’t win. In 2021, Gabe Kapler’s Giants won a franchise-record 107 games.

For AL Manager of the Year this season, there will be two strong competing narratives with Baltimore’s Brandon Hyde and Texas’ Bruce Bochy. Neither franchise has made the playoffs since 2016.

Hyde oversaw the worst team in the majors (nobody tell John Angelos I wrote that) in his first three Orioles seasons from 2019-21 — they were a combined 122 games under .500. When Baltimore rose to 83-79 in 2022, Hyde finished as the AL Manager of the Year runner-up (narrative). 

This season, the Orioles have the AL’s best record, perhaps a year ahead of schedule for being not just contenders, but high-end contenders.

The AL’s second-best record belongs to the Rangers, who hired Bochy in the midst of spending big to speed up contention. Bochy has managed in four World Series and won three, yet his only Manager of the Year came in a non-pennant season with the 1996 Padres, who went from under .500 to division champs (narrative). 

Bochy has the 10th-most wins in MLB history, and almost certainly is headed to Cooperstown.

I actually think the manager with the seventh-most wins, Houston’s Dusty Baker, should be in play here also. But the narrative is going to work against him. His team won the World Series last year, so it is coming from the top, not the bottom. But considering all the injuries incurred by the Astros and their continued success, Baker should be a consideration for the award.

Tampa Bay’s Osleivis Basabe made his major league debut Sunday. That brought the total to 1,345 players who appeared in a major league game in 2023 through the weekend.

To look at the upward trajectory of that number is to recognize how much more teams use the injured list and shuffle players than in a prior age. In 1998, the first year of 30 teams, there were 1,186 players used all season — and remember that was when after Sept. 1 rosters could expand to include as many members of a 40-man roster as a team wanted to promote.

Twenty seasons ago, in 2003, the season ended with 1,230 players used; in 2013, it was 1,304. Excluding the 60-game pandemic season of 2020, there was a new record total every year from 2013 through 2021, when it was 1,508. It dropped to 1,495 last season.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Yankees not being good with runners in scoring position. And they are not good with runners in scoring position.

But the bigger problem is that they don’t have enough runners in scoring position. If they were even league-average in getting runners to scoring position, they would have more runs and more wins. 

But they completed the weekend with 984 plate appearances with runners in scoring position. That not only was last, it was 158 fewer than the next-to-last White Sox. 

Among the many problems with the club, the Yankees don’t hit doubles. They had a major league-low 153 (the Mets were next worst at 158). LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres shared the team lead with 18, which tied for 110th in the majors. The Rangers had eight players with at least 18 doubles.