(Something about the Yankee bullpen pitching five scoreless innings, the grittiness of Brett Gardner’s sliding into first base starting that five run eighth inning rally, and why you should never hang “Mission Accomplished” banners)

(Nolan’s only sad because Swisher decided to bunt.)

(Or what happens when you use so many pitchers in the bottom of the eighth and your best one never makes an appearance!)

Images via Fangraphs and Reuters. A more serious post in the morning. Maybe.

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Two things:

1) Today’s loss is as much on the offense leaving the bases loaded with no one out and not scoring as it is on the bullpen, and

2) This is NOT a post about what ails Joba.

This is a post about whether Joba, as he is pitching right now, should be pitching the eighth inning in high leverage spots.

If you’re reading this, you probably know what happened: AJ Burnett pitched six and two-thirds innings of shut out baseball, and the Yankees took a 1-0 lead in the eighth, where Joba subsequently went IMPLODE!, and the Yankee offense couldn’t score for Mariano or D-Rob before Chan Ho Park did the whole Chan D’oh Park thing.

Ultimately, the crucial point of the game occurred late in the game, as the Yankees looked to hold on to their 1-0 lead.

Now, we can rehash the leverage argument–use your best pitcher in the highest leverage situations–all we want, and argue that maybe Mariano could have pitched the eighth inning and let Joba face the bottom of the lineup in the ninth, but that said look at the hitters Joba faced in the eighth (John Buck led off the ninth inning, so go from there).

Guys that are hitting .205 and .192 should not reach base period, if you are your team’s eighth inning guy.

I get that pitchers slump, have good outings and bad outings, but ask yourself this: Game 7 of the World Series, in 1-0 game the Yankees are winning, who’s coming on to pitch the eighth inning?

If we set aside for the minute the answer that “it’s probably Mariano, with everything on the line and nothing to lose”, then the answer right now becomes Joba.

So tell me, are you comfortable, in that situation, with Chamberlain on the mound?

I’m sure you remember the spectacular implosions of four or five runs against Boston and Cleveland, but what happens if we go saber about the whole things?

One thing we can look at is a player’s WPA, which is simply the probability that a player adds to his team’s chance of winning that game. Positive is good, negative is bad. Fairly simple concept even if the calculation is somewhat complex.

If we look at Joba’s game logs, we see that, prior to day, Joba had a negative WPA in 8 of 34 games.

That is, just over a quarter of all of Joba’s appearances have negatively affected the game’s outcome for the Yankees.

Joba’s not the only pitcher with a string of negative WPA marks–for example, David Robertson has 10 in 27 games, which is also very not good, but whereas Robertson’s negative WPA averages -0.069, Joba’s averages -0.195. In plain English, when Joba fails, he fails worse.

Of course, since Joba generally pitches later in the game, which often involves higher leverage situations, his failures would more adversely affect the outcome of the game than pitching poorly in a low leverage situation in the sixth inning, but I digress.

How confident are you if the pitcher on the mound is actually hurting the team in a quarter of all of his appearances?

Another way to look at it: In , batters are hitting .317/.356/.488 /.843 against Joba, and if you do that over the course of a season, you’re probably getting some votes for the All Star team unless you play the same position as Pujols or Jeter.

You will perhaps notice that Joba actually walks more in low leverage situations, but don’t be fooled: the more runners you put on base, the more likely that low leverage situation will become a self made high leverage situation.

Well, you say, if not Joba in the eighth inning, then who?

I’ll go back to the oft-repeated argument that high leverage = best pitcher and stick to that–if the eighth inning is the most crucial part of your game thus far, use Mariano if you’ve got him, because the ninth doesn’t matter if you can’t get through the eighth first. If the eighth inning is not that crucial high leverage situation, and you can afford to live with Joba’s nibbling, such as it may be, then fine, go ahead–but once the low leverage becomes high leverage, it looks like it becomes a roll of the dice.

Like every Yankee fan, I wish I could tell you how to fix Joba. I can’t. I can only hope, then, that somehow, by the time September and October roll around, we’ll be able to look back at this post, and laugh, in the good way.

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“I’ll take ill-advised logic for $500, Alex”

Argument: Skipping one of Hughes’ starts was a bad idea.

Supporting evidence: Look at what happened to Joba!

*****

Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes are not the same person. Both debuted in 2007, both are roughly the same age, and both are Yankees, but in terms of almost everything else, Joba is Joba and Hughes is Hughes.

Arguing that the Yankees’ poor handling of the Chamberlain situation last year automatically means that Hughes is screwed for this season is faulty at best. It’s like saying that just because you had one bad meal at that fancy restaurant, all other meals are also going to be bad.

The problem with Joba, as it seemed to be, was two-fold: 1) he never really ‘got going’ in the first half and was marred by inefficiency, and more importantly, 2) the Yankees changed their plan as they went along, which ultimately does no one any favors.

Hughes, on the other hand, has for the most part been pitching well, and thus far, the Yankees seem to have a plan in mind and are sticking to it. If they didn’t learn from last season that changing a plan halfway through ain’t the world’s greatest idea, then there may be an issue, but normally teams that can’t handle developing a pitching staff don’t win World Series.

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The last time I ever had to leave a Yankee game early, they were up by a large margin and I remarked to my friend, “well, if the Yankees blow this lead, I don’t particularly want to see it.”

I was reminded of this incident today.

I’ll keep it simple.

1) The game story, as explained by WPA, courtesy Fangraphs.

2) Prayers are with David Huff, who took an A-Rod double off of his head. Fortunately, word has it that he never lost consciousness, and his CT scan was negative. His family was in attendance at the game. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how dangerous this game can be…

3) CC Sabathia, via tweets from JMK and OSingh91, respectively:

CC currently sporting a career high in FIP, career low in BABIP, contact rate at 79%, high in HR/FB, less than 7 K/9. Career low in fastball velocity.

Wow, a career high in 2-seamers says Pitch f/x (18.1%, career 3.0%, but only 4 yrs of data). Explains low K’s and high FIP.

I mentioned that maybe CC’s heavy workload the past two years is coming home to roost. I hope it’s not the case, but no human being (except maybe old Hoss) can really pitch that many innings that often without having issues.

3) Joba Chamberlain

Needs to not be pitching in high leverage situations.

Last five games: 5 IP, 11 H, 11 R, 10 ER, 3 BB, 6 K.

What’s worse? His numbers in high leverage situations: Opponents are hitting .308/.357/.462/.819, which is very much not what you want from your set-up man. It’s the anti-what-Hughes-did in 2009.

4) Joe Girardi

This shouldn’t be entirely on him, because CC and Joba should have been able to do their jobs, but I don’t really understand removing Mitre after facing just one batter and even less removing Damaso Marte after he got the second out of the inning.

As Jay Jaffe tweeted, the Yankees do not have a shut-down non-closer, healthy RHP in the bullpen right now. That’s, um, not good.

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Javier Vazquez–yes, that Javier Vazquez–pitched awesome tonight.

There’s no other way around it. Through six innings he had just 70 pitches; he walked two, struck out six and allowed just one it.

The Mets may have been struggling, but Vazquez really was that good tonight.

The problem, however, was that he was kicking rear ends and taking names against the Mets, at Citifield, which means that NL rules apply, which means that he, as the pitcher, had to bat, which, in turn, means that he, as a Yankee pitcher, had to get hurt in doing so.

The diagnosis: bruised right index finger–yeah, that means the pitching hand.

Fortunately, the X-Rays came back negative, so no broken finger, but the last thing the Yankees really needed here was another injury.

It’s not the first time an American League team has lost a pitcher due to injury while batting in the National League, and it probably won’t be the last.

****

Congratulations ought to go to Kevin Russo, who had himself a game: his first major league hit, and then his first major league extra base hit, which also happened to be the only RBI hit of the game for the Yankees.

Let’s not talk about how the Yankees, in other innings, had runners on second and third with less than two out and could not score a run. Such things are depressing.

Happier things: Joba seemed to right himself, and Mariano was (mostly) his old self–though apparently Jason Bay stole his secret sauce.

Anyway, the Red Sox have lost and as this is being written, the Rays and Jays are also losing. The Yankees will send Phil Hughes out on the mound tomorrow, and go for the series win.

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A baseball team cannot blow eighth inning leads three games in a row and expect to win the majority of those games. It cannot.

If CC Sabathia pitches your team seven innings of one run ball, and your team has scored five runs, there is utterly no reason that that game should be lost.

You can argue whether or not Cervelli should have bunted (he shouldn’t), whether Winn should have been pinch hit for (not a possibility because Posada and Swisher are still too hurt), or the merits of Thames playing in the outfield (he shouldn’t, but again, not really any other option), but tonight’s game came down to one thing:

Joba failed.

A set-up man handed a 5-1 lead in the eighth inning needs to leave that inning with the lead. End of story.

However, tonight, the second time in three games, Chamberlain could not get the job done. You can argue that Girardi should have removed Chamberlain earlier, but with the bullpen, in Girardi’s words, “a mess”, Chamberlain really did need to get the job done. He did not.

You can argue the leverage argument–that once the game got to 5-4, Rivera should have made an appearance, but rushing Rivera to get ready on a rainy night in the forties in May is also not necessarily the best course of action.

@leokitty kindly offers us this clue as to maybe why Chamberlain could not get the job done tonight.

I’m no pitching expert, so I can’t tell you what he should have thrown, but half of the pitching battle is (supposedly) that the hitters don’t actually know what’s coming. With Joba, you don’t necessarily have to guess.

So yes, once the ninth inning played out as it did, Marcus Thames should have caught the baseball, the umpires should have called a strike, Cervelli should have not bunted because Robbie Canó was already at second base and Cisco’s got some great RISP numbers, and Randy Winn swung at ball four twice, but NONE of that matters if the Yankees actually manage to hang onto a four run lead in the ninth inning.

Last year, we made fun of the Phillies (and the year before, the Mets) for bullpens that weren’t getting the job done. I know the Yankee bullpen has been overworked, but when Sabathia gives you seven and your two best relievers are available, you have to find a way to win that game.

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I know games started by Sergio Mitre are not generally considered winnable, but tonight’s game was.

In the eighth inning, especially, when the Yankees had the bases loaded with no one out, they looked poised to at least tie the game, if not take the lead.

No, your pitching staff giving up five earned runs is not a good thing, but that said, it’s not the abhorrent blowout that last night was. When you have an offense like the Yankees, and you’re facing an emergency starter and the rest of that team’s bullpen, five runs should not be Mt. Olympus.

There is one glaring stat from tonight, however:

Randy Winn left seven men on base.

I know Randy Winn is not Curtis Granderson, and until he returns the Yankees are in a bit of a spot, but anyone who’s played on San Francisco’s offense (except, perhaps Pablo Sandoval) in the past three seasons can’t really be expected to put up tremendous numbers.

That said, in the eighth inning, Winn didn’t have to get a hit. All he had to do for the Yankees to tie the game was hit the ball out of the infield–or even to the right spot on the ground.

He did not do that. Instead, he popped out and advanced no runner.

****

However, some happy thoughts:

David Robertson easily had his best outing in a long time–if not all season. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of him being able to turn it around, and be something like the pitcher he was last season.

The gun had Joba Chamberlain hitting 98–98!–and while it’s tempting to say that the gun was on some sort of juice, the way the Tigers struck out in the bottom of the 8th reminds one of the phenom that burst on the scene in 2007.

(I’m too tired to mention anything about Joba and rotation, but if Javy Vazquez continues tomorrow, I might have to).

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[This is going to be a very odd juxtaposition given my last post, and some of you may even accuse me of treason, of a sort, but the question did arise, and after giving some thought to it, it's a point that needs to be discussed]

Today’s inevitable Joba/Hughes debate, and the resulting arguments, one might come to realize, beg a question that’s much larger than who is the Yankees’ fifth starter in 2010.

The question:

Can the Yankees develop, successfully, a starting pitcher?

The answer, one that I’ve avoided very often, is that it’s been a very, very long time.

Since Andy Pettitte came through the system in the mid-90s, what starting pitcher has come up through the Yankees system, you are hard pressed to find a pitcher who came up through that same farm system and went on to have sustained success with the Yankees.

If you think about it, almost every 1-4 Yankee starter over the past decade, with very rare exception, from David Wells and David Cone to CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett, have come to the team via another team, whether it be trade or free agency.

The Yankees have developed pitchers in that time–but none that’s had any sustained success.

The closest we can come is probably Chien Ming Wang, who pitched great for a couple years before hurting his foot in Houston, effectively ending his career as a Yankee. It should be worth noting here that it might have not been the actual foot injury, per se, that derailed his career, but rather his rushed return.

The Yankees, in recent seasons, have not been without their prospects.

Let’s take a look at the prospect list presented in the 2007 Baseball America Prospect Handbook and see how it breaks down, pitchers in bold:

2007:
Phil Hughes
Jose Tabata
Humberto Sanchez
Dellin Betances
Joba Chamberlain
Ian Kennedy
Tyler Clippard
J. B. Cox
Kevin Whelan
Brett Gardner
Marcos Vechionacci
Jeff Marquez
Eric Duncan
Chris Garcia
Mark Melancon
Alan Horne
Angel Reyes
Austin Jackson
Chase Wright
George Kontos
Jesus Montero
Steven White
TJ Beam
Zach McAllister
Colin Curtis
Jeff Karstens
Josue Calzado
Bronson Sardinha
Tim Norton
Dan McCutchen

Of that list, Hughes, Chamberlain, Betances, Sanchez, Whelan, Garcia, Melancon, Horne, Kontos, and McAllister remain in the Yankees’ system.

Sanchez, Garcia and Horne have injuries almost on cue annually; Kontos is just coming off Tommy John and Melancon is strictly a reliever.

That leaves Hughes, Chamberlain, Betances and McAllister as remaining pitchers who were in the Yankees system in 2007, and remain with the Yankees as starters; Betances and McAllister have not pitched on a Major League level yet, though I believe it’s assumed McAllister will debut at some point this season.

While both Hughes and Chamberlain have had success out of the bullpen, the closest either has had to real success in the rotation is the way Hughes pitched in the rotation just before the Yankees rushed Wang back and shuttled Hughes back to the bullpen. Neither has had what we could consider sustained success as a starter; though it’s not for lack of trying with Joba, but with the exception of a week after the All Star break in 2009, his starts have generally been marred by high pitch counts and nibbling. The same kind of nibbling that got Mussina pulled from the rotation in 2007.

Now, of course, most prospects do not become superstars and it’d be erroneous of us to expect that. There are a number of teams that don’t have a solid #2 starter–heck, the Dodgers earlier named Vicente Padilla their Opening Day starter, so by this measure the Yankees shouldn’t have any reason to complain, right?

Not so fast.

There was a reason, in the mid 2000s, that the Yankees kept signing the high-priced free agents, or trading for the old(er) stars, such as Randy Johnson: the Yankees did not have the farm to be self-sufficient.

In the ideal world, of course, a team’s farm system is so stocked that they don’t need to make trades or sign free agents; but do so only because it takes their team say, from an 89 win team to a 95 win team–the crucial difference between playing in October or watching football on TV.

The Yankees, however, needed to make those trades and sign those free agents just to be competitive enough to make the postseason.

The year they didn’t do it–2008–is, not coincidentally, the year they missed the playoffs.

Around 2006, it’s widely considered that the Yankees began to draft decently, again, taking Chamberlain/Kennedy, among others (Hughes had been drafted in 2004, my error)

It takes time to see results, and it may be a while before we see the results of the 2008 and 2009 drafts, but, as one commenter on River Ave Blues phrased it, the current brain trust has yet to produce one pitcher who has come up through the Yankee farm system and gone on to have sustained success with the team.

It’s widely believed that Hughes and/or Chamberlain will go on to do this, but that is contingent on two things:

1) that they remain healthy–original injuries are not the fault of the brain trust, but injuries that occur as the result of rushing a pitcher through rehab or over use are (at least in part), and

2) that the shuttling of the pitchers between the rotation and the bullpen stops. Just, stops. They have to decide if Hughes and Joba are starters, and then commit to it. The point is fast approaching where Hughes and Joba will simply be too old to go back and forth between the two positions.

****

One commenter phrased it thus: where would the Yankees be had CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett not been available as free agents after the 2008 season?

One can, of course, argue that all of the Yankee moves starting in the 2007 off-season were predicated on the likelihood of Sabathia, at least, being available, but there was never any set-in-stone guarantee, nor was there a guarantee Pettitte would come back for one more year in 2009, or that his arm would not fall off.

In that sense, the Yankees ended up being the luckiest of all teams, because both Sabathia and Burnett decided they wanted to play for the Yankees.

****

The fact, however, remains that we’re still waiting for the Yankees to develop a successful starter. Maybe it will be Hughes.

We have to hope it will be, anyway.

A successful team isn’t the team that wins the World Series one year; it’s the team that can remain a contender every single year, not just because they have money, but because they can successfully manage all levels of their organization. They’re the team that can lose their #1 starter due to injury and come up with enough resources on their own to overcome it.

The Yankees can not and will not achieve any sort of sustained success, this decade or the next, if they cannot develop their own players–and, with everything else in baseball, it starts with the pitching.

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Over on Twitter today, the guys behind the @Riveraveblues feed, wonder if, in their words “the Yankees have a plan”.

No doubt brought on by the Phil/Joba thingie and the just-announced release of Chad Gaudin, it seems to be a question worth asking.

The answer, however, is strikingly simple: Yes, the Yankees have a plan.

The plan is to win the World Series, this year and the years beyond, and though we might not agree with the way the Yankees attempt to execute it, it’s still the plan.

The big, elephant in the room, of course, is that the Yankees have too many starting pitchers for too few starting pitcher slots.

Ideally, both Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes would start and pitch well, but it’s not possible because a) the Yankees have too many starting pitchers, and b) the AL East is too competitive to trust the rotation with Joba and Phil for an entire season in the rotation as of yet, and memories of 2008 are still much too near.

By trading for Vazquez, the Yankees have more or less put themselves in a no-win situation (that is, until the season starts and they start winning tons of games and then we laugh about how worried we were about this entire thing in the first place).

Either Phil Hughes starts, and we worry that the shuffling of Joba back and forth between rotation and bullpen has irreparably damaged him and made the last three years of Joba ruling a complete waste, or Joba starts and in four years Hughes hasn’t thrown more than 110 innings in any one of those years, the very years in which Hughes should be building his arm strength.

Joba turns 25 and Hughes 24 this season, so while they are still young, they’re hardly babies. Both should be starting, getting the innings they need, and not wasted in the bullpen to fill a short-term need.

That said, since the Yankees will probably be loathe to trade either one, or to send either one to AAA to get his innings, we’ll once again be left with a situation in which one bad start by whoever’s in the rotation, gets the whole starter/bullpen debate riled again.

This issue aside, however, the Yankees are in great shape.

The only other issue seems to be who makes it as the team’s fourth outfielder; everyone on the team that needs to be health is, (knock on wood), thus far healthy, and that includes the ‘core four’. The Yankees don’t have any position battles at any other starting position, and while we might not be able to expect 2009-level production from the likes of Jeter and Posada, we should still get enough to make the Yankees one of the most dangerous teams in the league.

Fifth starter battle or not, I’d rather have the Yankees’ issues this spring than those of any other team.

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[Pitching stats for Joba can be found at BR and at Fangraphs. BR: 2007, 2008, 2009.
Fangraphs: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Joba Chamberlain went on the DL in August 2008 with his shoulder injury.

In 2007, a young pitcher who had fallen lower in the draft because of weight and injury concerns, captivated a fan base as he rose from A ball to the Majors in one season, throwing heat while working as a set-up man in a bullpen that, well, had issues. Relievers not named Mariano included Brian Bruney, Jose Veras, Edwar Ramirez, Kyle Farnsworth…and they were all managed by Joe Torre–so yeah, issues.

Joba so electrified the fan base–and his personal story, with his paralyzed single father, added some color to the legend–that expectations came about which we, as discerning fans, should have realized as unreachable, but did not.

We expected, then, as in 2008 Joba was to make the switch from reliever to starter, that he’d take to the new role as a fish to water.

In fact, I bought tickets to the game in which he made his first start–throwing over 20 pitches in the first inning and not making it past the third. The Yankees lost that game but it wasn’t really Joba’s fault, and that’s more or less how it played out.

Joba threw too many pitches for someone on a strict pitch/innings count, and hurt the team not so much because the other team hit him, but because he left the game early and caused the Yankees to burn through their relievers. Bullpens, as we know, are finicky–they can be rock solid one month, and then a couple bad starts later, they can become utterly burnt out.

The issue, as we all know, was further compounded when Joba sustained a shoulder injury in August 2008, and there is some question (which I will not attempt to answer, because I don’t own a radar gun) as to whether or not Joba’s been able to completely recover.

In 2009, there was a lot of the same–Joba throwing too many pitches–until just after the All Star break, when he reeled off a week’s worth of excellent starts, pitching as though all the hype had been deserved.

His reward? The Yankees, in a fit of helicopter parenting, messed with his routine, and it kind of all fell apart there.

There are so many variables at work here, it’s nigh on impossible to pick just one as the cause of Joba’s problems. I would argue, rather, that the combination of them–expectations set too high, shoulder injury, mismanagement and some sort of primal phobia of the strike zone–have conspired to descend upon one young man. The starter/reliever debate is simple to address if you think of it like this: while the previous four issues are toil and trouble, Joba is probably best as a reliever; if these issues get tackled, Joba will be quite fine as a starter.

It is my belief that in this case, whether Joba is better off as a starter or a reliever is inextricably linked to the problems thus identified.

It’s also impossible to figure out which one of the problems should be the easiest to fix. Forget trying to reset our expectations–even if one of us was to say “well, maybe he won’t be uber awesome”, another one of us would probably say “but he’s only 24! You can’t lose your faith! Pink hat!”

Shoulder injuries can be fixed in theory, but they’re nasty, and come with no guarantee that they won’t be re-injured. There’s a reason they’re considered much more serious to pitchers than elbow injuries.

Mismanagement is only easy to fix in hindsight. The Yankees thought that they were doing the right thing with Joba, in trying to find a way to limit his innings, because the new conventional wisdom states that you have to limit the innings of a young pitcher to avoid injury.

The inability to throw strikes? One first has to figure out if the problem is mechanical or psychological. I’d wager that the nibbling is in a large part psychological, but I’m no coach or doctor, so take my word with a grain of salt.

The Yankees, Joba, and yes, ourselves (since issue #1 is of our own doing), don’t have to address just one of these issues, we have to address all four. When we do, we just might get that old Joba back–the one we’ve been so high on in the first place.

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