Eye of the storm

The Yankees just finished the first seven games of a tough 14 game stretch against the Tigers, Angels, and Red Sox. They took three out of four from the Tigers but lost the next two games against the Angels, including one embarassing 18-9 loss, but avoided the sweep with yesterday's 8-2 victory behind Andy Pettitte's stellar outing. Today they have an off-day before another four game set against the Tigers, this time in Detroit, and then a three game series against the Sox at home.

The Yankee offense has been solid. In the past seven games, they faced the likes of Justin Verlander, Jeremy Bonderman, Kelvim Escobar, and John Lackey, and still managed to average nearly seven runs per game, which is outstanding. The hitters are stepping up and showing that they can handle tough pitching, easing some of my concerns that I voiced when I brought up the nominal nature of the Yankees' team OPS a couple weeks ago.

No, hitting certainly hasn't been the concern as of late. Rather, it's been consistent starting pitching. Here's a look at each Yankee starter's numbers so far this month and my take on them:

Andy Pettitte: 5 G, 35.0 IP, 2.06 ERA
Lately, Pettitte has been establishing himself as the team ace and, given his reputation as a big-game pitcher, he'll probably be the team's number one starter in the division series should they make the postseason.

Chien-Ming Wang: 4 G, 21.2 IP, 7.06 ERA
Wang has hit his first rough patch of the season. I'm fairly confident that he's just slumping a bit, but there is a budding concern that his eternal finger blister/cracked fingernail injury is finally catching up with him.

Roger Clemens: 3 G, 13.2 IP, 3.95 ERA
Clemens has been pitching decently as of late, but I'm worried about his durability. He's usually yanked before he gets to 100 pitches, and when he isn't relieved before the 100 mark, it seems to negatively impact his next start. He went over 100 during the first two starts of the season, which he followed up with a 4.1 inning loss in Colorado. He didn't reach 100 pitches in a game again until July 28th, when he threw 113 against the Orioles. His next outing was a disaster, as he lasted only 1.2 innings and gave up eight runs against the White Sox. Shortly thereafter, he decided not to appeal the five-game suspension handed to him for throwing at the Blue Jays' Alex Rios. Appealing the suspension would have allowed him to make his next scheduled start and push back his following start by only one game, but instead he was effectively skipped in the rotation and given ten days of rest. The fact that Clemens elected to do this makes me worry about his ability to go deep into games on a consistent basis. The man is 45, after all.

Phil Hughes: 4 G, 22.0 IP, 5.73 ERA
A lot of fans are worried about Phil Franchise because he hasn't been striking out every batter he faces like that wonderboy Joba Chamberlain, but I'm really not too concerned about him. Hughes hasn't been great since coming off the DL, but he's still learning. In all probability, he'll get better as the season nears its end. I'm much more worried about Wang and Clemens than I am about Hughes at this point, because they have attrition possiblities whereas Hughes has yet to reach his ceiling.

Mike Mussina: 4 G, 20.1 IP, 7.52 ERA
Man, just when Moose was starting to look better, he tanks in August. While I'm not going to join the angry mob of fans that believe he would be more valuable to the Yankees if Gene Monahan harvested his organs and sold them on the black market, he's clearly been a disappointment this season. It's funny when people say that Mussina should be left off the post-season rotation if he continues to pitch this poorly. Obviously, they're correct in stating that he would be the Yankees' worst starter if he continues to perform like this, but in all likelihood the Yankees won't make the playoffs unless he pitches well. With the Yankees five games behind the Red Sox in the AL East and three games back in the loss column from the red-hot Mariners in the Wildcard standings, they're going to need Moose to pitch well. I'm inclined to believe that he's capable of doing so. Granted, his drop in velocity this year is concerning, but he's never been a power pitcher. He relies on his control and good breaking ball to get hitters out.

Peter Abraham: 21 G, 483 bags of potato chips eaten, countless little children scared

Did you know that A-Rod, not Hitler, was responsible for the Holocaust?

I get a kick out of the fact that writers for two popular Yankee blogs that I follow would even suggest that Alex Rodriguez should be blamed for the Yankees' lopsided loss tonight because of something that happened 75 days ago. Here's some background information:

• On May 30th, when the Yankees stood at a horrendous 21-29, they led the Blue Jays 6-5 in the top of the ninth inning with two outs. Jorge Posada hit a pop-up to the left side of the infield, and baserunner Alex Rodriguez shouted "Ha!" at third-baseman Howie Clark at the last second, apparently causing him to lose focus and botch the play.
• The Blue Jays descended into a state of fiery inexorable rage, refusing to move on even after more than two months had passed, throwing at A-Rod, bad-mouthing him in the press, and burning effigies of him whenever the opportunity arose.
• A week ago, A-Rod was plunked by Blue Jays pitcher Josh Towers. Later in the game, Roger Clemens decided to respond by throwing at Alex Rios. He was ejected, and because of retarded MLB anti-retaliation rules, he was suspended for five games.
• Tonight would have been Clemens's spot in the rotation, and he was replaced by Jeff Karstens, who got roughed up. The Yankees lost 12-0.

So somehow, by the logic of certain Yankee bloggers, fans should be upset with A-Rod for getting Clemens suspended. What?

There are several obvious things to point out in order to negate this batshit-insane needless A-Rod bashing, but let's start off with a more subtle point -- one that took some rigorous investigative journalism on my part. If you review frame-by-frame footage of the game from last week, you'll actually notice that it was Roger Clemens who threw at Rios, not Alex Rodriguez! I know, I know, I just run a small-time blog and you probably think I'm a "conspiracy theorist" and whatnot, but seriously, check it out for yourself!

Seriously, how can Alex Rodriguez be blamed for something that Roger Clemens chose to do? It's not as if it was purely up to him to retaliate, something that Krazy Kyle Farnsworth or the dispensable Jim Brower (who came in after Clemens) were assuredly perfectly capable of, and as a 24-year veteran, he understood the implications of intentionally throwing at an opposing batter after warnings were issued. Which brings me to my next point: Roger Clemens could have appealed the suspension in order to avoid missing a start. This happens all the time. When starting pitchers get suspended, they delay the process in order to miss as few turns in the rotation as possible. Why Clemens chose not to do so is bizarre at best, and infuriating at worst. Quite frankly, with regard to this "Ha!" butterfly-effect fiasco, any sort of fan frustration with a Yankee player should be directed towards the Rocket, not A-Rod.

In any case, the most ridiculous mainstream oversight, in my opinion, is that the "Ha!" helped the Yankees at a time when they needed it most. At 21-29, they were 14.5 games behind Boston. A-Rod's antics allowed the team to score four important insurance runs in the ninth inning, en route to a 10-5 victory. MLB.com reported that when asked what he was trying to accomplish with the play, he responded, "To win a game. We're desperate. We haven't won a game in a little bit now, so we won the game." A-Rod was simply trying to help the team any way he could (in case his trillion home runs weren't quite good enough) and fans should respect him for doing so.

Also, can somebody please explain why a baserunner yelling at a fielder is generally considered a gross breach of baseball "etiquette"? This isn't golf. Most professional athletes have to deal with loud crowd noises and other distractions all the time. Hell, in basketball, almost everyone yells at an opponent going in for a wide-open layup, which is certainly that sport's equivalent to fielding a routine pop-up. A-Rod didn't even go as far as to yell "I got it!", which would have been much more disruptive to Howie Clark considering the relative proximity of Toronto shortstop John McDonald.

On a side note, Joe Torre is an idiot for DH-ing anyone other than Giambi at this point. It's a crime that a guy with a .413 career OBP isn't an everyday player. He is a terrible manager and I curse the Lord for taking Phil Rirruto instead of him. Those are z's.

I INVENTED THE PIANO-KEY NECKTIE, I INVENTED IT

Last night I was mulling over the Yankees' recent surge and whether or not I should adjust my 90-win forecast. The Bombers have been scoring runs at an insane rate lately, but mostly against teams that have pitched poorly all season, such as the Devil Rays, Royals, and White Sox. I began to wonder if there was any decent way of quantitatively expressing a team's tendency to outperform against poor pitching and underperform against good pitching relative to other teams. So I made up a random statistic and called it On-Base Plus Slugging Nominality (OPSN), defining it as the percent difference between the slope of the linear regression of a batting entity's OPS versus league pitching entity performances and the ratio of a batting entity's OPS over the average league OPS. It's a mouthful, but I'm pretty sure it makes some sort of sense. The result should be that a positive OPSN means that the batting entity performs disproportionately better against below-average pitching entities and whose OPS is therefore nominal in nature, and vice versa. Anyway, in this case the batting entity is the Yankees, the pitching entities are broken into teams (in the American League), and the time-frame is the 2007 season to date. Here's a graph that sort of breaks it down:


So the Yankees' OPSN versus AL pitching staffs is (2.1129-1.1029)/1.1029 = .916, which is probably a significant figure despite the relatively small sample sizes of around eight games per opponent faced. In other words, this Yankee team is likely to beat down on bad teams and get shut down by good pitchers. Why this might be the case is a matter of speculation, but I would guess that it probably has to do with things like:

- Bobby Abreu has lost a bit of bat speed and can be overpowered.
- Robinson Cano chases pitches that break out of the strike zone.
- Alex Rodriguez is something of a guess-hitter.
- Hideki Matsui has trouble with above-average two-seam fastballs.
- Melky Cabrera is young.
- Andy Phillips can struggle against high-level offspeed, breaking stuff.

Of course, my methods are pretty unscientific here and my conclusions could be off. In all likelihood, the best way of doing this analysis would be to calculate the OPSN of each individual Yankee hitter over the last several years (or however long they've been in the majors) against individual pitchers, adjusting for seasonal or ballpark factors, and doing some fancy statistical work to account for varying sample sizes. But I'm too lazy. Bottom line is, I'm not going to go with the new market consensus that the Yankees will win 95 games this year, but I'll go ahead and adjust to 91 wins, maintaining a 3.5 win standard deviation.

Joba Chamberlain, the Yankees second-biggest pitching prospect next to Phil Hughes (though I guess he's not just a prospect anymore), has been called up to work out of the bullpen. While I love that the Yankees are flexing their young-pitching muscle, I have mixed feelings about this move. Joba has been rushed, and he's only had three appearances in the minors as a reliever before being called up to the bigs to be a seventh-inning guy. He could easily overpitch on adrenaline and hurt himself. Word seems to have it that his fastball is sitting at 98 in relief, as opposed to 94 in starts, and the truth is that most pitchers simply can't put that kind of strain on their arms for more than a few seasons. Just ask Eric Gagne and Joel Zumaya (Guitar Hero my ass). Or, invent a time machine and ask Jonathan Papelbon in a couple years after this happens:

I'm secretly rooting against Jorge Posada

Jorge Posada is having a mind-blowing kind of season. He entered 2007 as a 35-year-old who had caught 1,222 games in his major league career, and it was looking like his best years were behind him. Those best years were impressive -- from 2000-2003, he won four Silver Slugger awards and finished third in the 2003 AL MVP balloting. He could practically be marked down for having an OPS of around .850 each season, which is tremendous production from a catcher. However, the start of his decline seemed inevitable in what would be his 17th season in professional baseball (including the minors). That's 17 hot summers of squatting behind a plate wearing heavy catcher's equipment and getting pounded by foul tips and pitches in the dirt. Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA card forecasted that Posada would hit .259/.365/.443 in 2007 and would continue to decline until his predicted retirement after the 2010 season. In addition to his expected drop in all batting metrics, the BP model also showed a 24% "attrition rate", meaning the chance of a player being injured or benched for a significant portion of the season.

Taking those factors into consideration, I agreed with Brian Cashman's decision to wait until the end of 2007 to negotiate a contract with Posada, rather than offer him an extension during the offseason.

Um, oops.

So far in 2007, Posada is hitting .343/.417/.553, all of which would be career-highs. The .343 BA is especially outrageous considering his prior best was a .287 mark in 2000. This is all great, and he's been incredibly valuable to the team this year, but he has consistently asserted that he is looking forward to free agency and will ceratinly test the market. Basically, what this says is that the Yankees will have to throw something like $75 million over five years at a 36-year-old catcher come this winter. He might even get more considering how irreplacable he is and how much he is adored by Yankee fans (Hip hip, Jorge! Hip-hip, Jorge!!! Hip-hip, OH GOD YOU TOOK ALL OF OUR MONEY).

So, getting back to the title of this entry, yes, I do root against Jorge Posada, but only when the Yankees are either way behind or way ahead. Don't take it personally, Jorgie. I don't really want you to fail, I just want you to rapidly regress to the mean in your contract year, goddammit.