Tex swinging over what I can only imagine is a curveball. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty)

About a year ago I took a look at Mark Teixeira’s curveball problem. While anyone who watched Tex hit in 2010 didn’t need an elaborate post telling them he struggled against the curve, it bore watching as he had posted above-average run values versus the curveball in his two seasons prior. 2010 was also a down year for Tex against the fastball, as he posted a five-year low (a mere 7.3 runs above average) against a pitch he punished to the tune of 38.8 runs above average a mere two years earlier.

Tex found himself back in Yankee fans’ crosshairs again last week, after suggesting that he might try bunting from the left side of the plate this coming season in a misguided attempt to beat the shift. Brien Jackson at IIATMS noted that the shift isn’t the real problem, William Juliano published a typically comprehensive look at Tex’s offensive numbers from both sides of the plate hitting to different fields, and TYA’s Michael Eder pondered whether Tex bunting would actually work.

Today I thought I’d take a slightly different tack and dive into how pitchers are attacking Mark Teixeira, left-handed hitter. The good news for Tex is that he improved his performance against the fastball this season (although wFF numbers are cumulative from both sides of the plate), fininishing the year at 12.3 runs above average. Still, this is a far cry from the heady days of wFF numbers in the high-20s. Unfortunately for Tex, his woes against the curveball continued in 2011, and he actually tied for the 9th-worst wCU/100 mark in the American League. So what’s going on with Tex against the curve? The below chart shows various outcomes for Tex against the curveball when hitting from the left side of the plate (data c/o both TexasLeaguers.com and JoeLefkowitz.com):

Following the curve’s whopping success against left-handed Tex in 2010, righties slightly increased the number of hooks they threw the Yankee slugger last season, from 11.2% to 11.8%. Now obviously we’re talking about a pretty small rise, but with Tex also seeing significantly fewer four-seamers than he did in 2009 (46.4% down to 38.1%), the minimal increase carries a bit more weight.

Right-handers threw the curve less frequently for strikes in 2011, but Tex still swung at them with essentially the same frequency as the previous year. He hit them in the air more frequently than he had previously as a Yankee (no surprise given his predilection for popping out to the infield), fouled them off slightly more frequently, hit fewer on the ground, and to his credit, actually whiffed less frequently than the previous two years. However, he also stopped hitting the curve for as much power, following a 1.3% HR% in 2009 with two straight seasons of 0.4%.

Given the curveball’s continued effectiveness against Tex, I was curious to see whether its deployment increased depending on the count. The below chart shows curveball frequency when the pitcher is ahead (I’m considering 0-0 as the pitcher being ahead in this case, because anecdotally it seems like Tex never swings first pitch, even though B-Ref says he did at least 56 times last year):

I was a bit surprised to see the curve being most frequently deployed on 0-2 and 1-2 in 2009, but perhaps the most telling component of this graph is that pitchers have significantly increased their likelihood of trying to get ahead of Tex at the start of his at-bats, dropping a curve in on the first pitch 13.9% of the time last season, a three-year high.

And what’s been happening when Tex does make contact?

His LD BABIP spiked back up last season after a woeful .250 in 2010, but was still nearly 200 points below its 2009 high of .833. His FB BABIP on the curve unsurprisingly fell to a three-year low, and his GB BABIP basically remained constant.

Now, in fairness to Tex, part of the curveball issue is that he has to face some outstanding curveball-throwing pitchers. Out of the 233 curveballs he saw from righties in 2011, 79, or 34%, were thrown by Josh Beckett, Justin Verlander, James Shields, Felix Hernandez, Jeremy Hellickson and John Lackey (pitchers he had 10 at-bats or more against each). Outside of Lackey, those hurlers are among the best in in the league, and so Tex probably needs to be cut some slack.

However, he’s shown that he’s not completely useless against the curveball in the past, and it would bode well for the 2012 Yankees if he can recognize that right-handed pitchers are probably going to attack him earlier in the count with curveballs and ideally hold off from swinging at said curves unless he actually is able to revise his approach from the left side with Kevin Long.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Tex should focus on pitch recognition from the left side, not bunting

(Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty)

For those of you sick of A.J. Burnett analysis, you have my sympathies, and please feel free to skip this post. For the masochists in the audience, I was inspired to take another spin down the Burnett freeway by our pal Brad Vietrogoski, who wrote a thought-provoking piece about everyone’s least-favorite Yankee on Tuesday. The following statement in particular caught my attention:

It’s not so much the two nasty curveballs that they swing and miss at in the at-bat that matter any more; it’s the fastball A.J. grooves with 2 strikes that they’re squaring up on and driving for power.

Having written about Burnett’s splits last month, I was curious to see whether the idea that Burnett was just laying it in there with two strikes held water.

A.J.’s tOPS+ (his performance relative to how he performs in all situations, with 100 being average and anything lower representing above-average for the pitcher) with two strikes last year was 36, while his tOPS+ while ahead in the count was 16, which means A.J. performed far better than normal in those situations. His sOPS+in each of those categories was 108 and 81, respectively, which means he was slightly worse than league average with two strikes in the count but almost 20% better when ahead. Essentially this tells me that it’s safe to say that A.J.’s issues last season weren’t necessarily grooving a fastball with two strikes.

However, he probably does have a sequencing issue, as evinced by his 208 tOPS+ when the batter is ahead in the count, and 157 sOPS+. While the 208 isn’t as crazy as it might initially seem, as we’d expect a pitcher to perform worse in favorable counts for the batter (for reference, CC Sabathia‘s tOPS+ was a near-identical 206); the 57% worse than league average part is a bit more damning (CC’s was 111 in those situations).

So what is A.J. throwing when falling behind in the count? The following splits are taken from Fangraphs — it’s important to note that these are BIS classifications and not PITCHf/x, and may not be exact, but they should be close enough for our purposes.

In 2011, he threw a three-year low percentage of fastballs in 1-0 counts, while his changeup percentage spiked from 3% all the way to 20%.

In 2-0 counts, A.J. decreased his fastball deployment to 88%, and went from throwing no changeups in this count in 2010 to 10% in 2011.

Getting a fastball from A.J. Burnett when ahead 3-0 is as sure a thing as there is in sports.

Again, a three-year-low in fastball%, while a spike in changeup deployment from 3% in 2010 to 13%.

Pretty sure you see where I’m going with this by now.

In 2011, A.J. Burnett decreased the percentage of fastballs he threw while upping his changeup percentage in every favorable hitter’s count. This unsurprisingly resulted in A.J. throwing more changeups overall last season than at any point in his three-year Yankee career (these are PITCHf/x classifications):

Why would he do this? Well, for starters, if you had the least-effective fastball in the American League, you’d probably stay away from it too. We’re all painfully aware of the diminished effectiveness of A.J.’s once-dominating heater.

Despite the drop in velocity, A.J.’s 2011 fastball still ranked as tied for the 15th-fastest in the game. Of course, it doesn’t matter how hard you throw if (a) you’re not getting any movement on it, (b) you don’t offer enough different looks to keep hitters guessing, and (c) all of the above. As far as (b) goes, to A.J.’s credit it appears he was toying with something of a cutter this past season, although it wasn’t exactly effective. He also appeared to have significantly cut back on sinker usage in favor of the change in 2011, though he barely threw either pitch in 2009.

While I commend A.J.’s appearing to be willing to try new things to right his ship, it’s pretty clear the change isn’t the answer for him, as its ineffectiveness (12th-worst in the AL) is likely tied in part to the fact that there’s just not enough separation in velocity from his heater. In 2009 the delta between his four-seamer and change was 7.2 miles per hour. In 2010 that shrunk to 5.3, and this past season it fell even further to 4.7.

So essentially in 2011, Burnett began turning to his changeup more frequently due in part to the decreased velocity on his fastball — this is not a terrible idea in theory; Mike Mussina for one had to reinvent himself as a pitcher as his velocity decreased near the end of his career — however, an inability to concurrently decrease the speed on his change resulted in what at times probably just looked like a slow, eminently hittable fastball. With hitters knowing full well that the likelihood of seeing a curve in a hitters’ count was slim to none, it’s sadly no surprise they teed off on Burnett’s changeup.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Talking about Burnett for a change

Don't hate on my MS Paint skills. (Both photos via AP)

In perhaps the most extreme case of overreaction in baseball history, the Tigers signed Prince Fielder to a nine-year, $214M contract two weeks ago after learning that Victor Martinez would miss the season with a knee problem. It’s the fourth largest contract in baseball history, and like many of you, I couldn’t help but think that Mark Teixeira eight-year, $180M contract suddenly looked a whole lot better by comparison. Fielder is the better player at the moment, but Teixeira didn’t get his contract at the moment. He signed it three years ago.

Given the enormous outlays, let’s compare the two players and their contracts. To do this, we’re going to go back in time a bit and look at the player Teixeira was when he signed his contract, because that’s more applicable when comparing these massive deals. He was 28 years old when the Yankees signed him prior to 2009, a year older than Fielder is right now. Both guys are Scott Boras clients, so that makes the comparison a little easier. With all due respect, no agent is as successful as Boras when it comes to getting top dollar.

We’re going to break the comparison into four sections: offense, baserunning, defense, and durability. The first three are self-explanatory, and durability is quite underappreciated in my opinion. If you’re giving out contracts like these, you want to be damn sure the player can stay on the field. Let’s start with the money-makers, the bats…

Offense

Both players are well above average offensively, both in terms of getting on-base and launched baseballs into orbit. Teixeira was approximately 40% better than league average back in the day while Fielder is roughly 50% better than league average today, so Prince is the better hitter by a not small margin. It is worth noting that Teixeira is a switch-hitter, and back then he had a relatively small platoon split (134 wRC+ vs. RHP and 148 vs. LHP from ’06-’08). Fielder is a lefty and has shown a somewhat significant split throughout over the last three years (168 wRC vs. RHP but 119 vs. LHP). He’s the better hitter, but the switch-hitting thing is a definite plus for Tex.

Baserunning

Baserunning is an important part of the game, but it really doesn’t have as much impact as you might think. The different between the best and worst baserunners in a given season will be something like 30 runs, and we’re talking Michael Bourn vs. Jorge Posada type of stuff. Most players are within five runs of league average (one way or the other) with few outliers.

He’s slow and he makes funny faces when he runs, but Teixeira was a pretty good baserunner once upon a time. He took the extra base 40% of the time from 2006-2008 (meaning he went first-to-third on a single, first-to-home on a double, etc.), ever so slightly above the league average (39%). Fielder is well below average on the bases, taking the extra roughly half as often as the average player (league average is 41% these days). In terms of runs created on the bases (that’s BsR), Tex was essentially league average again while Fielder was well below. We’re talking a 15 or so run difference between the two players over a three-year span, or five runs a year. None a huge difference, but a difference nonetheless.

Just ignore the stolen base stuff, neither of these guys are asked to do much of that.

Defense

Advanced fielding metrics aren’t perfect, especially for first baseman. They are useful over large samples though, especially in conjunction with the ol’ eye test. Teixeira is a great fielder and always has been by reputation, and the numbers back that up. Fielder is the opposite, a poor defender with the reputation to match. You can quibble with the exact numbers if you want, but they pass the sniff test. A 30 or so run gap is significant, even when talking about a three-year stretch.

Durability

Durability is a skill to a certain extent, and like I said earlier, I think it’s underappreciated. Fielder is arguably the most durable position player in the sport right now, appearing in all but one game over the last three years and starting all but five of them. That’s pretty amazing. Teixeira missed more than five weeks with a quad strain in 2007, but otherwise he appeared in 162 and 157 games in 2006 and 2008, respectively.

This is a pretty good spot to talk about the body types, because they are important. Teixeira’s got the prototypical robot baseball player build, meaning 6-foot-3 and 220 lbs., with less body fat than I have in my left thigh. Fielder’s a portly little guy, listed on the Tigers official site at 5-foot-11 and 275 lbs. That doesn’t mean he’s out of shape — there’s a difference between being fat and being out of shape — but his body is absolutely a concern going forward. All that extra weight can lead to knee and back problems later in his career. Three years ago (and even today), no one had any reason to be concerned about Teixeira physically.

Adding up the WARs

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no difference between 14.5 and 14.1 WAR. The various WAR models just aren’t accurate enough to get worked up over a four run difference. All this tells us is that Teixeira’s fielding and baserunning closed the gap between his offense and Fielder’s, nothing more. This is how each player performed in the three years leading up to their free agency, not an indication of how they’re likely to perform going forward. It might give you an idea of what to expect in the future, but make that assumption at your own risk.

At the end of the day, we have two very similar players in 2006-2008 Teixeira and 2009-2011 Fielder. Both guys were top ten draft picks once upon a time, both play the same position, both are young and very much in the primes of their careers, and both have provided the same amount of value in the three years leading up to their free agency. They’re both $100M+ players, no doubt about that. Going forward though, wouldn’t you rather have the switch-hitter than provides better defense and has the better body? I know I would.

In many ways, Fielder’s contract is one of Boras’ best. He got Teixeira 8/180 when both the Yankees and Red Sox were heavily involved in the bidding, but then three years later he got Fielder 9/214 with almost no big money teams in the market for the first baseman. Convincing the Tigers to sign Prince to that contract when they already had a better player with his own nine-figure contract at the same position is nothing short of player representation genius in my book.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Comparing Teixeira’s Contract To Fielder’s

(Beverly Schaefer / For the Times)

Note: This post was initially written prior to the Big Trade. With the Yankee rotation depth chart now seven deep at the Major League level, the likelihood of seeing David Phelps starting for the big league club at any point in 2012 has probably shrunk to nonexistent. Though in Phelps’ favor, with the recent departure of Hector Noesi he and rotationmate Adam Warren have become the de facto “next in line” at AAA should the Yankees indeed simultaneously lose three starting pitchers to injury.

Last winter, most of the non-”Killer Bs” buzz regarding Yankee prospects surrounded Ivan Nova and Hector Noesi, both of whom acquitted themselves rather well during their first full seasons in the big leagues. With Manny Banuelos and Dellin Betances both expected to need further seasoning in AAA before getting the call to contribute at the MLB level full time, the two pitchers that we started hearing a fair amount about last offseason and who now appear to be next in line in the rotation pecking order when one of the Yankees’ presumed starting five inevitably goes down with an injury are David Phelps (who Mike profiled a little over a year ago) and Adam Warren (Axisa profile). Today I’m going to take a look at what the Yankees might reasonably expect out of the former.

I found myself intrigued by the now-24-year-old right-hander — who most prospect mavens have pegged as a back-end-of-the-rotation guy at best — after seeing John Sickels recently rank him aggressively at #7 on his list of top 20 Yankee prospects, saying the following:

“I like (Phelps) more than most people do. Has developed the secondary pitches needed to off-set the fastball, and was one of the few pitchers who didn’t get killed in the Arizona Fall League. Could be a fourth starter if given a chance.”

While “fourth-starter-upside” isn’t anything to get terribly excited over — and from what I gather, I get the sense that people aren’t terribly enamored of Sickels’ evaluations as it is — I don’t know that I’d automatically thumb my nose at a guy who could hypothetically settle in as a #4 starter in an MLB rotation.

Phelps was drafted by the Yankees out of Notre Dame in the 14th round of the 2008 draft, and was immediately put to work in short season Staten Island. Here’s a chart of his progression:

While I don’t think Phelps is expected to generate an overwhelming number of strikeouts should he make it to the bigs, it’s still decently impressive that he’s managed to sustain a 7.00+ K/9 ever since moving up to Charleston, while never allowing his walk rate to rise above 3 men per nine. Reasonable strikeout and walk rates combined with a HR/9 that’s never eclipsed 1.0 — even this past fall in the notoriously hitter-friendly Arizona Fall League — has helped Phelps keep his FIP below 4.00 every season. Based solely on his raw numbers, there’s a fair amount to like from this picture.

The other reason I wanted to examine Phelps is that, by virtue of playing in the aforementioned AzFL, we have access (albeit limited) to PITCHf/x data, which is installed in two of the league’s six parks. Poring through the data, I found the two games on the Phoenix Dirt Dogs’ schedule that had them playing in Peoria and Surprise and also coincided with two of Phelps’ eight starts.

On November 7 Phelps threw 5 innings of two-run, three-hit ball with three strikeouts, one walk and one home run. On November 17 Phelps threw 5 innings of two-run, five-hit ball with six strikeouts, no walks and no home runs.

Here’s a breakdown of the 134 pitches he threw:

So based on this data Phelps is a fastball-slider righty, who also won’t shy away from throwing a changeup ~8mph slower than his fastball, or dropping in a curve. In Mike’s profile from December 2010, he noted the following about Phelps:

“Once a scrawny kid that would sit in the low-90′s on a good day, Phelps has filled out his 6-foot-3 frame (190 lbs.) and now throws his fastball at 93-95 mph consistently. Minor league pitching coordinator Nardi Contreras made some minor adjustments soon after Phelps signed, leading to the improved velocity. He also throws a two-seam fastball right around 90 mph, a good curveball, and both a below average slider and changeup. The curve is the closest thing Phelps has to a strikeout pitch, but it still needs some more improvement. At the moment he’s a ground ball pitcher, but that can change if one of the offspeed pitches takes that step forward.”

I saw a lot of 89-91mph fastballs in the PITCHf/x data, and so I’m guessing Phelps’ arm was somewhat tired by the time he got to the AFL after throwing roughly 114 innings in 2011 in both rehab and Scranton (Ed. Note: Phelps missed close to three months this summer with shoulder fatigue, so that could have contributed to the diminished velocity as well). If Phelps actually does usually sit at ~93mph with his fastball, a strong early showing at AAA could make him a valuable trade chip come July. Ultimately, I don’t know that anything about Phelps screams dominance, but it also doesn’t seem crazy to think that he could contribute as a starting pitcher at a league-average level in MLB.

For more on Phelps, be sure to check out TYA’s Brad Vietrogoski’s Top 30 Yankee Prospects capsules over at An A-Blog for A-Rod. Phelps checks in at #8.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

What can the Yankees reasonably expect out of David Phelps?

(Photo by Al Bello/Getty)

One of the commenters in my post about Nick Swisher last month suggested that Swish’s struggles in the postseason were due in part to the fact that hitters are facing their opponents’ best pitchers, or something to that effect. While it’s probably true that an offensive bludgeoning is less likely to occur during a postseason game than, say, in August, I also think it’s a convenient excuse for teams that aren’t hitting. We’ve frequently seen the Yankee bats run the gamut from laser-hot to ice-cold during the postseason, though we tend to remember the games in which the bats didn’t show up more often than not, given how accustomed we’ve become to fielding a powerhouse offense.

Unfortunately one of the primary issues when judging both a player’s and team’s postseason performances is that the samples are almost always too small, and the very nature of baseball dictates that any player, no matter how good, is going to suffer through a slump at one point or another. That’s not to minimize the impact of facing elite pitching in the postseason; but on the flipside not even pitchers are infallible and even the best ones have less-than-great days. CC Sabathia had a 6.23 ERA in 8.2 innings in the 2011 ALDS; Justin Verlander a 5.00 in 9.0 IP.

The point of all this is that, based on what we know of Nick Swisher’s offensive abilities over the course of a 162-game season, it’s crazy to to assert that he “can’t hit in the postseason.” Unless Swisher has actually demonstrated a distinct inability to hit so-called “good” pitching, the only explanation that really makes sense as far as his struggles have gone is the recurrence of several ill-timed slumps.

Prior to embarking on this post I’d initially hoped to be able to segment batches of “good” (which I would have defined as being 10% better than league average) and “bad” pitchers, and then tally Swisher’s stats against them in an effort to see how exactly he performed against these pitcher types, but B-Ref won’t allow me to export Play Index results to Excel, and there was no way I was going to manually re-enter all of the data.

Instead, below is a table showing all of the starting pitchers Swisher has faced during his three-year Yankee career (including the postseason), minimum 10 PAs. While 10-plus PAs isn’t anywhere near a large-enough sample, if we’re going to castigate Swish for small-sample failure in the playoffs, we also have to accord him respect for small-sample success.

David Price and Jon Lester are two of the best pitchers in the American League. Swisher has killed ‘em both. Cliff Lee? .852 OPS against. Matt Garza doesn’t stand a chance against Swisher. Gio Gonzalez, arguably the most-sought-after pitcher on the trade market, may as well be throwing Swish batting practice. Same with Trevor Cahill and Ervin Santana. RAB favorite John Danks? Swish has hit him to the tune of a .930 OPS in 13 PAs.

The naysayers in the audience will undoubtedly point out Swish’s struggles against Josh Beckett and James Shields (though among the Yankees that’s far from a Swisher-only issue), but on the whole, I’m not sure one could reasonably conclude that Nick Swisher routinely struggles against good pitching.

(Ed. Note: Keep in mind that while .641 OPS against Felix over the last three seasons looks bad, Hernandez has held all hitters to a .616 OPS during that time. We’re referencing a very different baseline when talking about top pitchers. Context is everything.)

For the folks who want to pin his postseason struggles on something tangible, there really is no better explanation than Swish happening to slump on three separate occasions, with each unfortunately coming at one of the worst possible times for the Yankees. This doesn’t make his regular season contributions — which have helped the team get to the playoffs in each of his three pinstriped years — any less valuable, nor does it mean that he is forever doomed to postseason failure (see Rodriguez, Alex).

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Does Nick Swisher vanish against good pitching?

(Photo by Otto Greule Jr./Getty)

There has been no lack of Michael Pineda PITCHf/x analysis in the aftermath of the Big Trade, and if you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out Lucas Apostoleris here, Whelk at DRays Bay here and our pal Matt Imbrogno here. With these fine fellows having already done some of the legwork I was planning on doing, I thought I’d shift my focus to a compelling comp:

Feel free to guess in the comments, or find out what we’re looking at after the jump.

Player A is, of course, Michael Pineda, while Player B is Brandon Morrow. The table on top are both pitchers’ four-seamers in 2011, and the bottom table are both pitchers’ sliders. While the two aren’t exact duplicates of each other — Morrow’s secondary pitches are a splitter and curve; while Pineda, despite the two-pitch pitcher tag (which I admit to lazily using myself) actually does occasionally throw a cutter, two-seamer, and something PITCHf/x has labeled simply a “fastball” but based on velocity, horizontal and vertical break could be a hard splitter (I asked Lucas about this pitch on Twitter but haven’t yet heard back. ETA, 1:24pm: Just heard from Lucas; the pitch is actually Pineda’s changeup. His changeup is apparently a hard change and somewhat similar to splitter) — they’re pretty close.

Both are among the hardest-throwers in the game (Pineda’s four-seamer clocked in as the third-fastest in baseball last season, while Morrow’s was tied for 6th), with fastballs that generate significantly above-average Whiff rates, while each righty pairs his heater with a devastating slider that also generates an above-average Whiff%.

Morrow rode his ridiculously strong one-two punch to the best K/9 in the American League and was one of only two hurlers in all of MLB to crack the 10 K/9 mark last season (the other being free-agent-to-be Zack Greinke), while Pineda had the seventh-best mark in the bigs. A side-by-side comparison further illustrates the two pitchers’ similarities, with both accruing 3.4 fWAR last season in nearly the same number of innings pitched, though doing it in slightly different manners, as Morrow walked more men and gave up three more home runs; while Pineda was the beneficiary of one of the lower BABIPs in the league, helping him post an ERA nearly one full run less than Morrow’s. Both men are flyball pitchers, and both finished the season with identical xFIPs.

So the Yankees have ostensibly acquired a version of Morrow who is five years younger, walks fewer hitters, throws harder, and appears to have an even more diverse arsenal in the person of Michael Pineda. Jesus Montero who?

Moving on, reader Frank submitted a mailbag question earlier in the week asking for Pineda’s 2012 projections, and so below is a table of what Pineda did in 2011, what the five currently available systems see him doing in 2012, and the straight averages of those projections. It’s important to bear in mind that all of these projections — save SG’s CAIRO — are for Pineda as a Mariner, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

For the most part the systems agree that Pineda will at least pitch as well as he did in 2011, if not a tick better. Again, one should expect these numbers to be slightly worse across the board with Pineda moving from Safeco Field to the Bronx.

While the Yankee-adjusted CAIRO projection may seem a touch negative, among the many awesome things SG does is also occasionally offering percentile projections for certain players, and so you can also see how CAIRO thinks Pineda will perform as a Yankee at several different levels. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to think that Pineda could at the very least hit his 65th percentile projection of a 3.77 ERA/3.45 FIP, and if everything breaks right for the big right-hander, the 80th percentile projection, while a lofty perch — should he hit those marks, he would likely be among the top 20 pitchers in all of MLB — is not entirely unreasonable, either.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

PINEDAf/x (and some projections)

• Guaranteed Contracts (16 players, $183.125M): Alex Rodriguez ($27.5M), Mark Teixeira ($22.5M), CC Sabathia ($24.4M), Derek Jeter ($17M), A.J. Burnett ($16.5M), Mariano Rivera ($15M), Robinson Cano ($14M), Rafael Soriano ($11M), Nick Swisher ($10.25M), Curtis Granderson ($10M), Pedro Feliciano ($4M), Freddy Garcia ($4M), Phil Hughes ($3.2M), Joba Chamberlain ($1.675M), David Robertson ($1.6M), Wade ($500k)
• Contracts Pending Physicals (two players, $12M): Kuroda ($10M), Jones ($2M)
• Unsigned Arbitration-Eligibles (three players, $13.5M max/$11.1M min): Russell Martin (filed for $8.2M, Yanks for $7M), Brett Gardner ($3.2M/$2.4M), Boone Logan ($2.1M/$1.7M)
• Option Buy-Outs (one player, $0.250M): Damaso Marte ($0.250M)

The money listed is in terms of average annual value, which is what the luxury tax is based on. The players’ actual salaries are slightly different in some cased, but nothing crazy.

So that’s all of it, 22 players owed a maximum of $208.875M and a minimum of $206.475M. One of those 22 is not on the team anymore, and for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume Martin, Gardner, and Logan each win their arbitration cases. That gives us 21 active players and a $208.875M payroll, though Feliciano is only active in the sense that he’s taking a spot on the 40-man roster. It’s really 20 active players for that price.

The Yankees have been talking about spending just $2M or so on a DH, but I think that’s their way of trying to drive Johnny Damon‘s down more than anything. I expect them to end up spending about $4-5M on the DH, but anything more would surprise me. If they sign a DH for $5M and fill the remaining four roster spots with guys making the league minimum, the 25-man payroll would be approximately $215.875M, up a couple million up from the $212.7M that was luxury taxed in 2011. We haven’t even included the rest of the 40-man roster or stuff like player benefits (which gets taxed as well) yet either.

The other 15 players on the 40-man roster will make the league minimum, though let’s call it 16 players since Feliciano will be stashed on the 60-day DL so another player can be added at some point. Calling it $8M for those players is conservative ($500k each), since they’ll make a substantially smaller salary while in the minors. The $8M is probably closer to $3M in reality, if that. Player benefits are taxed and typically estimated at $10M, which brings us to $233.875M, conservatively. Just imagine if they add a player or two at the trade deadline.

None of us are privy to the Yankees’ financial info, but chances are they can support a payroll much higher than the $200M or so they’ve been spending in recent years. We can’t say that for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption. I do however think the commissioner’s office and players union have discouraging them from raising payroll any further, just like they’ve encouraged small market teams (the Marlins and Athletics, specifically) to spend more in recent years. Raising the payscale for many second and third tier players over a handful of superstars is probably a net win for the union.

Anyway, that’s my one-paragraph semi-conspiracy payroll theory. As Stephen will explain later today, the club is going to have to make several tough decisions if they’re serious about getting under the $189M luxury tax threshold two years from now, but for now we don’t have to worry about that. The Yankees will again spend an absurd amount of money of their 40-man roster in 2012, far more than any other team.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Breaking down the payroll, part three

Robbie doesn't like a pitch, time to go for a walk. (Chris Pasatieri/Getty Images)

If you’ve been following the Yankees for long enough, you’re well aware that their games usually take an eternity to play. They have patient batters who work deep counts and an offense that scores a lot of runs, and playing in the AL East means they face a bunch of teams built the same way. More pitching changes are made these days made as bullpens become more specialized as well, and that lengthens the game quite a bit. The Red Sox had the longest average time of game at 3:13 in 2011, and the Yankees were second at 3:08. That’s a lot of baseball.

Although we have a general idea of why the Yankees played such long games in 2011, I wanted to get an idea of who specifically was responsible. To do so, I used the “pace” data available at FanGraphs. It’s compiled from PitchFX and tracks the time between pitches within a single plate appearance, so not the time between the last pitch of one plate appearance and the first of the next. The average pace across MLB was 21.6 seconds last year, with both leagues right there (AL was 21.6, NL was 21.7). Let’s break it down into the three major components of the team…

Starting Lineup

For the most part, we can deduce who the culprits are. Nick Swisher always seems to take his sweet time between pitches, as does Derek Jeter. Mark Teixeira doesn’t spend much time fidgeting around between pitches, and neither does Curtis Granderson. Let’s look at the pace data…

(min. 350 PA for ’11 and 1,000 PA for ’09-’11)

Cano is second only to Carlos Pena in both samples, and not by a small margin either. Pena leads him by 1.6 seconds in 2011 and 1.9 seconds from 2009-2011. That’s pretty nuts, the guy takes nearly half-a-minute between pitches. Cano ranking so high surprised me, but it makes sense when you stop to think about it. He’s always walking around the catcher and umpire and fixing his gloves between pitches. It makes sense. The rest is as expected, with Jeter, Gardner, and Swisher ranking well up there and everyone else further down the pack.

For what it’s worth, there’s basically no correlation between pace and wOBA. Using the ’09-’11 data, I get an R-squared of 0.0898 when I plot the two stats against each other. An R-squared of one means a perfect correlation while an R-squared of zero means no correlation. It’s worth noting that several former Yankees — specifically Jerry Hairston Jr. and Hideki Matsui — also rank pretty highly in terms of 2009-2011 pace. There are 234 players in our 2011 pool and 225 players in our 2009-2011 pool, just so you know.

Rotation

I don’t think there is anything more annoying in baseball than a pitcher who takes an eternity between pitches. Josh Beckett drew some ire last year for his painfully slow pace, and Steve Trachsel was not-so-affectionately known as The Human Rain Delay for the same reason. Rafael Betancourt also has a reputation for taking his sweet time between pitches. Let’s see where the Yankees starters ranked in 2011…

(min. 100 IP for ’11 and 300 IP for ’09-’11)

Unsurprisingly, the slowest working pitcher in baseball last year was Beckett at 26.9 seconds. In fact, the four slowest working pitchers last year all have Red Sox ties: Beckett, Brad Penny, Erik Bedard, Jon Lester. Penny is a few years removed from his stint in Boston, however.

The Yankees’ five starters last year are pretty high up there on the leaderboard, which consists of 137 players. Colon and Nova didn’t qualify for the 2009-2011 player pool, which is 126 guys deep. Two of the three Yankees that did are really high up there, and it’s worth mentioning that former Yankees hurler Javy Vazquez is at 22.8 seconds while Andy Pettitte is at 21.3 seconds. Click the link below the table, and you’ll see that the top of the pace leaderboard is dominated by AL East pitchers, which I doubt is a coincidence. The whole lotta grinding out at-bats happens in the division.

The old adage says that a pitcher who works quickly helps keep his defense on their toes, but it doesn’t show up in ERA (R-squared of 0.0006 using ’09-’11 data). That doesn’t mean it’s not true though, the defense may very well be more “into the game” with a quick pitcher, but it hasn’t yielded any significant benefits in recent years. Just FYI, the R-squared between pace and FIP is 0.00007. For all intents and purposes, that’s zero correlation.

Bullpen

Before I dug up the bullpen data, my hunch is that relievers would have a slower pace than starters because it’s the late innings and there are often men on base; these guys then to take their sweet time and think things through before each pitch. Turns out I was right in terms of the league average (by about two seconds), but not as far as the Yankees go…

(min. 30 IP for ’11 and 90 IP for ’09-’11)

Our player pools are 202 and 183 players deep for 2011 and 2009-2011, respectively. For whatever reason, the Yankees bullpen works substantially quicker than its peers and at about the same pace as the team’s starters. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. It could be Mariano Rivera‘s influence on those around him, could be a team philosophy, who knows. The guys they’ve brought in from other teams were also quick workers, so maybe it’s just dumb luck.  That’s pretty interesting though, and it’ll take some work to determine why this is the case and if it’s actually helping any.

The slowest paced reliever over the last three years wasn’t Betancourt (he was second), it was Jonathan Papelbon at a whopping 31.7 seconds. That seems rather excessive. Papelbon and Betancourt (30.8) were the only relievers over 30 seconds while Jonathan Broxton was at 30.0 seconds on the nose.

* * *

Although the Yankees and Red Sox averaged the longest games — and the Mariners averaged the shortest at 2:46 — there was basically no correlation between average time of game and wins in 2011 (R-squared is just 0.066). Some teams just play longer games, and the Yankees are one of those teams thanks to guys like Cano, Swisher, Gardner, Sabathia, and Burnett. Are long games irritating? Sure, but they come with the territory at the moment, so just enjoy the extra baseball.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

The Yankees And Pace

Phil Hughes provides a good example of this phenomenon. While many of us have moved on and have lowered their expectations when it comes to Phil, we still cling to him as a guy who has long had potential and could eventually capitalize on it. However, his myriad injuries and the stunted development associated with them have altered Hughes such that the previous scouting reports no longer apply. He was a guy with a fastball at 91-94 that he had stellar command of, an excellent curveball that he could finish hitters with, and a changeup that always seemed to be on the cusp of being a usable pitch. However, the updated scouting report reads differently:

Hughes, turning 26 in June, has a classic power pitcher’s build, coming in at a solid 6’5″ and a listed 240 pounds. However, he seems to have put on a bit of weight in recent years, and the Yankees sent him to their fat camp last spring to try and shed those extra pounds. The Yankees have long liked his makeup and believe he has the mental ability to be a successful pitcher in this league, but his conditioning is something worth keeping an eye on.

As for his stuff, he is primarily a two pitch pitcher, featuring a fastball and a curveball. While he has used a cutter fairly often in recent years, he seemed to have slowly removed in from his repertoire over the course of 2011, a smart decision considering its ineffectiveness throughout the season. He occasionally mixes in a changeup, but it is not much of a pitch and is unlikely to become a major part of his arsenal.

His fastball sits at 89-92, and is pretty straight. However, he does have very good command of the pitch in the zone, and he uses that ability to draw plenty of foul balls and get ahead in counts. His curveball, once a pitch that he could throw for strikes and use to finish hitters off, has become adequate at best. It was always a bit loopy, but it had a lot of depth and hitters would swing over it. It has lost some of that depth and just tumbles up to hitters, who can usually catch up to it and foul it off or drive it somewhere. He has also struggled to throw it for strikes in recent seasons. Hughes tinkered some with a spike curve last season, but did not see great results and is unlikely to lean on it in the future.

This two pitch combination allows him to get to two strikes by way of his fastball, but once he is there he has nothing to finish hitters off with. He cannot throw the fastball by them, and they are not swinging at the curveball out of the zone. Eventually, Hughes makes a mistake and hitters are ready to pounce.

Outlook: Hughes did have a major jump in innings from 2009 to 2010, so it is possible that some of his 2011 struggles could be attributed to overuse. But unless he recovers some of his velocity, has his command go from good back to great, or recaptures his old curveball, Hughes profiles as a #4 starter or possibly a good reliever. His fastball command is still good enough to keep him in a MLB rotation, but he needs to find another positive attribute in his arsenal to surpass his current back-of-the-rotation ceiling. As he nears his age 26 season, the likelihood that he does that grows ever more slim.

That is my scouting report on Hughes at this point. I’ve discarded the one that marked him as the next Yankees ace, as those expectations simply do not match the skills that Hughes currently brings to the table. I hope to be forced to pull that old one out of the trash, dust it off, and use it once again, but I do not expect that to happen. It is time to stop judging Phil Hughes on what he could have been, and start addressing what he is.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Scouting Phil Hughes

(Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

While I’m sure Nick Swisher doesn’t need defending among RAB’s audience, his name has continued to arise this offseason due to a variety of factors: (a) As the Yankees’ only position-player free agent among the starting nine next offseason, he would seem to be the most tradeable; (b) Some folks are still irrationally mad at Swish for underperforming in three separate and completely unrelated small sample sizes; and (c) the Yankees need pitching, which is basically an extension of (a).

Here’s the problem with any trade speculation involving Swish: Nick Swisher is (as I mentioned in the above-linked piece) the living and breathing embodiment of the ideal New York Yankee on offense, a sabermetrician’s dream of patience and power who led the team in OBP in 2011 with a .374 mark despite starting the season in a horrid slump, notched the best BB% on the team, at 15% — a massive jump from 2010′s 9.1% not to mention the third-best mark in the American League — and finished 11th in the AL in pitches per plate appearance (20th in 2010 and 2nd in the league in 2009).

He’s really quite good at what he does, random postseason struggles aside. This becomes even clearer when taking a quick scan of the 2013 outfield free agent class:

Left fielders
Josh Hamilton (32)
Eric Hinske (35)
Mark Kotsay (37)
Carlos Lee (37)
Juan Rivera (34) – $4MM club option for 2013 with a $500K buyout
Luke Scott (35)
Delmon Young (27)

Center fielders
Michael Bourn (30)
Marlon Byrd (35)
Melky Cabrera (28)
Curtis Granderson (32) – $13MM club option with a $2MM buyout
Angel Pagan (31)
B.J. Upton (28)
Shane Victorino (32)

Right fielders
Matt Diaz (35)
Andre Ethier (31)
Torii Hunter (37)
Mark Kotsay (37)
Carlos Quentin (30)
Juan Rivera (34) – $4MM club option for 2013 with a $500K buyout
Ryan Spilborghs (33)
Ichiro Suzuki (39)
Nick Swisher (32)

Before the Dodgers extended Matt Kemp, fine, I’d have been alright with letting Swish walk in favor of Kemp patrolling whichever section of Yankee Stadium’s outfield he wanted. However, as it currently stands, none of next year’s pending free agent outfielders are better than Swish. The only names on that list that I would maybe think twice about are Carlos Quentin and Shane Victorino, and Swish has been a better offensive player (.370 wOBA) than both outfielders over the last three seasons (both Victorino and Quentin have matching .354 wOBAs during that same timeframe). Yes, we all know Josh Hamilton’s been a beast (.388 wOBA over the last three seasons), but he also can’t stay healthy and will presumably be looking for a huge deal. With all of these players essentially the same age, I’d go with the devil you know who has also played in 150 games in each of his three seasons in pinstripes.

But wait, there’s more. Here’s a rundown of Yankee right-fielders over the last 20 individual seasons, sorted by OPS+:

Swish’s three seasons didn’t end up ranking quite as high as I’d have expected, although that’s really more a tribute to how beastly Paul O’Neill was in pinstripes than any shortcomings on Nick’s part.

However, the case for Nick Swisher as one of the best Yankee right-fielders of the past two decades really comes into focus when we look at the cumulative numbers (minimum 300 PAs, sorted by fWAR), courtesy of FanGraphs:

Who knew Danny Tartabull was a regular OBP machine? The Yankees have gotten some pretty robust offensive production out of their right-fielders for a large chunk of the past 20 years. As you can see, Swish is tied for third-best wOBA with Bobby Abreu and Tartabull, but more importantly, has been considerably more valuable than both men in a similar amount of PAs due to his superior glovework.

While the Yankees may not see another Paul O’Neill for a good while — believe it or not, O’Neill actually has a decent case for one of the top Yankee rightfielders of the last 50 years (2nd-highest fWAR, 3rd-highest OBP, 6th-highest wOBA) — they’ve arguably got the second-best thing in Nick Swisher.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

How good has Nick Swisher been compared to previous Yankee right-fielders?