Andruw Jones told reporters this afternoon that he is not on the ALDS roster. “I don’t deserve to be on it,” he said, telling us what we already knew. The roster is not due until 10am ET tomorrow and the Yankees have yet to official release it.
LDS Game Thread/Saturday Night Open Thread
Technically, the playoffs started yesterday with the Cardinals and Orioles winning the two wildcard play-in games. Those two games don’t really feel like the postseason though. Sure they counted, just ask the Braves and Rangers, but the whole one game, winner take all thing is weird. Anyway, the LDS round begins in earnest tonight, with two games on the slate. The Athletics and Tigers (Parker vs. Verlander) kick things off at 6:07pm ET, then the Reds and Giants (Cueto vs. Cain) will follow at 9:37pm ET. Both games will air on TBS.
Feel free to talk about those games or anything else (except politics) here this evening. There’s college football on somewhere, but really? Over playoff baseball? Not happening for me. You folks know what to do, so have at it.
Update: Hammel and Chen to start first two games for Orioles
6:16pm: Wei-Yin Chen will start Game Two, the Orioles announced. I assume Miguel Gonzalez will start Game Three followed by Joe Saunders in Game Four, but they haven’t announced anything beyond Hammel and Chen yet.
5:14pm: Buck Showalter announced this afternoon that Jason Hammel will start Game One of the ALDS tomorrow night. The 30-year-old right-hander pitching to a 3.43 ERA (3.29 FIP) in 118 innings for the Orioles this year, but he’s missed considerable time with right knee problems in the second half. Hammel has thrown just 8.2 innings since the All-Star break and none since September 11th.
Girardi Presser Notes: Rotation & Roster
Joe Girardi held his ALDS Workout Day press conference — which was broadcast live on MLB.com — this afternoon at Camden Yards. There were a lot of general questions about playing the Orioles and all that stuff, but here are the newsworthy items…
- Girardi announced that Andy Pettitte will indeed start Game Two behind CC Sabathia. Hiroki Kuroda and Phil Hughes will then follow in Games Three and Four, respectively.
- Girardi said the primary reason was Pettitte’s and Kuroda’s workloads. They wanted to give Kuroda, who threw a career-high 219.2 innings this year, some extra rest while not letting Pettitte go too long between starts. Splitting up the lefties wasn’t a huge concern.
- The Yankees have more or less finalized their ALDS roster, but they are not announcing it just yet. It’s not due until 10am ET tomorrow, and Girardi said it is still subject to change.
- Jayson Nix, who worked out at Yankee Stadium yesterday, is a possibility for the roster according to the skipper. Casey McGehee, Chris Dickerson, and David Aardsma have all confirmed that they are not on the roster in some way.
Key to Game One: Keeping Adam Jones in check
The Yankees and Orioles will open their best-of-five ALDS matchup tomorrow night in Camden Yards, which will be the first playoff game in the ballpark since 1997. The two teams split the season series 9-9 with the O’s scoring two more runs overall (92-90). They finished two games apart in the standings and were locked in a tight division race right down to the final game of the season. It should be a blowout on paper, but Baltimore has continued to exceed expectations all summer.
When the series opens Sunday night, left-hander CC Sabathia will be on the mound for the Yankees. It’s unclear who the opposing starter will be at the moment, but we’ll find out soon enough. Sabathia closed the regular season out with three dominant starts, allowing four runs total on 13 hits and four walks in 24 innings while striking out 28. He went exactly eight innings in all three starts. Sabathia made just three starts against Baltimore this season, allowing four runs in six innings twice (once in April, once in May) and five runs in 6.1 innings once (in September). He has dominated the Orioles throughout his career, pitching to a 3.12 ERA (~3.40 FIP) in 25 starts and 176 innings. These aren’t your older brother’s Orioles anymore though.
One of the biggest keys to Game One for Sabathia and the Yankees is stopping Adam Jones, Baltimore’s 32-homer center fielder. Stopping the other team’s best player is like, Captain Obvious stuff, but this is a little deeper than that. Jones is one of just six active players with at least 30 career plate appearances and an OPS over 1.000 against Sabathia, so he’s given him some problems in recent years. One of the remaining five players in Sabathia’s teammate, and only one other is on a postseason team…
PA | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | IBB | HBP | GDP | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Evan Longoria | 50 | 14 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 9 | 10 | 3 | .359 | .500 | .821 | 1.321 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
Alfonso Soriano | 46 | 13 | 2 | 0 | 6 | 10 | 6 | 9 | .333 | .435 | .846 | 1.281 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Kevin Youkilis | 46 | 14 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 7 | 8 | .368 | .478 | .711 | 1.189 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
Miguel Cabrera | 38 | 10 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 12 | 8 | 4 | .357 | .474 | .643 | 1.117 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
Adam Jones | 45 | 14 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 10 | 4 | 6 | .341 | .400 | .659 | 1.059 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Derek Jeter | 31 | 13 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 4 | .448 | .484 | .552 | 1.036 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Those three homers have come in each of the last three years. Jones took Sabathia deep this past May (solo shot in a 1-0 count), last April (three-run shot in a 2-1 count), and two Junes ago (solo shot in a 0-1 count). Notice the strikeout and walks totals, just six whiffs (13.3%) and four free passes (8.9%). They’re far better than Jones’ career rates (19.3 K% and 4.8 BB%) in the admittedly tiny sample size. Let’s take a look at a strike zone breakdown of where the Baltimore center fielder does his damage and where he struggles against southpaws, courtesy of Joe Lefkowitz’s site…
You can click the link for a larger view, but the gist of it is that Jones murders fastballs on the inner half and up in the zone. Catch too much of the plate with an offspeed pitch and he’ll crush that too, though most big league hitters will make pitchers pay for a hanger. TheĀ Baseball Prospectus Matchup Page shows us how Sabathia has pitched Jones in their 45 career matchups, and it’s pretty basic Sabathia stuff. Sliders down-and-in, changeups down-and-away, fastballs to both sides of the plate.
Given Jones’ strengths within the strike zone, Sabathia and the Yankees are better off pounding him away with fastballs before coming down-and-in with the slider (or burying a changeup). His spray chart against lefties over the last two years (via Texas Leaguers) suggests that Jones will reach out and poke outside pitches to right for a base hit, but he doesn’t hit for much power to the opposite field…
That career walk rate I mentioned earlier (4.8%) is an indication that Jones is not the most patient of hitters. Even this year, the best year of his career (to date), his walk rate was just 4.9%. Jones will help pitchers get him out, and in fact he’s swung at 40.4% of the pitches he’s seen out of the strike zone in each of the last two seasons. That’s the fourth highest rate in the game among qualified hitters, behind noted hackers Vlad Guerrero, Delmon Young, and A.J. Pierzynski. He will get himself out at times, but Jones isn’t an idiot. He’ll sit on the pitch if the Yankees keep throwing fastballs away, so expanding the zone and intentionally throwing some off the plate, especially later in the count, will be important.
Outside of Jones, two of the Orioles most productive hitters in the last month are left-handed — Chris Davis (190 wRC+) and Nate McLouth (125 wRC+). Sabathia should be able to handle both guys thanks to the left-on-left matchup and his vicious slider, but stopping Jones (and switch-hitter Matt Wieters for that matter) won’t be so simple. Sabathia has had some trouble with him throughout his career, and Jones’ tendencies suggest that staying away with the fastball before coming inside with the slider is the way to approach him tomorrow night. Much easier said than done obviously, location will be very important.
2013 Draft: Yankees will pick 29th overall
The Yankees finished the third best record in baseball (behind the Nationals and Reds) this season, meaning they will have the 29th overall pick in the 2013 Draft. A compensation pick for the Pirates failing to sign last year’s first rounder earlier in the draft pushes everything back one spot, which is why the Yankees aren’t picking 28th. I’ll get our Draft Order page up and running soon enough, but Conor Glassey has the preliminary order pieced together right here.
The Bombers have held the 29th overall pick once before, using it to take OF Slade Heathcott in 2009. Slot money for that pick was $1.625M this year, so expect a similar number next year. The Yankees could receive up to three supplemental first round picks depending on what happens with Nick Swisher, Hiroki Kuroda, and Rafael Soriano this winter. All three impending free agents (Soriano is likely to opt-out) seem like locks for qualifying offers (in the $13.3-13.4M range) and could sign elsewhere, sending those extra picks to New York.
Bring on the Orioles: ALDS matchup set
Two days after winning Game 162 and clinching the best record in the league, the Yankees finally know who they will be playing the ALDS. The Orioles beat the Rangers in Texas by the score of 5-1 on Friday, winning the first ever AL wildcard play-in game. Joe Saunders turned in an unexpectedly strong performance while the offense mustered just enough off Yu Darvish before piling on the bullpen. The Orioles’ always strong bullpen handled the final 3.1 innings. Here’s the box score.
The Yankees will now head to Baltimore for the first two games of the ALDS, which begins Sunday. Here are the start times and umpiring crew. Joe Girardi confirmed that CC Sabathia will get the ball in Game One, and apparently right-hander Jason Hammel will return from his knee injury to start for the Orioles. That is unconfirmed, however. Either way, it’s time for the postseason to really begin.