Andy Pettitte will forever be remembered as the last winning pitcher at Yankee Stadium. A week and a half ago, he threw five solid inning to earn himself the W against the Orioles in the Yankee Stadium finale. While the fans gave Pettitte, in potentially his last start, a huge ovation, the last few months of the season were not kind to Pettitte, supposedly one of the anchors of the Yankee rotation.

After the Yanks and Joba Chamberlain downed the Orioles 13-3 on Wednesday, July 30, everything was coming up roses for the Yankees. Counted out in May, the Yanks were four games behind Tampa Bay and just one game the Red Sox for the Wild Card lead. That tantalizing glimpse of postseason hopes would fade the next day.

Andy Pettitte, 12-7 with a 3.76 ERA, would draw the start against Jon Garland and the Angels. While the Yanks would plate eight, Pettitte gave up nine. Over the next few weeks, the Yanks would slip in the standings, and Andy Pettitte couldn’t buy an out.

From that July start until he shut it down early due a sore shoulder, Pettitte would make 11 starts and win just two of them. He would go 2-7; the Yanks would go 2-9. Pettitte threw 65 innings to the tune of a 6.23 ERA. He allowed 87 hits and 22 walks while striking out 51. Opponents hit .323/.374/.461 against him.

On the surface, Pettitte’s numbers didn’t change that much during that 11-start run. Over his first 139 innings, he had a K/9 IP of 6.92 and a K/BB of 3.24. Over those final 65 innings, he would strike out just over 7 per 9 innings, but he would strike out just 2.31 per walk. With the worse walk rate and the higher hit rate, Pettitte’s overall numbers slumped.

Watching the games, it seemed as though Pettitte just ran out of steam in August. The velocity on his fastball was down, and he couldn’t locate his pitches as well as he had been earlier in the year. While Mike Mussina adjusted to a new physical reality, Pettitte was trying to pitch as he always had but with little success.

Had Pettitte and the Yanks won three more of his 11 starts — or even four more — the Yanks would have been that much closer to the playoffs by mid-September. But it was not to be, and as the Yankees face a tough off-season, Andy Pettitte’s status, if he choose not to retire, will be front and center on the agenda. If the Yanks can find a way to ensure that first-half Pettitte shows up for a full year, they’ll be set. If not, I’m not sure for how much they should rely on Pettitte next year.

During packing day at the Stadium today, Andy Pettitte stopped for a chat with the reporters. Pettitte hasn’t made a decision yet on 2009 and is still firmly on the fence. It sounds, however, that Mike Mussina may be retiring. I never thought I would want to welcome back Mussina over Pettitte, but after their respective 2008 campaigns, if I had to pick one, Moose would be my guy. For all this, the Yanks still plan to, somehow, add some experienced pitchers this off-season. Who those will be is anyone’s guess.

Andy Pettitte’s 2008 season went out in style; he won the final regular season game at Yankee Stadium. Now, as Pettitte deals with shoulder tendinitis, the Yanks have shut him down for the season, and the rumblings about his career have started up again. Pettitte will play in 2009 for either the Yankees or no one. While I’m not sold on the idea, the team seems willing to have him back. The proverbial ball is in Andy’s court. If he wants to pitch, the Yanks will have him; if he wants to hang it up, he’ll have gone out with a win in the final game at the House that Ruth Built. That’s not a bad way to go.

You can never have enough pitching. It’s the cliche that rings true every time you hear it. So if Andy Pettitte wants to come back, the Yankees should welcome him with open arms. Peter Abraham caught some quotes from the lefty which indicate that he’d be open to coming back next year should the Yankees want him.

“I look at that ballpark next door, and it makes you want to play there. It’s wonderful to look over there and think how special that would be,” he said. “I came back here to try to help this team win and win in the playoffs.”

In seasons past, Pettitte has been concerned about his family and being away from seven or eight months of the year. That seems to be less of a concern now. He says of his in-season home in Westchester:

“We love it, we really do. It feels almost as much as home as Houston does sometimes,” he said. “The people have been so nice to us.”

As for his kids, well, at this point they’re at the age where they can appreciate their dad being a major league pitcher. Pettitte says that they’d try to talk him out of quitting if it came to that.

Abraham also brings up Pettitte’s off-season workout routine, or lack of it. He’s worked hard since Spring Training, but his off-season workouts, less than he’s used to, might explain why he’s fading in the second half. Let’s hope that’s the case. This way, he can get back to working out as normal this winter, and give the Yankees a solid lefty in the rotation for 2009.

Late yesterday afternoon, Mike reported the news, via Mark Feinsand, that Andy Pettitte may miss his next start. Well, when word of Feinsand’s story hit the Yankees’ clubhouse, both Andy Pettitte and Joe Girardi issued denials, and now the story is different. As Feinsand writes in his updated post, Pettitte will start on Sunday but could earn himself an extra day of rest the next time through the rotation. Clearly, Pettitte isn’t 100 percent; his post-All Star Break numbers are terrible, and he could be suffering from the ever-popular fatigue. We’ll see how this one develops, but the Yanks can ill afford to lose Pettitte right now.

Via Mark Feinsand, southpaw Andy Pettitte has been experiencing some sort of stiffness is his throwing arm, and may not be able to make his start this Sunday in Anaheim. This probably explains why Pettitte has sucked lately. The simple solution is to stick Darrell Rasner in that spot. When it rains, it pours baby.

(Save us, Phil)

As the Yankees — without Jorge Posada and Alex Rodriguez’s anchoring the middle of their lineup — struggle to score runs, the team has come to rely upon their starting pitching to keep them in games. While the back end of the rotation has been in flux, Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina have so far done their jobs and both lead the team with six wins. Where the Yanks’ pitching has faltered, however, has been with Andy Pettitte.

Over his last five starts — a period of time that seems to correspond with the Yanks’ less-than-stellar hitting — Pettitte has not been his reliable self. He’s put together a truly forgettable stretch of pitching. Over 27.1 innings, he’s given up 35 hits, five of them home runs, and nine walks while striking out 24. He’s 0-4 over that span with a 6.26 ERA. Yesterday’s Pettitte effort counts as a Quality Start, but he’s probably just as unhappy as the rest of us were with his forcing in a run by walking the Mets’ number eight hitter with two outs.

During this stretch of time, opponents are hitting .315 off Pettitte with a .372 OBP and a .477 slugging. Basically, with Pettitte on the hill, opposing hitters are putting up Magglio Ordoñez-like numbers. That’s not going to lead to many Yankee wins.

For Pettitte right now, the key stat seems to be the batting average on balls in play or BABIP. Over the course of the season, Pettitte’s BABIP is .333 while a pitcher will, on average, see a BABIP of .290. For the Yankees, this is good news. Luck dictates that Pettitte will stop giving up so many hits at some point soon. He’s bound to regress to his career mean and become a more effective pitcher.

But at the same time, Pettitte’s defensive-dependent pitching numbers raise something of a red flag. His line drive numbers are down this year and his fly ball numbers are down this year but he’s giving up many more groundballs — 53.3 percent of all balls put in play this year compared to 47.7 percent last year — than he has in the past. The Yankee defense, then, isn’t doing a very good job of turning the ground balls Pettitte is surrendering into outs.

Something has to give here, and it will. Petttitte’s BABIP will decline, and the Yanks will hopefully grab a few more batted balls. The team certainly needs Pettitte to be more effective than he’s been over the last month. The success of their starting pitching depends on it.

Chad Jennings is always thinking. He’s got a decent idea for the start of the season, wherein the Yanks would place Andy Pettitte on the DL. He’d be eligible to return on Saturday, so it wouldn’t hurt the Yanks rotation. They’d go Wang on Monday, Moost Wednesday, Hughes Thursday, IPK Friday, Pettitte Saturday. Of course, this doesn’t have the effect of splitting up Wang and Pettitte, which many think will be good for the bullpen. It does, however, open up another bullpen spot for a few days, which could be valuable in the season’s early going.

The AP reports that Andy Pettitte threw a successful bullpen session this morning and is now on target to start the third or fourth game of the season. To keep a retroactive DL stint an option, Pettitte will face Minor Leaguers on Saturday or Sunday depending upon how his back responds to today’s pitching. Mike Mussina will, in all likelihood, start game two against the Blue Jays.

In other pitching news, the Yankees have apparently claimed Felix Heredia off waivers from the Reds. With the minors stocked with better arms, I shudder to think why.
Update by Joe: As many have pointed out, this seems to be a technical error on ESPN’s part. Rest assured, there is no Heredia redux.

We knew it was a possibility, but now we’re seeing reports that Andy Pettitte will not start on April 2. Mike Mussina will go in his place. After that, it’s either Pettitte or Hughes for the third game, with the other likely going on the fourth. Isn’t this basically the same deal as last year?