Phil Hughes wasn’t supposed to pitch well last night. He was supposed to go out and give up eight or nine or ten hits and a bunch of runs against a weak lineup (missing its best hitter) and gracefully bow out of the rotation in favor of Ivan Nova. That didn’t happen. He gave the Yankees a reason to keep him in the starting rotation, and now things are … complicated.
“We have to talk about this,” said Joe Girardi after the game. “Maybe we stay [with a] six-man rotation through another time. I don’t know what we’re going to do at this moment, but I’m happy with what I saw tonight, and I really liked it.”
I’m in favor of sticking with a six-man rotation for at least one more turn through the rotation, and not just because I’d like Hughes to make another start. The other guys in the starting staff, CC Sabathia and Bartolo Colon in particular, are on pace for relatively large workloads and a few extra days of rest during the dog days of summer seems like a pretty good idea. The Yankees have a sizable lead on a playoff berth and can afford to be conservative this month. It seems odd to talk about having too many starters given how unsettled the rotation was in April, but this is where we’re at.
Nova starts on Thursday against the same White Sox lineup Hughes shut down last night, though Paul Konerko might be back by then. I suspect he’ll pitch well and the picture of what should be done won’t be any clearer. It seems silly to determine who does and who doesn’t deserve to be in the rotation on a start-by-start basis in this marathon of a sport, but that’s what seems to be happening right now. In a perfect world, both Hughes and Nova would be starting because you want to see if the former continues to make progress while the latter simply keeps doing what he’s been doing over the last three months or so. That just might not be feasible.
So now all we can do is wait. Wait and hope that Nova dominates the ChiSox on Thursday and makes the decision for the brain trust even harder. The Angels aren’t a great offense (.310 wOBA) and neither are the Rays (.313), so it would be nice to see if Hughes can build off last night’s start and maybe, possibly get back to being the guy he was in the first half of lasts year. That’s the best case scenario for the Yankees regardless of how well Nova pitches, and I think they owe it to themselves to see if last night was a sign of things to come or just a blip on the radar.
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