Monday, April 28, 2008
Wang and Melky
Behind a Melky Cabrera HR and seven scoreless innings by Chien-Ming Wang, the Yankees beat the Indians 1-0 yesterday. On a team that's been loaded with underachievers to this point, Cabrera and Wang have been great.I wondered if Melky had changed anything in his approach that could be verified statistically, so I used the ever valuable fangraphs.com to see what his secondary stats may show.
| Year | AVG | OBP | SLG | IsoD | IsoP | BB/PA | K/PA | P/PA | LD% | GB% | FB% | BABIP | xBABIP |
| 2006 | .280 | .360 | .391 | .080 | .111 | .107 | .113 | 3.656 | 17.2% | 49.5% | 33.3% | .310 | .292 |
| 2007 | .273 | .327 | .391 | .054 | .118 | .070 | .111 | 3.670 | 19.7% | 51.2% | 29.2% | .301 | .317 |
| 2008 | .291 | .356 | .506 | .065 | .215 | .099 | .132 | 4.077 | 18.8% | 46.4% | 34.8% | .290 | .308 |
Melky's recovered some of his 2006 walk rate after dipping last year. He's also striking out more frequently, which may not necessarily be a bad thing if it means he's working deeper counts. He's seeing about 0.4 pitches more per plate appearances, which tells me he's not necessarily swinging at the first hittable pitch but perhaps is being more selective and looking for a pitch he can drive. He's hitting more fly balls than he hit last year, and fewer ground balls and line drives. Interestingly, if you use the LD% +.12 for his expected batting average on balls in play he shows as being slightly unlucky, so he's not necessarily overperforming right now.
As always, small sample size caveats apply here, but we should expect 23 year old players to improve. So go Melky!
Moving on to Chien-Ming Wang. The constant knock has been Wang's low K rate. I've shown that he does enough other stuff well that he was not a fluke, but what if he's added strikeouts to his repetoire?
| Year | HR/BF | BB/BF | K/BF | GB% | FB% | LD% | FB% | Avg Vel | SL% | Avg Vel | CH% | Avg Vel | SF% | Avg Vel |
| 2005 | 1.9% | 6.6% | 9.7% | 63.9% | 22.0% | 14.1% | 77.9% | 92.0 mph | 12.9% | 85.4 mph | 7.5% | 82.6 mph | 1.6% | 85.9 mph |
| 2006 | 1.3% | 5.8% | 8.4% | 62.8% | 20.3% | 16.9% | 75.5% | 93.1 mph | 14.7% | 85.6 mph | 4.5% | 82.1 mph | 5.3% | 85.8 mph |
| 2007 | 1.1% | 7.2% | 12.6% | 58.4% | 23.3% | 18.3% | 76.4% | 92.7 mph | 16.2% | 83.9 mph | 6.2% | 79.9 mph | 1.2% | 86.6 mph |
| 2008 | 0.6% | 6.8% | 16.8% | 52.1% | 24.0% | 24.0% | 76.1% | 92.3 mph | 19.7% | 86.3 mph | 3.3% | 80.0 mph | 0.9% | 86.5 mph |
Wang has struck out 16.8% of the batters he's faced this year, compared to 9.7%, 8.4%, and 12.6% from 2005-2007. The AL average is 15.8%. Yes, that's right. Wang is striking out more hitters than the average AL pitcher so far in 2008. What's he doing differently? He's throwing the same rough percentage of fastballs, but you can see that he's been incorporating more sliders into his arsenal each season. This year he's throwing it almost 20% of the time compared to 13% in his rookie year. He is throwing fewer split-fingered fastballs and changeups, but it certainly seems to be working.
Wang's ground ball tendencies have been weaker this year, although his HR rate is improved. The one area of concern I see is a higher than normal line drive rate (for him).
Wang has five wins for a team that has 13. But remember that he's not an ace.
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