Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Why Did the 2008 Yankees Disappoint?(Starting Pitching Edition)
Although Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy disappointed this season, overall the pitching staff was not nearly the biggest problem on the team. Projecting pitching kind of sucks, so when I wrote this entry back in March, I looked at two different scenarios. Scenario 1 was more optimistic about pitcher health, Scenario 2 added in more missed time and more scrub time, although I had no idea that the Yanks would go back to Snacks at some point.
For the player comparisons I’m going to use the optimistic scenarios, then at the end I’ll also look at the pessimistic one on a team-wide level. I decided to break the pitching up by starters and relievers, so here’s the starting pitching part.
Scenario 1
FR: FIP converted to runs allowed
FIP: Fielding independent-pitching
RSAR: Runs saved above a replacement level pitcher.
I think a lot of us took Chien-Ming Wang for granted. No, he’s not as good as C.C. Sabathia or Johan Santana. News flash, hardly anyone is. Is he an ace? Well, he’s one of the top 30 starters in baseball. Whether that makes him an ace or not is open to interpretation I suppose.
Wang pitched right around where he was projected to, rate-wise. The problem is he got hurt and only pitched 95 innings, which cost the Yankees 13 runs. Thankfully it’s not an arm injury and Wang should be back at full strength next year. If you are wondering how the Yankees are going to move from 89 wins to 95 or so, here’s one of those missing wins(hopefully).
Thanks to a dreadful end to his season, it’s easy to forget that Pettite pitched well for a large part of 2008. Through July 26 he had an ERA of 3.76. It didn’t appear to be a fluke, as his FIP was 3.68 and his xFIP was 3.58 through that point.
Then, the wheels seemed to come off over his last 12 games, as Pettitte gave up 50 runs in 71 innings, an RA of 6.34. Interestingly, his FIP was only 3.72 and his xFIP was only 4.03 over this stretch. He just gave up a lot more hits on balls in play. This period coincided with a reported sore shoulder, so it’s possible Pettitte still has something left in the tank. I’m still not sure if I’d bring him back or not, although a lot of that depends on if Mike Mussina retires. Anyhoo, Pettitte was about six runs worse than expected.
Phil Hughes’s 2008 probably could have gone a little better. Instead of 160 good innings, the Yankees got 34 mostly awful ones. Hughes suffered a rib injury early in the year that supposedly affected his mechanics. When it got diagnosed it led to him being shelved for most of the year, although he ended the season on a positive note with eight innings of two run ball against Toronto in his last start of the year. Hughes was a 25 run disappointment compared to his projection.
As disappointing as Hughes was, Ian Kennedy was worse. Like Hughes, Kennedy failed to win a start. Unlike Hughes, his peripherals don’t show much promise, and he never really had Hughes’s ceiling. While his minor league track record is impressive, I have a feeling the Yankees have soured on Kennedy and there’s a very good chance that if he makes an impact in MLB it’ll be in another uniform. Kennedy was 29 runs worse than expectations.
After a whole bunch of disappointments comes one of the two best stories of the Yankee season IMO. Mike Mussina had a horrible 2007, putting up an ERA of 5.15 and for all intents and purposes he looked like he was cooked. When he started the year 1-3 with a 5.75 ERA, it seemed like just a matter of time before he was going to be out of the rotation. Some dolt even wrote a blog entry about it.
A funny thing happened though. Moose won his next five starts, putting up an ERA of 2.76 and saving his spot in the rotation. From there, he finished the year by going 14-6 with a 3.17 ERA, culminating in his 20th win of the season on the season’s final day. Most of us know that win/loss records are not really a good indicator of a pitcher’s skill since it’s so heavily dependent on run support, but we do know that Moose was great. Instead of being worth 10 runs above replacement, he was worth 40.
I don’t know if Moose is going to retire. I’d love to have him back for another season, even though I’d expect him to decline a bit next year.
Unlike Hughes and Kennedy, Joba Chamberlain kicked ass as a starter. Unfortunately, he came up with tendinitis in Texas and that cost him about a month. When he came back he went back to the bullpen since the Yankees felt he wouldn’t be able to stretched back out into a starter in time. This gave the ‘Joba should pitch teh eight’ clowns more ammunition for their silly battle, but the good news is that Joba wants to start, Joe Girardi wants him to start, and Brian Cashman wants him to start. Anyone with a brain should understand that 200 innings of Joba as a starter is more valuable than 80 innings of Joba as a reliever, even if you factor in leverage.
Oops, I went off on a tangent. Since we only had one season of data to project Joba in 2008, his projection was pretty conservative. Despite pitching 35 fewer starter innings than expected, he was four runs better than projected.
Since we’re looking at the optimistic scenario, I don’t really have anything to compare every one else who started this year with, but here’s how they did collectively.
Update: Fixed the two charts below.
And here’s how it all looks in terms of RSAR (assuming replacement level for all non-projected pitchers)
So we have the starters collectively being worth 67 - 6 RSAR, a total of 61. The optimistic projection had the Yankees’ starters giving up 498 runs, and the pessimistic had them giving up 518 runs. Yankee starters actually gave up 528 runs. So overall, the difference between the optimistic projection of the starting pitching and what actually happened is -30 runs, and between the pessimistic projection and what actually happened it’s -10 runs. I guess I need to be more pessimistic next year.
One last thing, if you look at the ERA compared to FIP for the Yankee starters, you’ll see a fairly significant difference, on the order of around 60 runs. FIP regresses BABIP to average (aka, an average defense), so this ties into the -40 defense the Yankees played this year. There’s still a 20 run difference, which is most likely an issue with hit location. According to the team stats page at the Hardball Times, the Yankees didn’t give up a higher percentage of line drives than the average team.
So you can add starting pitching to the 2008 Yankees’ list of underperformances, although it’s not nearly as much to blame as the offense is. That won’t stop some people from blaming Hughes/Kennedy and the non-Santana trade of course…
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