Daily News sportswriter and TYU fave Mark Feinsand has an update on the 5th starters race. After yesterday’s masterful performance by Hughes, one which he was able to use his long-rumored but rarely seen changeup, it appears Phil is the clear front runner to land the #5 spot. He writes:
If you didn’t consider Phil Hughes to be the frontrunner in the fifth starter’s race before Tuesday night, it’s hard not to think of him that way now.
Hughes did precisely what he needed to, tossing four scoreless innings against the Astros for a save in the 4-1 win.
(Mariano Rivera pitched the fifth inning, prompting Hughes to tell reporters, “That’s a hold for Mo” as he walked into the clubhouse.)
In three outings this spring, Hughes now has a 2.08 ERA, giving up two earned runs in 8 2/3 innings. More impressive, he’s done so while fine-tuning his changeup into a pitch he can trust in big situations.
“I was really happy with my changeup tonight,” Hughes said. “I threw some in counts where normally I would never, ever do it and I got good results.”
That’s absolutely great news, and could transform him as a starting pitcher. In his early work as a starter, many hitters were able to fight off the fastball and pick up on the curve, leading to long at-bats and poor results. He has had much more trouble facing Lefty batters in 2007 and 2008, and even last year he showed a good sized split, though much of that work came out of the bullpen. The change is designed to give him an out pitch facing Lefties, since it tends to fade and drift away from them, inducing poor contact or a swing and miss. With his ability to command and control his fastball, along his plus-plus Curve, a change could take him to the next level as a starter.
Up today is Joba Chamberlain, who needs to show the Yanks something if he is to stay in consideration. According to manager Joe Girardi, time is running out if Joba wants to start.
“You’ve got to pick it up,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “We’ve told him that you’ve got to pitch now. We gave you those first couple of starts to get under your belt, and now you’ve got to show us. You’ve got to pitch.“
Who says Spring Training is dull?
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20 Responses to Hughes pulls ahead in 5th race
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I thought Hughes was supposed to be able to mow down minor leaguers?
I have no idea what this comment is getting at.
It’s the dreaded rooster…
I am saying I’m not all that impressed with Hughes ability to get minor league batters out.
Let us see him do this against a good teams starting lineup PLEASE….
That is fair. That’s why I was glad to hear everyone thought his stuff looked good and sharp- that is more important than the result.
Whether its Hughes or Joba in the 5th spot, won’t make much of a difference for ’10 team success. Bigger picture though…let’s say Hughes wins the 5th spot in the rotation, do you think this ends Joba as a starter for his career? Or do you the Yankees let him pitch relief this year and then stretch him out again for ’11 (Joba rules part deux?!).
I was just writing a comment about how it’s a bit strange to be pulling for Joba to take the fifth spot when Hughes is really my prospect-crush (I love Joba too, of course, Hughes is just kind of top of the heap for me), but I realized I really don’t know how I feel about it. I’ve wanted Joba to take this spot for so long, due to his more advanced innings-limit situation, that I don’t know if I’ve ever really considered what I’d think if Hughes were to just blow everyone away and make the decision for the Yankees. I do want to see Joba continue his development, since they’ve now put him in position to take a full workload and see what he can do with it… But either way one of these guys is, most likely (and probably less than ideally, as far as their development is concerned), going to work out of the ‘pen for at least a portion of 2010 if not all of it… And I certainly don’t hate the idea of Hughes building up his innings and working as a starter.
So in sum: continued confusion.
One thing that helps me wade through the fog… As good as Hughes may have looked yesterday, I still put very little stock in spring training performances. If the Yankees loved what they saw out of him that’s great, but the results are pretty irrelevant in my mind. So, if Joba shows decent performance from here on out… I still don’t see how they don’t give him the fifth starter’s job. I think Joba’d have to show a relatively high degree of unreadiness from here on out, coupled with one of the other starters making an emphatic case of himself, for Joba to lose this rotation spot.
RE: Your last paragraph. I sure hope thats true, but I don’t think the Yankees can justify giving Joba the spot if Aceves and Hughes continue to pitch as well as they have and Joba becomes just slightly better than he has been till now.
The way the “Joba to the pen” sentiment is building every moment in the media and by the general uninformed/bandwagon-jumping fan-base, it’s looks like a train speeding down a hill and ppl will revolt if the Yanks give him the job, unless he pitches much better today and his nect time out.
Eh, I disagree with thinking that what the Yankees can and can’t justify to a bunch of overreacting media members really matters much. If they choose Joba, for example, and the media disagrees, here’s how they’ll justify it: “We’re fortunate to have what we consider to be multiple strong options for one rotation slot, and we chose Joba because we’ve been developing him to be a starting pitcher and we feel putting him in that position gives this team the best chance to win this year and into the future. Our bullpen will be very strong, and we believe Joba’s talent and progress will be borne out in results in the 2010 season.” Period, end of sentence. Let the guys at the News and the Post cry about it all they want.
I really don’t think Brian Cashman, the rest of the F.O. and his management team make decisions based on what the media thinks is justifiable or what the uninformed/bandwagon-jumping portion of the fanbase might think. There’s no train speeding downhill here, they’ll make their decision based on the information they have at hand and not based on the ridiculous and uninformed opinions of writers or fans. Every time the Yanks are faced with a decision like this some fans start to fret about the Yankees’ hand being forced by the media or the fans, but it’s just not borne out in reality and it’s something we really need to move past.
I hear ya.
But what i’m sayin is, if the Yankees really had this line of thinking “We’re fortunate to have what we consider to be multiple strong options for one rotation slot, and we chose Joba because we’ve been developing him to be a starting pitcher and we feel putting him in that position gives this team the best chance to win this year and into the future. Our bullpen will be very strong, and we believe Joba’s talent and progress will be borne out in results in the 2010 season.” , then why in the hell have this dumb competition in the first place?!
Joba had 12 dominant starts in 2008 that everyone seems to have completely forgotten (except us, obviously) and they went thru all that crap last season to stretch him out. He has done enough in his career, IMO, to deserve a damn fifth starter job.
So if they really were convinced themselves that Joba is and always was a starter, and is ready to be a starter long-term, then why not end this whole charade, and pull Joba aside once and for all before spring training & tell him “Listen kid, don’t pay attention to all this BS. We beleive in you, and you are a starter, end of story, and the only way you end up in the eighth inning is if you completely bomb as a starter this season and we dont have anybody to setup for Mo come playoff time.” and then tell the media – once and for all – “Listen up fellas, you can stop fantasizing about all this “heir to Mo” crap and you can stop asking the coaches and players about it. It just ain’t happpenin.”
The fact that even after they went through all this with Joba to develop him till now they STILL dont want to give him a starter’s job easily, and the fact that Joel Sherman is saying “many Yankee officials were heading into spring already believing that Phil Hughes was going to be the fifth starter and that Chamberlain was going to be Mariano Rivera’s set-up man” shows me that, yes, there are still at least some in the organization that are not convinced he should be a starter over an eighth inning guy, and that, yes, the pissing and moaning of the fans and media has indeed gotten to them, because if not, they would never have had this dumb competition in the first place.
I mean, Sherman and his ilk have to be getting this inside info from SOMEWHERE, don’t they?
So it’s not such a clear-cut thing IMO.
That’s a different issue altogether, and there’s no way for us to know the answer, but there are certainly perfectly reasonable explanations other than that this is in fact a totally open competition. For one thing, they might not want to just hand the job to one of these guys without making him work for it. It just might be an organizational shift after what happened in 2008, they might want to make it clear to every one of these guys that they have to work for their spots. They also, even if they’re favoring Joba for the same reasons most of us are (innings limits, development, value, etc.), will be doing something less than ideal with at least one of their top two young pitchers this season as either Joba or Hughes will not be in the MLB rotation on Opening Day… So this Joba thing isn’t happening in a vacuum or in a situation in which he’s the only one whose development they’re protecting. So… For those reasons, they came into camp telling these guys they are all in the mix for that fifth rotation spot. Saying there’s a competition for a spot is not the same as a vote of no-confidence in one of the contenders, especially when you consider the various aspects of context attached to this situation. There are a few different layers to this sort of thing, it’s not so black-and-white.
Also… Please don’t mischaracterize what I’m saying or what I’ve said elsewhere in this thread. I’m not saying Joba is a shoe-in for that spot, nor that everyone with the Yankees believes he’s a shoe-in for that spot. You’re kinda confusing a couple of different issues here. What I said above in my other comment is that the management team isn’t going to make decisions based on the whining of uninformed/unintelligent media members or fans and that we, as more well-informed fans, shouldn’t go nuts every time some decision like this looms that the F.O. is suddenly going to freak out and make their decisions based on some sort of perceived media or mouth-breathing public pressure, not that there is no competition going on here or that everyone in the F.O. is in unanimous agreement on anything.
Joba and Hughes will have plenty of mound time this year and who will be the 5th starter just a interesting media story but not really a good baseball story. The strength of schedule, health and effectiveness of the staff all come into play in the long season. The bull pen needs strong arms that can pitch innings since managers have become fixated on around 100 pitches for starters. The Yankees have 3 strong prospects today that they can plug into the rotation and frankly it does not matter. I am equally concerned about the performances of Andy and AJ but everything will sort out as soon as the season begins in earnest.
If I was looking to stir the pot, I would be talking about run production of under 6 per game, but we all know we are still in Spring training.
I just don’t get it. Will ANYBODY acknowledge at least that Hughes faced the Astros’ SCRUBS?!
Don’t get me wrong. I love Hughes, and I want him in the rotation too, but with all the work the Yanks have gone thru already with Joba, I want him there that much more.
BUT, how can this be called a fair “race” if Hughes gets four innings against the Houston Shitloaders and Joba has to start against the Phillies starters, today’s NL version of the Bash Brothers.
There’s no comparison between the two. It’s not even close. Doesn’t anybody else think that Hughes has an unfair advantage over Joba in this “race”? Yesterday was the start of the “real” starts i.e. where results really will start to matter. So Hughes gets to face the Astros’ subs and everybody is fawning over the fact that he “even threw his changeup in key spots for strikes.”
Well, duuuuuuuh. These aren’t top quality hitters, of course he’ll be able to slip by a changeup or two.
Again, not to diminish Hughes’ outing, it definitely was big progress.
But what i’m saying is, that no matter what Joba does today, it’ll be hard for him to match Hughes’ outing, considering that he has much less margin for error against the Phillies if he tries to do what Hughes did, i.e. try to prove himself worthy of winning the starter’s job while also working on his secondary pitches.
If Joba tries throwing a change on the inner half against Werth, if he misses by an inch, it’s crushed.
I don’t think it’s fair to Joba that the Yankees are going to decide the roles, and quite possibly the future careers of, these two pitchers based on one or two spring training starts – remember, yesterday was the beginning of the “real” starts in the competition and they want to make a decision “sooner rather than later” so Hughes and Joba basically have two or three chances, that’s it.
And I can’t understand why nobody is mentioning the advantage Hughes has over Joba based on the quality of the hitters he’s facing vs. Joba’s.
Am I missing something?
You’re not missing anything… Take solace, everyone knows this is just spring training and the level of competition certainly must be taken into account.
Hughes looking good and impressing the Yanks with his stuff? Great. Hughes’s results against a spring training version of the Astros? Nobody (who matters) really cares.
So when Joba posts this line in spring, we shouldn’t be concerned?
ERA 27.00
IP 3.2
H 8
SO 2
BB 6
He’s facing the same scrubs that Phil is. I agree that Joba can still win the 5th spot but he DOES need to show something. I don’t want to pay $100 buck in May to watch Joba put up that line against the O’s and have the yanks be out of the game before the 3rd inning. If he is still pitching this way at the end of ST (assuming he can’t be sent to AAA), put him in the bullpen and let him work the kinks out as long middle relief. Let him take to starting job back from Phil like Melky did last year to Bret.
Yeah, he does need to improve somewhat. But if he looks good and the results are not there, that is a different story. Then it is up to the manager to judge.
Dude… 3.2 IP is the only stat in that line that you need be concerned with. You’re getting upset about 3.2 IP. 3.2 IP.
You’re also arguing against a straw-man, I never said Joba can skate by showing nothing of worth. You’re making up arguments to argue against.
A: It was 6 innings worth of pitches
B: my entire reply was not directed towards you…I apologize.
C: He hasn’t “looked good” since July 29th 2009 (I know, there are a ton of excuses for that). When considering the end of 2009, the 3.2 innings this spring could be a trend and not a blip. That’s what I’m worried about. I haven’t see good Joba in a long time.
D: Joba is STILL a starter no matter the outcome of this spring (Phil too).
If Hughes and Ace continue the way they are pitching, the East will belong to the Yankees. Add in Joba and Mo to close out the games with Malancen, Robertson, Marte and Park pitching middle relief along with either Gaudin or Mitre as your extra longman/reliever. Add to that the high power offense and there is stopping the Yankees on reaching number 28.
The reason Phranchise is currently the favorite for the 5th spot isn’t because he’s ‘mowing down minor leaguers’ (actually, he’s pitched against MLB hitters this spring as well.) It’s because he’s throwing a good change-up. If he can get lefties out with the change, he can be an effective MLB pitcher.