The batter doesn't know what's coming, but he knows it will be ... really ... slow ...
As the trade deadline approaches, I’m increasingly certain that the Yankees aren’t going to make a trade for a number two starter. The Yankees have a legitimately deep, talented farm system that they intend to squander with value that needs to be assessed carefully. That big, empty-the-farm pitcher isn’t available this year. Ubaldo Jimenez was that guy in 2010. He’s not in 2011. James Shields wasn’t in 2010, is this year, but probably won’t be traded within the division, if at all.
At the beginning of the season everyone took it as a given that the Yankees would be in the market for a starter, at all costs. At the time this made sense. CC Sabathia: BEAST, but after him the Yankees were looking to Phil Hughes who’d had a bad second half and the mercurial A.J. Burnett. Anyone with a pulse and an arm was in a position to serve as the fourth and fifth starters. And that’s precisely what the Yankees did with Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon.
A funny thing happened on the way to 2007 redux. Colon was surgerically repaired (do you believe in magic?) to his old form and Garcia had something left in the tank. Through 18 and 19 starts respectively, these two have given the Yankees 104.0 and 111.1 innings of 3.40 and 3.65 FIP baseball. Each pitcher has been worth exactly 2.0 fWAR.
For the entire season to date I’ve marveled at Colon’s stuff (Larry can testify that I was always a HUGE supporter) and been indifferent to Garcia for his lack of stuff. As a result, I’ve never bothered to investigate how they’re putting up solid numbers, until now. We’ll start with Freddy.
Make no mistake, Freddy may not have a single pitch that tops 88 mph, but he’s been excellent for the Yankees so far this season. His ERA/FIP/xFIP are 3.23/.3.65/4.11. His strike out rate is 5.98 per nine innings, which isn’t spectacular, but he makes up for it with a respectable 2.59 walk rate and a tiny 6.3% home run rate. No matter how you slice it, Garcia is getting the job done.
Anyone who pays attention to Al Leiter when he announces Yankee games will surely have heard him say that a pitcher doesn’t need to throw hard if he knows how to pitch. Garcia is the embodiment of that logic. Freddy’s fastball averages 87.3 mph, according to Fangraphs, and is his hardest pitch by a considerable margin. Garcia makes up for his slow moving heater (if you can call it that) with four other pitches that he throws at least 7.9% of the time each. He mixes in a slider, a split fingered fastball, a curveball and a changeup. The slider and the splitter make up about 45% of what he throws. All these pitches range in speed from just 72 mph to 81 mph, each breaking differently through the zone.
Garcia’s fastball is as bad as you’d expect such a slow, straight offering to be. It’s worth -1.01 runs for every 100 thrown, but that’s ok because his slider, curveball and splitter are all plus pitches, worth 0.72, 0.77 and 0.61 runs for every 100 thrown respectively, while his change is a neutral offering. In defense of what Al Leiter says, any pitcher with three plus pitches will be successful in the major leagues, regardless how hard he throws.
This portion of the post came about because Larry was wondering why Garcia had gotten hit so hard against the Red Sox and the Blue Jays, in what were really his only bad starts of the year. In light of these data, stopping short of breaking down the performance of my two least favorite Yankee opponents, I’m going to posit that Garcia was missing his spots against teams that force you to make your pitches. If Garcia hangs a slider or a splitter, good offensive teams will punish him. Fortunatley for the Yankees, he hasn’t done that a lot this season.
Should I throw my fastball, or maybe I'll throw my fastball? Definitley the fastball!
If Freddy Garcia needed a few paragraphs to break down what he’s done this year, Colon can be summed up in a single word: fastball. Bartolo Colon has only thrown fastballs this season, and every season for which Fangraphs has pitch type data. Since 2002, Colon has thrown his fastball at least 72.9% of the time. In 2009 he threw it 90% of the time. This season he throws it 83.4% of the time, which is to say always. To put things into perspective, CC throws his fastball 60.3% of the time. Colon is proud of his fastball, as Michael Kay would say.
And with good reason. According to Fangraphs, Colon’s fastball is worth 0.77 runs for every 100 thrown, making it the fourteenth most valuable fastball in the American League. His fastball lines up close to pitchers such as Michael Pineda, Ricky Romero and David Price, all of whom can pitch a little, last I checked. The results speak for themselves. Colon’s ERA/FIP/xFIP are an impressive 3.29/3.40/3.25. With a strike out rate of 7.96 and a walk rate of 2.34 Colon has been the second best pitcher on the Yankees.
Performance-wise, Bartolo’s one weakness is that he only throws fastballs. Occasionally he’ll mix in a below average slider (-0.40 runs) and an awful changeup (-2.86 runs), but if he throws 100 pitches in a game he turns to those two pitches just 15 times in total, about 1.5 times per inning. So, really, he doesn’t use them. This means that everything flows from that fastball. As we’ve all seen, when Colon is getting that filthy horizontal movement on his two seamer he’s practically unbeatable, but when he’s not he can implode quickly. Bartolo’s worse outings came about right around his injury, particularly just when he came back from the DL and has been good for two consecutive starts. Hopefully the worst is behind him.
Entering this season the Yankees were perceived as under dogs (to the extent that was possible) because of their uncertain starting rotation. The Bombers took chances on Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia and hit the jackpot, twice. To a certain extent, the problems the Yankees are trying to answer now are because these two have spoiled them so much. If Colon and Garcia had struggled the team would be looking for starters to make a push for the playoffs. Instead, these two have thrived, and the Yankees are legitimate contenders. Rather than becoming concerned that one of the two gets seriously injured this late in the season (a legitimate risk), I’m trying to enjoy the ride because it’s always fun to play with house money.
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8 Responses to Pitchers not named CC
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TIQ IQ
First, thanks KC (you beat Boston today, Yanks now 2.5 games back.) RRRRR Oakland As but you did clobber the Rays last night and hit ‘em hard today (Rays 10-8 win.)
Sabathia/Burnett/Garcia/Colon for the postseason is extremely risky esp. when Sabathia, the only sure guy to be an ace at best to a #3 at worst any given night, could suck, get injured, or get outdueled drawing Verlander, Tomlin, Weaver, Wilson, or Ugando depending on who the Yanks draw in the ALDS.
Could the 2011 Yanks win it all with the above rotation? I guess anything is possible but when you have a team with only three consistently good-hitting everyday players out of nine (Granderson, Cano, and Gardner), three bad everyday hitters (Jeter, Posada, Martin), two streaky ones who are closer to being bad than good and homerun hitters instead of all-around solid run producers (Teixiera and Swisher), and a grossly overpaid, aging, now often injured player (A-Rod, d.l. 2009 and this year) and no definitive #2 starter, it’s unlikely the team will win it all with that.
Let’s all be thankful Sabathia hasn’t made Scott Boras his new agent because if he did, Boras would probably want something like 8 years at $30M per for Sabathia because what are the Yanks gonna do, let him go?
It sucks that there aren’t enough top flight starters available in FA w/o huge question marks every offseason. Lee last year, CJ Wilson this year, it’d make the Yankees’ job handling its prospects easier.
I guess we’d have to step back and think about the Yankees’ two objectives: (1) win the World Series (2) win the World Series every year. They’re somewhat mutually exclusive. Objective (1) can be achieved by trading prospects for a Jimenez or Garza unabashedly. Objective (2) requires more prudence. The Yankees have, or should have, some idea of which of its prospects will eventually wear their pinstripes long term. These are also usually the ones necessary in a trade for Yankee level major leaguers. Unfortunately the Yanks don’t have enough of them, making their trade stack shorter (Im a poker player).
The Yankee farm system has a lot of depth, particularly players unlikely to contribute remarkably to the major league team. They’ve proven to be able to obtain mid-season salary dumps like Berkman, Kearns, Wood, Nady. This recent Beltran trade has gotten my attention. The Giants traded Wheeler, a top 40 prospect for a 2 month rental. The cost of talent appears to be rising. With revenues increasing across MLB, the Yankees’s financial advantage is slowly shrinking.
In order for the Yanks to achieve objective (2), they have to spend up in the draft and international free agency. The industry has shifted towards this practice. Bonuses are rising. Talented young players in the majors are locked up early at team friendly deals. This allows teams to spend up big in the draft/IFA. This means the value of prospects has risen. The Yankees’ will inevitably miss the playoffs for a period, and have to rebuild. The Jays and Rays have better farm systems. Their prospects will either be productive players for them, or will help obtain productive players via trade. The quality of their prospects mean they’ll be able to trade for players we won’t be able to.
On a side note, I think the Yanks see Montero as two things: (1) trade bait (2) DH/part time catcher. That they’ve kept him stashed in the minors suggests they’re leaning towards (1). It could be that they love Posado so much that they’re willing to see out his contract as a DH. But they could also be hiding Montero’s defensive flaws to protect his value as a catcher. It’s likely a combination of both. The league consensus already is that he’s a 1B/DH, hence there’s no need for the Yankees to persist with a below average DH going forward. With the Wild Card safely in their hands, it looks like protecting their relationship with Posada is more important than improving their A-Rod less lineup. Too bad. Had the Rays remained in contention, at least it’ll give us fans a better idea of what the Yanks plan for Montero.
RIP Hideki Irabu. Dead at 42 from suicide. From the NY Post.
real quick, Colon is pitching far better than anyone hoped for. One thing though, at the beginning of the season, when the top half of an inning was over the dugout cam. made a shot of Colon hawking this big loogy on his left arm, and rubbing it in, also has anyone noticed that smudge he has on the right bill of his cap?
Yes he throws a wicked fast ball with extreme movement, Lightning in a bottle? Probably not, probably something else is coming out of a bottle though.
Nothing will be said about it though until NY makes the playoffs.
With all that movement though who else thinks he’s loading up?
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Great read, Mike.
[...] the trade deadline approached, I became increasingly confident that the Yankees were going to be spectators. The Bombers certainly would have benefited from getting Ubaldo Jimenez, but there were enough [...]
[...] innings throwing only fastballs. The answer to Paulie’s question is that, while Bartolo has one of the best fastballs in baseball, A.J. has one of the worst. In fact, Burnett’s fastball is worth -1.15 runs for every 100 he [...]