1. Scrubbed down litterboxes. Just merely changing the litter was not enough to distract me so I went the extra yard and scrubbed them down. When I finished, Rafael Soriano had recorded what I believe was his second 1-2-3 inning of the year.
2. Installed and updated custom firmware on my PSP. David Robertson is one of the best relief pitchers in MLB this year but he was due to face some of the best hitters in MLB this year and has a tendency to walk people in bunches if his control isn’t just right. There was only one way to keep my stomach intact: Not watching the inning. When I checked back in the inning was over and the Yankees were still in the lead though I still don’t know how it all went down, exactly. I can, however, play ISOs of my PSP games instead of listening to the WHIRRWHIRRWHIRR of the stupid UMD drive once again.
3. Cleaned the Hellish area around my computer up a bit. The bottom of the 9th was the least concerning of all innings, even with a Mariano in decline. I knew that if he retired Ortiz there wasn’t much to worry about. Not to belittle the three guys following him, but we’re talking about Mariano here. So I was able sort of to watch this half inning. It was a good inning.

For the sake of science I decided to try and not only get my cats to wear the ice cream helmets but to take pictures. Here are the results.

First off is Sonya who shoved herself in a dirty corner in the extra room to try and hide from me. She did not succeed and we managed to get a photo before she knocked the helmet off her head:

Sonya

Next up was the newest addition to our household, the chubby Miss Olive. She sat around for a while after the hat had been placed on her head before bucking it off, making her the easiest subject.

Olive

Last was Blue, who I did not manage to get the helmet on. He freaked out every time it got near his head, and this picture is the closest we got to him wearing the damn thing. We even tried distracting him with some cat treats and sneaking up on him while he was sleeping but neither worked.

Part of Blue, part of me, Chris' thumb or something and the helmet nowhere near Blue's head

I managed to not get maimed while doing this though Blue spazzing out did give me some minor scratches on my stomach and arms.

I would have liked this better if I could fill in the names myself instead of picking from a list. I stopped at 8 because there are people not available from the list to pick that I would put before the remaining candidates.

The inclusion of Reggie Jackson who only played for the team for five seasons on these lists always irks me. I also understand that he’s there because this is made for the common man and not the nerd Leo who is wondering how you could possibly leave out Red Ruffing!

I think Alex will be on the list when he retires, he is pretty close now.

If you’re wondering who Bill Dickey was and why I’m so high on him, feel free to educate yourself.

The first was a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship. I wasn’t able to get a very good picture of it because of the glare:

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Cruise ships do not normally come this close to RCB, making it a rare sighting.

Next up was a huge cargo ship. These are the most common type of large ship, but as they are very big I always find them very fun.

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The last ship came by much later in the game, and it was another cargo ship albeit a different kind.

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Sometimes these ones have a huge number of crates stacked on the deck, making them much more impressive. Still, a big boat is a big boat. Or ship, I suppose, I don’t want to offend any of the serious maritime fans out there.

As a not boat related aside, Kelvin De Leon hit a homerun over these trees in Left Field.

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A good night on ole Satan Island. I will not talk about the Yankees game, though.

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Expect the Yankees to be big players in the free agent market this year. Although Brian Cashman has been quoted as saying that Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes are ready to go without any significant innings limits, the team is probably wary of going with two young pitchers in the rotation again after 2008. A source inside the club expects Joba Chamberlain to start at AAA and said that the team has been looking into John Lackey to slot into the three spot whether or not Andy Pettitte returns for another season.

The world has gone mad on us all.

The other one everyone remembers is “What the Hell is ANSKY?” My mother’s best friend still wears her ANSKY shirt every now and then.

Here are a few more featuring the ANSKY guys

There were several others that I can’t find, and some that I did find but never found funny (like the Braves fan having horrible taxi cab driver luck) and that’s a shame. I know that Adidas is no longer the provider of shoes and all to the Yankees but it would be awesome if they put up a repository of all of them up somewhere.

AJ is a very different pitcher from either Andy Pettitte or CC Sabathia. He strikes out a lot of guys but then he also walks a ton (and his BB/9 shot up this year after being pretty good for the last two). Because of that, I’m not going to comment extensively on the individual graphs because I think more than anyone else it’s important to look at the full picture beforehand.

Going by FIP, AJ Burnett overachieved quite a bit some months. And in some ways, he probably did but in the end it evened out. After his last start for the season he’s got an ERA of 4.11 and an FIP of 4.31.

AJ walked a lot of guys this year. His BB/9 shot up from the 3.5ish where it normally sits to 4.28. He still strikes out a lot of guys but those walks hurt.

I have no idea how or why this happened but AJ’s GB:FB ratio dropped to about 1.0 when over his career it’s been more like 1.5. Is it a blip? I guess we’ll find out in 2010. This is the sort of thing that deserves a Pitch F/X look but I’m no expert and don’t feel that I can ably tackle that issue.

Not the best of OPS against you’ll find, for sure, but not horrible I suppose. Walking as many guys as Burnett did this year will of course boost that number quite a bit. I felt this deserved a further breakdown because of the oddity of AJ:

Looking at all of this, I think it shows what we all know: AJ is a good pitcher with some weaknesses (such as free passes). If you troll through his gamelogs you’ll see a lot of good starts and then some amazing starts and completely awful starts mixed in. Overall, I think the Yankees got what they were looking for from Burnett this season. Sure, they would have loved to sign two CC Sabathias but I don’t think anyone thought he’d be consistently brilliant. The two extremes that often come out are what makes him so frustrating to watch and why it’s so terrifying to think of him pitching this October (and hopefully November!) and I’m sure in four years we’ll be crying everytime he takes the mound but this season he delivered what you could reasonably expect from him. And as an added bonus he was healthy all year again, which nobody expected.

Again, I’m doing these now because the absolute last run through the rotation is probably going to feature abbreviated starts unless something special is happening and that’s honestly pretty unlikely.

Andy is a guy who has always had ups and downs. He had an awful May–there’s no way around that one–and then two months where we found out later he was a bit achy. June, July and September all featured the usual assortment of quality starts and clunkers. His FIP says that maybe he was getting a bit unlucky those months but when you put a lot of balls in play that tends to happen.

August sort of came out of nowhere and Andy somehow lead the AL in FIP that month, don’t ask me how that happened but it was pretty obviously not going to keep up.

In the end, the Yankees got what they were expecting out of Andy which is an ERA somewhere between 4 and 4.5 and a good number of innings put in.

Looking at this it’s pretty easy to tell why he was so horrible in May, kinda bleh in September and amazing in August.  The quality of competition (Seattle, for example) helped for sure but strikeouts are strikeouts.

One thing I found troubling about this season is that his BB/9  is .5 higher than his career norm. Was it an aberration? We may never know since his future is not locked up, but perhaps his pitching through some minor injuries hurt his command.

Interesting that Andy Pettitte was a groundball machine in the month where he performed the worst. But then again, maybe not so much as he gave up 7 homeruns in May which may indicate that he was just getting hit hard, and hard hit groundballs often find holes.

Other than that, it’s pretty standard Andy recording a few more flyouts for his groundouts. His numbers are down from his normal GB/FB ratio but that’s might be just a blip. About 10% of the flyouts he’s gotten this year have been infield pop-ups so maybe that’s the difference.

This is the sort of thing a Pitch F/X expert could analyze, but I am not one so I am not going to make an attempt at that.

Just in case you weren’t sure about how awful Andy was in May and part of June, here’s another way to look at it. A simplified way to look at this is batters facing Andy hit him like Robinson Cano hits everyone. That’s pretty bad unless he’s pitching for the other team, which Andy was not as far as I know.

Unlike May, in June his numbers are bumped by some real clunkers but he actually had a few good starts as well, and then he went on a roll before leveling out a bit in September.

Overall, Andy has had the season that was expected from him. Would I make him the #2 in my playoff rotation? No, probably not when you consider the quality of pitcher he’d be facing from the ALCS on and that his home/away splits show that he has pitched rather badly in Yankee Stadium and pretty well on the road this year.