I made a lot of jokes that if/when Andy retired that I’d cry and do my best Greek mourner impression and be generally inconsolable. It seems I got that out of my system when he left the Yankees for Houston after 2003, however, because while I felt a little tinge of sadness it was nothing over the top. My in my head response was “Goddammit” and then I got caught in a coughing fit and made a face and sent some kind of swear out over my Twitter account I think.

And then, strangely, the next thing that popped into my head was “Who is Alex [Rodriguez] going to talk to now?” The last few seasons of watching Alex run and immediately find Andy for hugs, talks, whatever have been really amusing and I’m sad that there won’t be any of that to watch out for during not very exciting games anymore.

I first remember seeing Andy pitch at a game in 1995 that I went to with my mom’s best friend. It was a Friday night and we were missing the X-Files to attend a game where the Yankees couldn’t get anything off Chuck Finley which was always aggravating. I didn’t really know who Andy was then, when we got home and my mom asked who pitched for the Yankees I told her “some guy with too many ts in his name”. I don’t have a path that I can trace from that moment to when Andy became my favorite baseball player but it happened at some point. I wish it was some kind of revelation I could relate that sounds cool and interesting but I’ve really got nothing to tell.

However it happened, though, I really loved Andy beyond the normal “I like watching this baseball player, he is good at his job” feelings. I got really nervous when he was pitching with runners on base, and I was known to cover my face with a cat/book/pillow when he was working “into and out of trouble”. It was very stressful–not just because of how I felt about him but because of his mound mannerisms. When a player you are very fond of is yelling at himself on the mound as he pitches it’s hard to stay calm. Obviously it usually worked for him (if it hadn’t he would have been branded with the HEADCASE label rather quickly) but Jesus it was nerve wracking to watch.

There was a lot of Hall of Fame and number retirement rumblings from fans pretty much as soon as the word got out that Andy was retiring so I also wanted to get this out of the way: I don’t think he really fits the criteria for either. I think that a lot of why Yankees fans want these things to happen is because of the love they feel for Andy, and really want to see him honored and not forgotten. I completely understand that, and it’s a shame that the Yankees do not have a traditional team Hall of Fame because he certainly belongs there. Nobody is going to forget about Andy, though, so I don’t get that fear. There are simply too many people that love him.

I think Andy should get a plaque in Monument Park like Allie Reynolds, and an Andy Pettitte day, and come to every Old Timer’s Day until he can no longer make it because he had a very good career and was very important to the teams he was on…but I just don’t see that jump to number retirement and the Hall. Maybe I view them a little differently, but when the Yankees eventually give 46 to someone new it won’t bother me. Perhaps it’ll even go to a young LHP who loved Andy, I always like when things like that happen.

Pettitte’s back was locked up, hamstrings tight, leg grabbed in G2 of ALDS. Pitched G3 in ALCS to give him extra time to recover.

Two things to take away from this:

1. Andy is tough as nails. We sort of already knew this but it needs to be acknowledged again. That’s ridiculous, to pitch through that and pitch as well as he did in both of his turns during the playoffs.
2. He might actually really retire this time.

Andy has always said he is going to do what is best for his family, and that is the number one consideration when he determines to come back every year but if he feels he is unable to stay healthy for a full year there is a real chance that he will bow out gracefully. Who can blame him for that?

I’m choosing not to think about it beyond being in awe of his condition plus performance for a few weeks.

Trenton Thunder 09-09-10

It was a huge pain getting in the park, thanks to Mr. Andrew Eugene Pettitte. It was expected but the lots were almost totally full when we got there and apparently Trenton packed 8,000 people into the park. Because of this we were not able to take advantage of the Thirsty Thursday $2 beers. But we had very lovely seats to see Andy so that was okay:

Waterfront Park, Section 17, Row C

Could not really ask for a better view of my favorite baseball player pitching than what I got last night. Hooray for awesome friends.

Because of the mess getting in, my friend and I missed Andy’s first out and how a runner got on first base but saw him induce a weak groundball for a doubleplay to get out of the inning as we dashed over to our seats.

The best part about rehabbing Yankees players is that they have to adhere to the minor league dress codes they set for their affiliates. In short: They wear high socks.

Andy Pettitte in ~high socks~

High socks rule. Andy used to wear high socks in MLB but then stopped. I don’t know why, it made me sad.

Andy Pettitte and Austin Romine

There’s not really a whole lot to say about how Andy pitched. He doesn’t have the fastball a lot of the guys you see in AA feature in terms of velocity but he’s a lefty, he hasn’t yet turned into Jamie Moyer and he has very good breaking stuff. The kids he faced didn’t really stand a chance. Eric Thames whiffed so hard at one point that he blew me over.

After Andy hit his four inning max, he went into the bullpen to hit his pitch count max (he’d thrown 51 pitches in the game and was supposed to throw about 65 total) Adam Warren came out to pitch. I saw Warren quite a bit last year on Staten Island, and I like him a lot as a prospect though I’m not sure if he’ll wind up as a starter in MLB.

Adam Warren

One of the things I was taken aback by was how aggressive Warren was with his fastball which struck me as different from when I saw him 2009. I don’t have an exact count but he threw an overwhelming number of them, exactly where he wanted, and got a lot of whiffs. I didn’t see much of his secondary stuff at all, but with the command he was showing it probably wasn’t needed for this start. Going forward, that will probably have to change. Everyone loves their fastball but you have to use your other pitches as well, especially if they need some work (which Warren’s do, though they are not bad).

I took a couple of videos of his throwing motion for the audience at home:

Warren finished up the night with a line of 6IP, 3H, 3BB, 10K. Two of the strikeouts were hilarious 2 strike foul bunts.

Beyond the pitching staff, Romine has looked very tired all three times I’ve seen him in the last month. However it is his first year catching full time in a full season league so it’s understandable that he’s fading a bit. He had a little trouble handling some of Andy’s breaking stuff (two Wild Pitches were charged but one was definitely a Passed Ball). I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the Arizona Fall League with him but I assume much of it will be work on his catching and that he won’t necessarily put in a lot of time playing in games.

Trenton doesn’t have much of an offense right now with Romine looking tired, callups and Marcos Vechionacci reverting into pre-2010 form. New Hampshire’s pitcher Zack Stewart was very good, and a lineup like Trenton features at this time doesn’t stand a chance.

There were two throwing errors charged to fielders last night (one to Romine, one to Luis Nunez) but honestly they were both on Vechionacci. The throw from Nunez did bounce the the throw from Romine was right there and he just didn’t catch it. A competent first baseman would have made both plays without much effort.

In the end, Trenton pulled out a win with a walkoff homerun by Rene Rivera in the 12th inning. There weren’t many people left in the park at that point–school night and at least half the park left when Andy came out of the game–but those of us that stayed got coupons for free WaWa coffee and bragging rights.

This video (not involving hitters hitting) is helping keep me sane. Maybe it will help you too.

Did You Know? The last homerun hit by any Yankee was Juan Miranda’s shot off James Shields 5/20. A whole 3 game series without a homerun is most unYankees-like. Send help. Send dingers.

The Yankees have re-signed Andy Pettitte for one-year at $11.75 million, the Post has learned.

The two sides quickly hammered out an agreement once Pettitte signaled he did want to play again in 2010 — and only for the Yankees.

The contract this time around is not incentives based, which makes sense. Last year, the team was worried that Andy’s shoulder/elbow/arm in general wouldn’t hold up and it turns out that it did pretty well. He only missed one start over the season, and once again finished up around the 200 innings mark. Almost all of his incentives were hit (not hitting the actual 200 innings mark was the last one, I believe), so it’s reasonable to expect that he’d do that again.

I am pretty happy that this year was drama-free compared to 2008 (retirement pondering station) and 2009 (money squabbling). This was obviously also important to the team since Brian Cashman stated that signing Andy was Priority #1, whereas last year they were in CC Sabathia land at this time. It probably made him feel important, plus I’m sure that whole winning the World Series thing puts you in a good mood.

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.

And I’m very happy to talk about his because he went through a stretch where he just wasn’t pitching very well. And unlike a most of his bad stretches, it was pretty long. Here are his splits by month:

And then something happened in July and towards the end he started pitching much, much better. Here are gamelogs for Andy’s last two months:

What’s caused this other than the completely berserk and unexpected strikeout surge? I’ve heard him say that his cutter and other pitches are working better, but I haven’t done the pitch F/X legwork to see if this is really true.

More balls in play are getting converted into outs, that’s for sure. Unfortunately we are still in a world without Game F/X and Hit F/X so I can’t comment on whether or not it’s because of how they’re getting hit, but his BABIP for August was a bit low (.267) whereas it was outrageous in June (.370).

Hopefully when regression kicks in, it’ll only be a slight pain and Andy can stay effective for the whole of September and October and the first week of November.

Here’s the basic stats:

CC Sabathia is giving the Yankees a lot of innings, and though he’s had some bad starts he has overall been very good. He had a rough April and has rebounded nicely from it, though there have been some bumps along the way since then.

Andy Pettitte is obviously underachieving quite a bit, or maybe that’s just his current level of skill. He was supposed to be the 5th starter this year, and he’s pitching like one. Unfortunately circumstances have changed and that’s not really true right now. What he is managing to do is give the Yankees about 6 innings a start, which is pretty useful. It will be more useful if he gets better, and if he doesn’t get better don’t be surprised if the Yankees look for someone to replace him.

A.J. Burnett’s basic line shows us what we all knew already: he throws a lot of wild pitches, walks a lot of guys, and strikes out a lot of them as well.

Joba Chamberlain’s 2009 season has been a hair-pulling experience so far: his ERA is very deceptive because of those 10 unearned runs, and he doesn’t give the Yankees very many innings.

And overall, the Yankees’ pitchers have been giving up a lot of homeruns. The short porch in right doesn’t help but it also doesn’t explain why lefty Andy Pettitte has suddenly seen his HR/9 spike at home.

Now that we have the basics of what’s going on, let’s take a look at some more of what is going on.

CC’s K/9 rate sitting at 6.66 is kind of scary. It’s a huge drop from his last three years when he posted K/9s of 8.93 (2008), 8.03 (2006) and 7.8 (2007). In addition to that, his walk rate is up a tick (it was just about 2BB/9 last year and 1.3BB/9 in his Cy Young year). Why is this happening? I have no idea, and both of these can improve in the second half but it is concerning. These changes turn CC into a very good pitcher when the Yankees need him to be an excellent pitcher.

Andy Pettitte has always been a guy who pitches to contact and seen a lot of hits get through, but has put up sustainable numbers in a few different ways. 1) His pickoff move; 2) Doesn’t walk dudes; 3) Lots of groundballs. The not walking batters probably being the most important part in the equation, especially as he doesn’t have a lot of pure stuff and needs to be more of a “Crafty Lefty”. Unfortunately, he’s not been so crafty and his BB/9 has ballooned. It’s not the worst it’s ever been, but whenever his BB/9 reaches 3.0+ the quality of his pitching drops dramatically. Maybe he’ll have one of those Andy Pettitte second-halves but it could just be age catching up. Step #1, though, is getting that walkrate down.

Speaking of walks, A.J. Burnett gives out a lot of free passes. Always has, always will. They seem to come in bundles and his ability to strike out guys at a high rate gives him a bit more wiggle room. His groundball rate is still very off from his career norm (about 1.5GB:FB), and it would be nice to see it get back where it is but other than being really frustrating to watch when he loses the ability to throw strikes there’s not much to complain about out of his pitching. The less flyballs he gives up, the less we’ll see drop over the short porch in right, though.

Lastly, the by far most frustrating of all Yankees starters: Joba Chamberlain. Here are some more advanced stats from Joba this year:

Joba’s fastball is not as explosive. You expect to see a drop here to a certain degree because he isn’t pitching in relief at all, but it should still be closer to his 2008 number than where it sits currently. In relief in 2007, he averaged 97MPH on the fastball so that 94 is probably just about where it should go (think: A.J. Burnett). But it’s not, though in his last start it was a lot closer to what it’s been. But why does he have so many starts where we don’t see that? It’s a mystery to me, and I think most people. It could have to do with the mechanical tweaks the Yankees say they had him do in Spring Training but I’m no expert and can’t comment there. All I know is that Joba should be able to break out a high 90s fastball when he reaches back like Justin Verlander but we haven’t really seen a lot of that.

F-Strike% and Zone% tell us another thing that we know: Joba simply is not throwing a ton of strikes. He starts behind in the count almost half the time and then continues to…not throw strikes. And on top of that, batters aren’t swinging at his stuff at much. But that happens when you stop throwing pitches in the zone.

And no, none of this will be miraculously fixed by putting him in the bullpen. Going into the bullpen doesn’t magically give you the ability to throw strikes.

It’s so rare for a young pitcher to come on the scene and destroy it like a Tim Lincecum that I think we all expected Joba to hit some bumps. The problem is that nothing is getting better and people are starting to get really irritated (this is helped alng by his “I think I pitched great!” post game blurbs recently).

I am trying to be patient but when you’ve got another member of the staff under-performing in Pettitte and one who has not been able to pitch well at all this year in Wang it’s very frustrating. If the bottom half of the rotation does not fix itself at least a little bit and the Yankees do not do something to add at least one pitcher better than Chamberlain and Pettitte, they are going to be overtaken by the Rays and miss the playoffs.

First, results only. Because as we all know, results are what are most important.

Hey, that looks like there’s some pretty okay and valuable pitching going on. Yeah, there’s a few bad games in there but nothing completely awful that immediately takes the team out of it, right? So there should be nothing to worry about.

Just for laughs, let’s take a closer look and include something other than the raw results. MOB is the total baserunners over the course of the game, it doesn’t include homeruns hit because nobody is on base after one of those happens.

With that next context, things don’t look so great do they? Including the Cleveland start where he was yanked out with a back problem, Andy has allowed 44 baserunners in 21 innings. That’s terrible. It’s Sidney Ponson-esque, even. He had some real clunkers before then too (with 5/18 being the one where he got the luckiest) but he seemed to rebound against Philly–4 runs in 7 innings isn’t great but it’s okay–before descending into bad. If you put lots of men on base, your luck will run out and they will eventually come around to score (another thing we saw first hand during the Sidney Ponson adventure).

Now Andy has always allowed more men on base than people would normally be comfortable with, but in the past has made up for it by having a decent strikeout rate and not walking anyone and getting a lot of groundballs.  He’s still getting those groundballs but his K/BB ratio has taken a nose dive from the 2+ you expect to 1.5 this year. His BB/9 is sitting at 3.73 and his K/9 at 5.67.

Only the foolish expected Pettitte’s 6.97K/9 from last year to hold up, but that 5.67 that he’s sporting now would be perfectly fine when you take his GB% into account if he weren’t walking almost twice as many batters. Thanks to that and an increased homerun rate (which is a bit flukey if you look at the gamelogs–four homeruns in one game will certainly bump that number up) , his FIP is 4.77 which is not what the Yankees really expected when they brought him back.

And on top of that, Andy’s just not putting in the innings you expect and laboring through games only to log in the minimum you want out of a starter (5 innings).

These things could all fix themselves, sure. Andy is known for having a good second half, and he did start out pretty well so the potential is there. However if something is wrong with him physically, as was hinted at when he was yanked out of the Cleveland game, the team has got to make him rest though. I don’t know if it’s the cause here, but we do know that they let him pitch through an “achy” shoulder with no rest last year and it did nobody any good. This year, Andy’s got an incentives based contract and there is no way he is going to willingly take a break so someone else (Girardi? Eiland? Cashman?) has to step in at some point. He’s pitching at his worst levels in years, and last year we saw that a Pettitte in decline was still useful.

Of course, this would be a lot easier to do if Chien-Ming Wang were pitching better and you could slip Phil Hughes in a few times. Still, I feel like if someone is looking winded (Andy’s fastball was pretty consistently touching 90 and his last start he hit that number just twice) you have to give them a break. Especially when that someone is almost 40. Stretch out Alfredo Aceves and have him fill in once or twice, maybe. Sure, that hurts the bullpen for a few weeks but it does give the team a better chance to win.

Andy’s first three starts in 2008:

Andy’s first three starts in 2009:

On the surface they look pretty similar but there are a few small things. I like that he is walking less batters (yes even one less a game means a lot–Tampa and Oakland do have guys who excel at getting on base), but I don’t like that he is getting a lot more air outs right now. Hopefully the groundballs will come as his secondary stuff starts working consistently well, it’s a minor nitpick for the time being.

I also really like that he’s pitched 7 innings in each game. After the Wang disaster, and Joba and CC not lasting very long the bullpen really needed some rest and Andy has been able to help out there.

So, three quality starts in a row. I don’t know how long it will last–especially since his next start is in Fenway–but I’ll take it. He definitely did not have his best stuff or control tonight and was let down by a certain third baseman who is not Alex Rodriguez a few times but he battled out of it. The A’s don’t really have a great lineup by any means but that middle three of Jason Giambi-Matt Holliday-Jack Cust is tough if only because they are patient as Hell.

Other minor game notes:

Brian Bruney’s streak of scoreless innings ended but he looked pretty good still. Holliday was a tough out for him, but he got it done.

The play of the game was Orlando Cabrera trying to bunt for a hit off Mariano, though. It popped up and Mariano just sort of reached out his glove. I wish I had a screencap but MLB.TV doesn’t put up the archives for local games until the next morning.