Here’s where we are up to this point (two weeks ago or so) in the season:

Click for the full-size version.

July was a good month for Yankees pitching. That wonderful difference between ERA and xFIP means that they didn’t give up as many homeruns as expected with a normalized HR/FB rate.

Let’s take a quick look at the breakdown for the month:

Click for the full-size version.

Looking at this, you can see that the rotation was 1) Very good; 2) Pretty much performed (as a whole) as their peripherals said they would. Don’t mistake this for every pitcher in the rotation being awesome,we’ll take a look at that a little further down.

The bullpen has been very good as of late, and their numbers in July reinforce this. Relievers can and do often outperform their peripherals such as HR/FB%. It’s not necessarily a skill or something you should count on as repeatable but it’s not an uncommon occurrence in the limited amount of innings relievers pitch. Take, for example, Mariano Rivera’s career HR/FB rate of 6.3%. And no, not everyone is Mariano—not even close—but do remember that he pitches quite a lot of the relief innings put in by the Yankees bullpen.

Click for the full-size version.

Last month is eerily similar to the first month of the year, no? Anyway, since it’s silly to pretend the rotation was all performing on that level let’s take a look at how each member fared:

To the shock of no one who watches baseball CC Sabathia was the anchor of the Yankees rotation. He was very, very good and his numbers are a very large part of why the overall rotation numbers looked so great.

Andy’s FIP is exaggerated by the 2 1/3 innings he pitched (walking 3) before getting pulled with a groin injury. We miss him and he should come back before I hang myself after watching Dustin Moseley pitch (it’s not Moseley’s fault he just is what he is, and that is not very good).

The reason Burnett and Sabathia have such big differences in their FIP/xFIP is that they gave up so few homeruns in July (big old duh, I know). To be specific, AJ gave up 1 and CC 0. Hard to believe about AJ specifically, but there you have it.

Javier Vazquez was who he is, and Phil Hughes has been working through a bought of Babypitcheritis.

To be fair, Hughes’ numbers are exaggerated by two bad starts. He also had a very good start and two ok starts. Then again, that sort of month is Babypitcheritis in a nutshell. I’m sure he’ll be fine.

Click for the full-size version.

The bullpen went from horrifying to hooray pretty quickly and stayed that way. This is thanks to David Robertson turning things around (which I knew he would because he is clearly powered by my love), Boone Logan somehow turning into a good pitcher (I don’t get it either, but I’ll take it as long as it lasts), no more Chan Ho Park (sorry things didn’t work out, buddy) and so on. Life’s been good lately. No complaints!

Let’s kick this off with the usual staff overviews.

Well, it stayed mostly flat. That’s not bad as a whole. Probably not what the Yankees were expecting but that’s what happens when some guys pitch terrible and some guys pitch really well. And that’s generally how baseball goes.

Here’s a focus on the rotation’s year so far:

June was the first big stumbling block for the Yankees’ rotation. When Javier Vazquez was bad early in the year, everyone else was good. In June, A.J. Burnett was flatout awful and Phil Hughes hit a few bumps. Here’s the individual rotation results:

A.J. gets a special star for having a HR/9 of 3.52 for the month of June!

Javy is crawling back to where he should be, his strikeout numbers have been picking up and his walks have been ticking down. As has been discussed to death he will always be hurt by homeruns, but that’s just how it goes. I’m not overly concerned about him outpitching his peripherals at the moment because they are improving. He also had a very weird start in Arizona where he walked 2 guys but only struck out 1 over 5 innings (4R/ER). Over the course of a year, those things work themselves out and get lost as blips.

Phil Hughes had a few rough starts, including one where he managed to give up 7 runs to the Mariners and fail to retire Rob Johnson. It happens, and he’ll just have to work through things like that and make adjustments. I believe he can do this, and so does pretty much everyone else so it’s not anything to be concerned about.

Here’s the K/BB stacks for the rotation:

That sure is a red bar you’ve got there, AJ.

Finally, the bullpen:

The bullpen was much better in June than May for a few reasons:

• Their numbers are always skewed by Mariano Rivera, who pitches a lot of excellent innings.
• David Robertson pitched a whole lot better last month.
• Joba Chamberlain only had one terrible blowup all month (yay).

Imagine what this would have looked like if Chan Ho Park could get his act together? Oh, to dream.

That’s all I’ve got this month, stay tuned for the next installment of As The Graphs Turn.

First off, here’s the usual ERA/FIP/xFIP comparisons:

In a nutshell: May not as good as April. If you’ve been watching the games, you probably figured that out by yourself.

The Yankees rotation pretty much matched their peripherals as a whole in May. This is only part of the story, however, and I think it’s worth looking at the pitcher breakdown here.

The things that stand out here:

• Javy Vazquez really improved a lot in May. Which isn’t that shocking because it would be hard for him to repeat the awfulness in April. The end results (ERA) were not pretty but the FIP/xFIP are very encouraging, as has been his recent string of starts.
• C.C. Sabathia put together a very nice April and then had a really awful May. I hope this is just his one month blip for 2010 because it wasn’t very pretty to watch.
• Andy is probably due for some bad starts soon, which will be painful but I think everyone has been waiting for it.

Yep. The bullpen was pretty bad in May, at least in terms of results. They gave up a lot of homeruns. It sucked but it’s already gotten better (except for Chad Gaudin who is struggling hardcore).

Lastly, the obligatory K:BB graph for the starters:

Andy doesn’t strike out a lot of guys (except when facing the Blue Jays I guess), the good news is he also does not walk a lot of guys. The low strikeout numbers are what drag his FIP and xFIP down, of course.

Phil Hughes walked 11 batters in 3 starts (18IP) in April and then 8 in 6 starts (38 2/3 IP) in May. That’s what you might call an improvement. The first month, he was getting somewhat lucky but cutting down that walk rate has helped out his peripheral stats a lot. What he’s doing is still not really sustainable but cutting down on the walks dramatically is a good sign because if he keeps that up, he’ll keep on being awesome.

CC’s K/9 ratio in May was 6.38 which is not what you expect from him. It’s about a strikeout off from what you get from normal, not beastly, CC and just helps to highlight the struggles he had last month.

And that’s all I’ve got for this month. Hope you enjoyed the pretty bars with numbers in them for May!

Exhibit A: GROSS

Besides having to shave that thing off his face, he got some okay results for the team. They released him because they only had one space in the bullpen free coming out of Spring Training, and he cost too much for what he offered. He wound up back in Oakland where he produced some not okay results.

Everything except ERA tells us that there wasn’t a gigantic difference in the way Gaudin pitched for the two teams. With the Yankees he outperformed his peripherals and with the Athletics he underperformed them. Either way those peripherals are not that impressive.

There’s more to it than just this than just “Wow, Gaudin isn’t that good”. He strikes out a good number of batters and his walk-rate while not great is not terrible. His biggest weakness is that he has got tremendous platoon splits during his career. He is decent enough against righties, but lefties kill him.

Here are his splits from this year:

Not what you expect to see from Gaudin considering his career splits:

Over the course of a full season I’d expect Gaudin to gravitate more towards his norms, since that’s what players tend to do if nothing else is wrong with them. Relief pitchers are volatile little creatures and their bad spots can be extremely ugly, as anyone who watched the Yankees bullpen pitch for the first few weeks of May witnessed.

As a depth move for a beaten down bullpen, Gaudin makes a lot of sense if he is deployed properly (against as many RHB heavy parts of lineups as possible) and he also hopefully boots Boone Logan into limbo for a while. I approve of anything that gets me a temporary reprieve from watching Boone Logan pitch.

Since there’s not a whole lot of data out there yet I am just doing the basics. In case you’re not familiar: FIP is a statistic that only takes the things the pitcher directly controls (Walks, Hit Batters, Strikeouts, Home Runs) into account. xFIP normalizes the home run rate at the league average because pitchers all tend to have around the same rate on HR/FB% unless something weird is going on.

There are some measurements that take batted ball types into play like tRA and SIERA but I’m not including them in this round, maybe I will for May.

With that out of the way, here’s how the Yankees pitching staff did in April according to these three stats:

Very nice especially considering how bad Javier Vazquez has been. Compared to last year, it’s much much better. Thank you for a nice April, pitching staff. I expect them to come back to earth a bit when the rotation sees some more balls fly over the wall but it shouldn’t get too much worse if Vazquez or whoever replaces him pitches decently.

The bullpen has been shaky on and off but is bolstered by Mariano Rivera having a well, very Mariano Rivera month.

Next up is a look at the starters and their K:BB ratios:

What I am most impressed by, and what is probably the least sustainable is that A.J. Burnett is not walking dudes. This is a revelation because walking dudes is A.J.’s specialty. His strikeout numbers are down but I expect those to climb along with the walk rate.

Hughes has walked a few too many but I think that’ll get better as he goes on and “learns how to pitch” as people love to say. His start today against the White Sox was a nice start for that.

The next graph doesn’t mean anything really because of the sample size but it made me laugh and also cry at the same time so I decided to include it:

In April, the Yankees rotation gave up 10 home runs and 5 of those were from Javier Vazquez. This does not include his recent disaster start against the White Sox. CC gave up 2 and everyone else gave up 1. This is not going to hold, but hopefully everything gets spread out nice and easy instead of coming in bunches.

Here’s everyone’s HR/FB% for April, which should correct itself to 10-11% by the end of the year:

Little Phil is going to get pretty hard with a correction if he doesn’t start getting more groundballs. But I believe that he can. 55% of batted balls being flys is ridiculous and not likely to hold up, even if he does wind up with a pretty high percentage when it’s all over. His LD% is also pretty low so expect that to change. He’s had a great, weird, month and even as everything evens out you can expect him to be pretty good going forward.

What does May hold? Well, the Yankees rotation is going to give up a few more runs than they did over April but you can still expect them to be good. I have no idea what is going on with Vazquez so I can’t comment on that, that’s for the Pitch F/X experts and scouts to talk about and I am neither of those things.

Oh and also CC Sabathia is awesome.

This year I added inherited runners and inherited runners scored for relief pitchers because it always drives me crazy at how much I have to dig to find those numbers. Now they’ll be in an easy place for me (and anyone else interested) to find.

Relievers:

Starters:

I’ll try to keep them updated after every game, but it’ll probably wind up being something more like every two or three games.

Guys like Bruney, I’ve learned, will always break your heart. The cycle works something like this:

1. Guy has great stuff! It’s hard to find guys with raw stuff like this!
2. Guy does not throw strikes very often, misses his spots by two feet so lots of the strikes manage to be meatballs. It becomes painful to watch him “pitch”.
3. Amazing month-long period where stuff and strikes come together to make outs without runners on base. Could it be real??
4. All the strikes have gone away again.
5. But he’s got stuff! It’s hard to find guys with raw stuff like this!

Eventually it happens enough that the player in question is outrighted, shipped off to another team mesmerized by his stuff or his contract expires and is not renewed.

And so today Brian Bruney has gone the way of many like him, and I wish him the best. Maybe he’ll be one of those guys who finally finds it and doesn’t lose it at some point in late July. But he broke my heart and I’ll never forgive him for that.

With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at each area of the team and see what exactly they have as of right now.

And also celebrate that we are not a team like the Mets who want to compete but have a large number of holes in their lineup and not really a lot of resources at their disposal.

Starting Pitchers

Right now the Yankees rotation for 2010 looks like this:

SP1 – CC Sabathia
SP2 – AJ Burnett
SP3 – Joba Chamberlain
SP4 – Andy Pettitte
SP5 – Phil Hughes

That’s a pretty good rotation, even if 3-5 are only league average. AJ Burnett is who he is, there’s nothing that you can do about that except hope beyond hope that he has a third injury-free season in a row. Hughes and Chamberlain both have innings limits, of course, but neither of them are dangerously low.

There’s a feeling that the innings limit this year for Joba royally screwed up his progress as a pitcher, but that’s pretty stupid. Here’s why, in brief:

• He didn’t bounce between the bullpen and rotation.
• The Yankees listened to him when he said he preferred to pitch once every 5 days instead of getting extra rest and that’s why he had the abbreviated outings.
• The only other thing they could have done was send him to AAA, which may not have been a bad idea but I’m sure the same people would have been crying about it.

A young pitcher who has never been healthy for a full year before showing some unevenness in performance is not unexpected and it does not mean that he’s been ruined. I too wanted to punch myself watching him pitch sometimes but it doesn’t take a genius to realize his problems were not rooted in having a few three inning starts.

Infield

1B – Mark Teixeira
2B – Robinson Cano
3B – Alex Rodriguez
SS – Derek Jeter
C – Jorge Posada
C – Francisco Cervelli (backup)
UTIL – Ramiro Pena(?)

The infield, other than backups, is pretty much defined for the next bazillion years. Not really much to say other than “hey it’s pretty good.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they re-signed Jerry Hairtson Jr since he’s very versatile and has a decent bat.

Outfield

RF – Nick Swisher
CF – Melky Cabrera/Brett Gardner (super tandem)
LF – Mystery person

The need here and DH is clear. I don’t think the Yankees are going to break the bank on Matt Holliday after the spending spree last December, and I’m not sure if they’re really interested in bringing back either Johnny Damon or Hideki Matsui nevermind both. However they have to do something because the rotating DH idea is horrible and you can’t have both Cabrera and Gardner starting. The free agent market isn’t very appealing if Holliday isn’t actually in the picture so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a trade.

They’ll also need a backup OF for the corners.

Relief Pitchers

CL – Mariano Rivera
LRP1 – Damaso Marte
LRP2 – Phil Coke
RP1 – David Robertson
RP2 – Alfredo Aceves
RP3 – Brian Bruney
RP4 – Chad Gaudin
RP5 – Sergio Mitre

Mitre is included because the word is the Yankees want him back, he clearly is not going to be in the rotation from the getgo and I don’t think he as any options left (though that would be pretty cool).

Similarly Bruney is coming back because the team apparently wants to burn 1.5 million dollars for the Hell of it.

Other than those two, the bullpen is pretty solid and I don’t think we’ll see any tinkering there.

Here’s the final wrap for the season. As you can see, the team took a big hit in September but that’s what happens when you’ve got Joba pitching bad and guys like Chad Gaudin just pitching.

Here’s the final tally for the season as a whole:

And just for fun, here’s 2008:

And before you cry oh God the pitching was so much better last year, how is that possible?

• Offense, as a whole, was down last year. That 4.28 ERA was good for 8th in the American League. After that, you start getting into the truly awful pitching staffs like the Orioles and Rangers.  That 4.28 this year was good for 3rd in the American League.
• Reliever ERA and FIP is easily inflated by things like Jose Veras being awful for two months. This is why it’s useful to look at it broken down by month. It’s also only so useful to look at the entire bullpen which is often a revolving door of Anthony Claggetts. The important relief pitchers for the Yankees are: Mariano Rivera, Phil Hughes, David Robertson, Alfredo Aceves, Phil Coke, Damaso Marte. The righties are all good-to-excellent and the lefties kill lefties.

So there you go. Because of the demise of Chien-Ming Wang’s body and pitching ability, things didn’t go as planned and the staff isn’t as rocksolid as was hoped but it’s not terrible. The biggest issue I see in the playoffs is that AJ Burnett and Andy Pettitte both have consistency issues (and with AJ it’s more like will he be awesome or awful). If there were a way to ensure that the good versions would come out, I’m sure the Yankees would have looked into that but there’s not so let’s just hope the two faces act plays in the team’s favor.

Last year he rose quickly through the minor leagues, as you expect a 25 year old mostly polished guy to do. You may remember he even came up and made two starts for the Yankees at the end of the year to relieve of us the agony of Darrell Rasner or Sidney Ponson or someone similar starting. In any case, through four levels of professional baseball in the US, he put up these numbers:

Not mind blowing, but pretty solid. Again, those numbers at A+ and AA just show how advanced he was compared to the rest of the league, which you hope for given his amount of polish and lack of upside.

After his 2008 season, Baseball America ranked him as the #7 prospect in the Yankees system (probably due to that polish and of course his proximity to the majors). They note that none of his four pitches grade as a plus but all of them are pretty good and because of this conclude that he needs a solid defense behind him. Their end note:

Aceves resembles Yankees 2006 first-rounder Ian Kennedy but features more command, pitchability and experience. He has a leg up on Kennedy and Phil Hughes for a rotation spot in New York in 2009.

This was, of course, written before the Yankees went out and signed AJ Burnett and CC Sabathia and brought back Pettitte but their scouting on him is pretty spot on. Their conclusion is faulty in that I don’t think the Yankees ever really considered Aceves as a serious contender for a rotation spot. Yes, he has solid pitches and very good command but they were looking for more than the average he could provide there.

So he started off the season at Scranton and was recalled for long relief in May. Since then, as anyone who watches knows, he has been doing very well. Why? Well, I am not going to pretend to give an in-depth Pitch F/X analysis or anything here but I think there are some of the more important factors:

1. He throws strikes. Lots of them. Getting ahead of a hitter quickly puts even the best batters in a bind if you just pound the zone. If your stuff is good, like Aceves’, it will very often work in your favor.
2. Even in relief, he uses all four of his pitches. Most relief pitchers really only have two: a fastball and something else. If their out pitch isn’t working, it’s hard to go to something else. Aceves doesn’t fit the prototype of a hard-throwing reliever, but that’s not always necessary if you can keep the batter on their toes. Especially if you are only seeing them once in a game.
3. Since moving into a relief role with the team, he has a K/BB ratio of 4.14. Even though he doesn’t come in and strike out the side, he doesn’t give runners many free passes (his BB/9 stands at 1.75) which always helps prevent runs from crossing the plate.
4. Although his peripherals have been good, he has been getting a little lucky. His BABIP is currently .249 and he is leaving 90% of runners on base. His FIP stands at a bit below 4 right now, which means he’s still pitching well enough but perhaps a little over his head. At some point, that 90% LOB% is going to drop though and he’s going to look human. It happens.

I really do think that Aceves will continue to be successful in a relief role with the Yankees. While you don’t normally see the more finesse types in that role, it clearly is working pretty well. He’ll normalize a little–you can’t avoid that, it happens to everyone–but as long as he has not atrocious defense behind him he should continue to bolster the bullpen.

He was a great find by the Yankees Front Office and their International Scouts, and after yesterday’s amazing 4 inning lockdown of the Blue Jays he deserves a standing ovation. All hail the Bullpen Ace.