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.

So, here’s a table with the data from his first three appearances. I’ve included the data from his dominating Opening Day start in 2008 to compare.

I guess it’s slightly better in a vacuum compared to the awful from the first two starts, but it’s nothing compared to his killer sinker/fastball from 2006/2007/early 2008.

If you want to read a detailed analysis of what has changed with Wang, check out this post on RAB. The summary is: Last May, for some reason, his release point changed and he lost a great deal of both the horizontal and vertical break on his pitches as well as some speed. If you think back to last season, this makes sense. He was pretty killer for the first month and a half (though he had a stinker or two) and then all of a sudden started churning out a bunch of really bad starts and the good ones were the rarity.

It’s unclear why Wang’s release point changed. I did some digging around and I found a few articles where Dave Eiland talks about wanting him to throw more over the top but nothing solid. If it was an intentional move by Eiland, that’s pretty troubling since all signs point to this new release point being the issue. Especially when you consider that Wang was kicking ass before the change.

There’s not much they can do now since Giardi, Eiland and Wang all said he’s not hurt so they can’t use that as an excuse to put him through “rehab”. I honestly think that was a pretty foolish decision as it’s clear this is not something that is going to be worked out against the best hitters in the world, and every time he goes out there it hurts him more importantly, the team. Additionally, if it was an intentional change they’re not going to look to have him release from a less “over the top” point than before. I think Wang can be put right, I’m just doubtful it will happen with this team the way things are going.

This approach has mixed results, and the Yankees themselves recently were burned by doing this with Jorge Posada last season. Now, that was his shoulder but last year Mike Lowell and Chase Utley also had the same injury (minus the cyst!) and underwent the same surgery. Utley was able to play through it all season and nobody even had an idea that something was wrong until the procedure was announced, but Lowell had his season cut short in September when they were unable to put it off any longer. My personal preference is that A-Rod undergoes the procedure before the season, and returns by latest around the time of the All-Star Break. Missing the beginning of the season does suck, but it is Spring Training right now and you can take a look at internal options rather than trying to fill the position suitably through trade when other teams know how desperate you are.

And no, a combination of Cody Ransom and Angel Berroa is not acceptable for more than maybe two games.

In any case, bloggers and newspaper journalists everywhere are throwing their ideas around so I am going to jump on that train.

• Mark Grudzilanek is an interesting option, as he has a decent glove and bat and would be cheap. However, he is 39 and has a bad back that sidelines him pretty often. It’s entirely possible that he would be hurt for the whole time he is “filling in” for A-Rod.
• Xavier Nady was originally a third baseman coming out of college, and still played the position for a while in the minor leagues. It’s been a long time, and he doesn’t really have any experience at the position in the Major Leagues but it’s Spring Training and A-Rod is out so why not just have him playing there as much as possible from here on out. If he’s not completely terrible, he is a far better option there than Ransom/Berroa.
• Nick Swisher is a very versatile guy, maybe he can play some 3B as well? I’d prefer him in Right Field as he seems to be very good there by eye and by numbers like UZR. Nady is pretty average there, but Swisher is a bit better. Maybe a platoon/switch off situation between 3B/RF if both seem suitable would be possible. Pure speculation/best case scenario.
• There are some rumors that teams will be salary dumping once the season rolls around, which the Yankees could take advantage of but picking up another 3B for anything useful is something I don’t really agree with. If they could get Adrian Beltre for cheap, that would be amazing. He is makes a decent amount of money and could end up on the dump list and is a free agent at the end of the year, and is a simply fantastic defender. He is incredibly undervalued to the general public (and media), but not to the (current) management of the Mariners. This scenario falls under “pipe dream”.

All in all, I am very disappointed and upset about the inevitable absence of Alex Rodriguez from the Yankees lineup, but I do honestly think the team can weather this. They upgraded the team significantly this off season by signing CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira, and I am thanking everything around that they jumped in and signed Teix now. If the Yankees can find someone who is not an automatic out to plug in A-Rod’s place when he does miss time or needs a rest (I am thinking he can play 4 out of every 5 games or something similar, feasibly) then they’ll be in pretty good condition. I don’t know if they’ll be better than the Red Sox or the Rays but I feel like they’ll be in the fight.

“We don’t think it’s anything serious,” Girardi said. “I’m not really concerned that he’s going to be shut down for a while, but there’s a chance that he’s going miss a start, and we might have to be a little bit creative.”

Oh my God he is going to be out forever.

Eric Milton was added to the Triple-A roster late Monday night and immediately placed on the disabled list. All of it was retroactive to Saturday.

There are now like a billion starting pitchers on the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre roster, including Russ Ohlendorf who they have got doing starting work until he gets into a groove and stops sucking. That means it’s very likely that the Sidney Ponson Experiment is at a close (it wasn’t a total failure, but it also wasn’t very pretty) and that someone from AAA will probably be joining the roster soon. The most likely candidates are:

• Kei Igawa – I don’t see how he could be better than Ponson, but I also don’t know if he could be worse. Actually, that’s a lie I know he could because I sat through all nine innings of this game and somehow didn’t throw myself off the tier at Yankee Stadium. I know he kills AAA hitters for the most part, but high fastballs don’t work in MLB.
• Jeff Karstens – Pitches about as ugly as he looks but the organization is in love with him. Also generally eats AAA hitters for lunch and is not so successful with MLB.
• Dan McCutchen – Probably the most interesting candidate, I haven’t seen him personally though. It seems like it would likely be a bad idea to rush him up to MLB instead of letting him spend some more time in AAA and having him join the team next year. Primarily a groundball pitcher but his gb:fb ratio hasn’t been that great in AAA which is not really a good sign.
• Ian Kennedy – Hey, remember him? Probably not coming back up to MLB this year (like Phil Hughes) as the organization has pretty much admitted he was rushed. But you never know because desperation makes people do strange things.
• Eric Milton – I don’t even know what to say except “Please, no”. I know his lifetime stats are slightly better than Ponson’s (average rather than below average!), but he is coming off TJ surgery and who knows if that will make him even worse than he was the last two years in Cincinnati.

I recognize that Milton is an emergency option and a flyer case very similar to Ponson, but at least watching Ponson pitch is special kind of comedy as opposed to just painful. I know the team expected Alan Horne to be ready, but I am starting to think the right move would have been to just trade him last year when his value was rather high. He’s 25 and oft-injured and I don’t think he is going to stick as a starter, but at the same time he has control issues that make him somewhat troubling as a reliever.

So yeah, the offense needs some work because there is a lot wrong with it at the moment. Hideki Matsui is out for god knows how long, Robinson Cano is getting better but still isn’t showing much power, something is seriously wrong with Derek Jeter who is posting career lows across the board, Melky Cabrera has fallen off a steep cliff into sucksville and Brett Gardner is not the answer.

I don’t care that he is a “clubhouse cancer” because baseball is a sport of individuals, I don’t care about any controversy he may create, I don’t care that he is a total jerk to everyone. What I know about Barry Bonds is that last year he had an OBP of .480, a Slugging Percentage of .565 and an OPS+ of 172. Even if he regresses hard and ONLY has an OBP of .400 that is still astoundingly useful.

In the things getting worse front.

Phil Hughes has come down with a severe case of needs some AAA starts strained oblique and has been placed on the 15 day DL. Rasner will probably come up in his place. I am not sure who the prime candidate to take Kennedy’s place will be when he comes down with the same mysterious injury.

(I think this is the right thing to do because Hughes needs to get his head straight/contacts fitted/something/anything, though I believe it would have been better to just send him down rather than waste 15 days but whatever.)

Via Kat O’Brien, she of the infamous “I called lots of hospitals in Omaha and Joba’s father wasn’t in any of them” incident:

Also, not to scare you all with another potential injury, but Johnny Damon had a huge wrap around his upper left leg after the game. I asked him what was wrong, and he said he tweaked his left groin during the day game in Cleveland. I asked if he’s OK, and he said: “I’ve got to be. We’ve got too many guys out.”

On the one hand, Brett Gardner is about ready. On the other hand, he’s not really ready and oh God Damon is one of like 3-4 guys on the team who seems to know what to do with a bat right now.

Jorge Posada is on the DL for the first time in his career.

Brian Bruney after working really hard and looking good is out for the season with torn ligaments in his foot, although he keeps trying to find a doctor that says otherwise (good luck on that one).

Phil Hughes can’t see at night.

Ian Kennedy can’t throw a strike.

At least it’s happening at the beginning of the year.