As I did on Opening Day, I awoke at virtually the crack of dawn this morning and did a handful of drive-time radio hits across the country, previewing the World Series for Fox News Radio. Starting at 7:10 AM, without benefit of coffee or an alarm besides the phone (some idiot who shall remain nameless forgot to tell my wife about my schedule), I hit WREC (Memphis, TN), WJCW (Tri Cities, TN), KFAB (Omaha, NE), WPIN (Blacksburg, VA), WHJJ (Providence, RI), WERC (Birmingham, AL), and KCOL (Fort Collins, CO). No, they're not all New York City, but a couple of those hits are close to the cities of the two Series participants, and it's always fun to spread the Baseball Prospectus gospel and the Futility Infielder name to new and occasionally out-of-the-way places.
Which isn't to say that I'm overwhelmingly bowled over by the prospect of this World Series, as I'm not exactly prone to rooting for either team. I was greatly disappointed that the Red Sox came back from a 3-1 deficit in the League Championship Series to defeat the Indians, but I was hardly surprised. Since the 2004 ALCS, I refuse to believe the Red Sox are dead until I see somebody picking the splinters out of their fingers after hammering a wooden stake into their collective heart. The Indians had their chances to apply the coup de grâce to Josh Beckett, Curt Schilling and Daisuke Matsuzaka, but they failed to deliver, then lost the late-inning battles in a big way. The Tribe's bullpen was charged with 16 runs allowed over their final three games and 11 innings, helping to create the widest average margin of victory in a seven-game series at 6.28 runs. The Sox, in winning despite not starting Josh Beckett in Game Four, undid my prediction for the series because of those bullpen failures, but also because the real C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona -- to say nothing of Travis Hafner -- never showed. Requiescat in pace.
The Sox are overwhelming favorites to win this series as well, and when pressed for a prediction, I've called it in six games on all of my radio hits. But I do believe the Rockies have a shot thanks to the vulnerability of Boston's rotation. Game One starter Josh Beckett remains the modern-day answer to Bob Gibson, but Game Two starter Curt Schilling will be going on four days' rest, something he's done only once since returning from his seven-week stay on the DL; manager Terry Francona has done everything but volunteer to take the ball himself in order to get the Big Schill an extra day of rest. Game Three starter Daisuke Matsuzaka hasn't gone longer than five innings in his three postseason starts after a brutal final six weeks of the regular season. With Tim Wakefield left off the roster due to shoulder trouble, Jon Lester is the potential Game Four starter. As an extreme flyballer, he isn't best suited to Coors Field, where fly balls tend to wind up littering Pike's Peak.
Additionally, the Sox are faced with sitting David Ortiz, Kevin Youkilis, or Mike Lowell in the games at Colorado due to the loss of the DH. Ortiz can play first base (he had seven games there this year) but may sit against lefty Jeff Francis in Game Five, and if he's in, Youkilis is out unless he plays third, where he saw only 13 games worth of action. Given how top-heavy the Sox lineup has been this year, losing one of those guys is a blow both offensively and defensively (Youkilis > Ortiz, Lowell > Youkilis), though Francona's overdue decision to start Jacoby Ellsbury over Coco Crisp in centerfield has reduced the number of offensive sinkholes by one.
As for the Rockies, they've got vulnerabilities in their rotation as well. Game One starter Jeff Francis, the staff ace, is good but is no Beckett. Rookie Ubaldo Jimenez is prone to walking hitters (3.86 unintentional walks per nine, including the postseason). So mediocre is Game Three starter Josh Fogg that he's never posted an ERA better than the park-adjusted league average; his career ERA+ is 91, nine percent worse than the league. Game Four starter Aaron Cook has been sidelined by an oblique strain since August 10; starting him at the expense of rookie Franklin Morales is a huge gamble, and while one can point to Cook's ability to keep the ball on the ground as a reason to pitch him at Coors, Nate Silver points out, he's not a particularly good matchup for this lineup. Morales lasted only seven innings in his two starts, though he came into the postseason as hot as any Rox pitcher. As another lefty, he too may have forced Ortiz to the bench, which is a chance worth taking.
Beyond that, I don't have a ton to add at this point. Nate did an excellent job previewing the series at BP; it's free. He makes a couple of salient points worth remembering:
• Though the Rox have won 21 out of 22 and become one of the great Cinderella stories of all time, being an especially hot or cold team coming in to the World Series has no predictive value in and of itself.
• The 2007 Sox are the best Secret Sauce team since Division Play began. The Secret Sauce, as created for Baseball Between the Numbers is the combined ranking of each team in the only three categories found to be statistically significant in systematically predicting the outcome of a series: the quality of the team defense as measured by Fielding Runs Above Average, the power-pitching orientation of the staff as measured by Equivalent Strikeouts per nine innings, and the quality of the closer, as measured by WXRL ranking.
One more not-so-predictive tidbit to add, courtesy of USA Today. With the Rockies coming off an eight-day break in the action, it's worth noting that last year's Tigers to the contrary, seven of the last 10 teams to enter the series on five or more days of rest have won. Be that as it may, I'm sticking with my prediction of the Sox in six, but I'll be pulling for the purple gang from Colorado to provide an upset for the ages.
Oh, and I'll add another prediction or two to the pile: Don Mattingly in as Yankee manager as of Friday. Back on that score later this week.
I've got a Prospectus Hit and Run column up at BP today, loosely focused on the Rockies, who finished up their sweep of the Diamondbacks on Monday night. As improbable as their 21-1 run has been, the Rockies' claim on National League superiority is legitimate. They finished the regular season with the best run differential (+102) and highest Hit List ranking (#4) of any NL team thanks to their finishing kick.
Still, it was a weak league, Charlie Brown. The four NL postseason representatives combined for just a .532 Hit List Factor (the average of their actual, first-, second- and third-order winning percentages), the lowest of any slate from the Wild Card era, and their combined Hit List ranking of 38 tied for the second-highest of that era. This isn't an isolated situation, either. The 2005 slate, which featured the 18th-ranked Padres (-44 runs and a .483 HLF) has the edge with a combined ranking of 39, while last year's slate, with the 17th-ranked Cardinals (+19 runs but a .497 HLF) tied at 38. The presence of the 15th-ranked Diamondbacks (-20 runs and a .4998 HLF) hurt, as did the fact that the 8th-ranked Phillies and 11th-ranked Cubs were the other two teams in.
One league's weakness is the other league's strength. This year's AL finished with the lowest combined Hit List ranking of any league playoff slate via the #1 Red Sox, #2 Yankees, #3 Indians and #6 Angels. It isn't even particularly close:
Elsewhere in the piece, I point out that the Rockies' average ranking over the course of the year was 16.1; they spent time in both the top and bottom five spots of the Hit List. I came up with a compact form to display the week-by-week rankings of the various contenders. For the Yankees, it looks like this:
Yankees APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT 1 11 14 10 2 2 2 8 10 9 5 2 2 3 12 8 4 2 2 17 12 7 3 2 2 10 2
For the Rockies, it's like this:
Rockies APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT 20 24 22 16 14 11 4 16 25 21 16 13 8 16 25 20 16 11 6 24 26 15 17 14 5 19 11
The Rockies actually wound up as most volatile of any team in terms of the standard deviation of their Hit List rankings. That's not necessarily a plus, though four of the five most volatile teams -- the Phillies, Yankees, and Angels were the other three -- wound up making the playoffs; only one of the five least volatile, the Red Sox, made it in, though the bottom 10 also includes the Indians and the near-miss Mets and Padres.
Anyway, that's some stuff to chew on regarding the NL champions, who've become a pretty entertaining team to watch during this run. I'm still not much of a Todd Helton fan, but I do like Troy Tulowitzki and Matt Holliday, not to mention pitchers like Ubaldo Jimenez and Jeff Francis. I won't root for them if they face the Indians in the World Series, but if the Red Sox manage to claw their way out of a 3-1 hole, the Rox get my nod.
As for that series, I'm not terribly surprised to find the Indians up 3-1. In the Unfiltered addendum to my ALCS preview, I had the pitching matchups of the first two games as tossups and the Indians with an edge in the next two. Jake Westbrook and Paul Byrd helped me look smart by consistently getting Strike One on the patient Red Sox hitters and putting them in a hole, while Daisuke Matsuzaka and Tim Wakefield wilted like hothouse flowers, continuing their poor performance trends of the past two months. Bad breaks behind him had more than a little to do with Wakefield's demise, but once it started he was as powerless to stop them as any other 41-year-old coming off an 18-day layoff due to back and shoulder trouble.
Westbrook threw first-pitch strikes to 18 of the first 20 Sox hitters and 21 of 27 overall. Byrd did so to 17 out of 21 after doing so to 20 out of 25 Yankee hitters in the Division Series. How important is this? Baseball-Reference's splits show that batters hit .239/.283/.358 after an 0-1 count, compared to .284/.394/.463 after a 1-0 count. That's 45 points of batting average, 111 points of OBP and 105 points of SLG higher!
Of course, those first-pitch stats count all balls in play as strikes, but even so, the Red Sox only put Westbrook's first pitch in play twice, via a Dustin Pedroia groundout in the second and a J.D Drew single in the seventh. Here's the breakdown:
TBF is Total Batters Faced, SL is Strikes Looking, SS is Strikes Swinging (including fouls), and SIP is Strikes In Play. The Sox challenged Westbrook to throw Strike One and he did nearly every time until he reached the heart of the order for the third time, by which point Cleveland had a 4-0 lead. As for Byrd, his breakdown isn't quite so emphatic, but again, he took advantage of Boston's patience:
Can the Sox come back? Anyone who remembers 2004 would be an idi... a moron to deny that it's possible. To my surprise, many in the national media were pretty adamant about the idea of throwing Josh Beckett on three days' rest for Game Four -- something I felt could be the deciding factor in the series -- and are hammering Terry Francona for it now. Beckett threw only 80 pitches in his Game One start, but apparently, tightness in his back kept Francona from even considering pitching him instead of Wakefield on Tuesday night -- inconvenient for the Sox. Still, with two more days of rest under his belt, going against a C.C. Sabathia who hasn't lived up to his #1 billing in October, this series could easily go back to Fenway. I don't care who the starting pitchers are, that's a can of Whoop Ass I don't want to see opened.
As for the Yankees, the waiting game regarding Joe Torre's fate continues. With every pundit busy spinning their wheels regarding this ongoing Hamlet act and taking the we-have-no-news news to ridiculous extremes, I'll hold my tongue and focus on the baseball that's still going on. There's a ton to be said about the impending end of an era, whether it's Torre's era or that of paper tiger George Steinbrenner, but all in due time.
By now, the Yankees are old news. Contrary to my sanguine assessment of Chien-Ming Wang's chances while pitching at home, Wang made another early exit as the Yankees fell, 6-4. The loss didn't merely end the team's 2007 campaign, it may have drawn the curtain on the Joe Torre era. Since Tuesday, the national media's been abuzz, waiting to see whether George Steinbrenner makes good on his threat not to renew Torre's contract. Speculation that the team will tab Don Mattingly or Joe Girardi as Torre's successor has abounded, but by far the most disconcerting rumor -- though hardly the most credible one -- involves Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, himself in limbo with the ouster of GM Walt Jocketty.
As bummed as I am about the Yankees' defeat, I haven't really had time to pick over the bones regarding all of this, because Baseball Prospectus tabbed me to preview the AL Championship Series between the Indians and Red Sox. The preview is here, and there's an important addendum here, because I screwed something up:
In my ALCS preview, I made a provisional prediction of the series outcome, one that hinges on whom the Red Sox tab to start Game Four. Terry Francona has indicated a preference to start knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, who was bombed in September [an 8.76 ERA in five starts] and missed the ALDS following a cortisone shot in his shoulder. But Game One starter Josh Beckett could also start if willing to pitch on three days’ rest, something he did in shutting out the Yankees to clinch the 2003 World Series. If that’s the case, Beckett would then be available to pitch a potential Game Seven on normal rest. But if Wakefield goes, the Sox forego that third start from Beckett and are faced with a choice of Game Three starter Daisuke Matsuzaka, himself a human piñata since mid-August [7.14 ERA over his final eight starts, plus an early exit in Game Two of the Division Series], for the rubber match, or of bringing back Wakefield, who would be on normal rest.
Neither of those choices is optimal, but the real problem with what I wrote was that I misidentified Cleveland’s potential Game Seven starter as Fausto Carmona. Carmona will start Game Two, and would then be in line to pitch Game Six, with Jake Westbrook slotting for a Game Seven. In other words, score that E-6. D’oh!
...For consistency’s sake, I’ll stick with my pick of the Indians over the Red Sox under the Wakefield-4 scenario. But I’m decidedly less emphatic about that outcome than I would be if Carmona were going.
Having written that, I'm still not 100 percent satisfied with those conclusions, and clearly many of my readers aren't either. So let's work through this together.
Scenario 1: Beckett starts Game Four
Fr 10/12: Beckett/Sabathia - tossup Sa 10/13: Schilling/Carmona - tossup Mo 10/15: Matsuzaka/Westbrook - Indians edge Tu 10/16: Beckett/Byrd Red Sox - Red Sox edge Th 10/18: Schilling/Sabathia - tossup Sa 10/20: Matsuzaka/Carmona - Indians edge Su 10/21: Beckett/Westbrook - Red Sox edge
As it should, the first two games feature the series' best pitchers. Beckett, Carmona, and C.C. Sabathia were all among the AL's elite hurlers any way you slice it. Curt Schilling has been forced to remake himself as a pitch-to-contact hurler in the wake of the rotator cuff strain which sidelined him for seven weeks this summer, but his control and pitch efficiency have covered for an otherwise drastic drop in strikeout rate, and let's face it, the guy has made his name pitching in October. So I'm comfortable calling that a tossup even given Carmona's prowess. By my reckoning, this scenario yields two edges in each team's favor and three tossups, two of them at Fenway, so I'll call it for Boston, but in seven games, not six as I originally did.
Scenario 2: Wakefield starts Game Four
Fr 10/12: Beckett/Sabathia - tossup Sa 10/13: Schilling/Carmona - tossup Mo 10/15: Matsuzaka/Westbrook - Indians edge Tu 10/16: Wakefield/Byrd - Indians edge Th 10/18: Beckett/Sabathia - tossup Sa 10/20: Schilling/Carmona - tossup Su 10/21: Matsuzaka/Westbrook - Indians edge
This time around, I've got three advantages for the Indians, and four tossups, three of them in Fenway. Even if three of those tossups go Boston's way, in my view, they still wind up on the short end in my book. Indians in seven.
I should add here that I'm strongly pulling for Cleveland to win this series, but anybody suggesting that the objectivity of my analysis is compromised by that preference need only look back to my Division Series preview, when I picked the Indians against my own rooting interest in the Yankees. Knowing the Bronx Bombers as well as I did, I was hypercritical of their every flaw, particularly the ones which doomed them in recent postseasons. I wound up looking wise when their rotation decisions backfired, and when the Indians' bullpen gained the upper hand in the late innings based on matchups. So I had that going for me amid the bummer of the Yanks' elimination.
Predictions are a necessary evil in this business, and while getting one right certainly makes you look smart, it's critical to remember that in a short series, any damn thing can happen. To me, the process of how that prediction was arrived at -- casting aside my initial preconceived notions about a series and attempting to correctly analyze the various components of the two teams involved -- is far more important. The end result may not be a bullseye, but unless the readers are planning on taking my predictions to Vegas (and seriously, God help you if you do), they should have gained insight into what to watch for and the means by which I arrived at my prediction. It's the journey, not the arrival, that matters most to me.
Almost forgot: Brad Wochomurka interviewed me for a BP Radio hit hit this morning. We did 10 minutes, mostly on the ALCS but also covering the Diamondbacks and Rockies in the NLCS.
For Game Four, Joe Torre has opted to go back to Chien-Ming Wang, who was tagged for eight runs in Game One. He's appearing on just three days' rest, and his outing wasn't exactly short; 94 pitches under duress is a pretty full workload for 4.2 innings. Anecdotally, sinkerballers such as Wang tend to benefit from being a bit tired. With three days of rest instead of the seven he had prior to the series opener, the Yankees have to hope so.
Just as important as the amount of rest, if not more, is the fact that Wang is pitching at home. I made note of his persistent home-road splits in my series preview at BP and expanded on them here a couple days back. Today at BP, I have a quick and dirty study taking an even closer look at Wang and examining whether groundballers such as Wang tend to fare better at home than on the road:
Looking at the performance record, note the consistent disparity in innings pitched across the two splits. Overall, Wang has thrown 55 percent of his innings at home, suggesting that the Yanks may regard that setup as optimal. Second, while Wang's home/road split has been consistent across all three years, the actual ERA disparity is much, much wider than suggested by his peripherals, as reflected via FIP [Fielding Independent Pitching]; an apparent home-field advantage of 0.14 runs according to FIP turns into a 1.58 run advantage according to ERA. For those wise enough to pooh-pooh the earned/unearned run distinction, the spread is 1.82 runs per nine innings.
The difference appears to be largely due to the results of balls in play. Wang's BABIPs at home have consistently been about 40 points below the league averages (.296, .305, and .308, respectively, over the last three years), enabling him to beat his FIP estimates by 0.78 runs. On the road, his BABIPs have been about 15 points above, with a much wider variation from year to year; collectively, his road ERAs have been 0.66 runs higher than his FIPs.
This discrepancy could be random, but it may not be. Along with the ballpark-to-ballpark variations in fence distances and the amount of foul territory, home/road differences may be a reflection of field preparation. It's no secret that groundskeepers can prepare the field to the benefit of the home team's starting pitcher. For any pitcher, that may include tailoring the mound to his liking. For a groundballer, that may include watering down the area in front of home plate and leaving the infield grass longer; likewise, for an opposing groundballer, the crew may opt to cut the grass short and keep the plate area dry and hard. The TBS broadcast of Game Two of the Cubs-Diamondbacks series showed the Arizona crew watering down home plate before the game even as the umpires looked on. Lou Piniella complained, prompting the umps to order the application of a drying compound, but the results were still reportedly damp. Still, there's an element of tradition involved—such groundskeeping gamesmanship goes back to the 19th century, as teams even back then were watering down the basepaths to slow down their speedier opponents.
Turning to the group of 65 pitchers (including Wang) who threw at least 50 innings at home and on the road in each of the last three seasons -- a group that's decidedly better than league average -- we see:
• a homefield advantage of 0.38 runs of ERA for the entire group of pitchers. That's about twice as large as predicted by FIP (based on the pheripherals), with differential results on balls in play widening the gap.
• a 0.30 ERA advantage for the group's groundballers over the flyballers, mainly due to a lower home run rate.
• a 0.45 ERA advantage for the groundballers at home, as compared to a 0.39 ERA advantage for the flyballers at home, with a separation in favor of the groundballers persisting across the two sets. The ERAs of the four subsets of performers:
Home Road GB 3.78 4.23 FB 4.16 4.45
More detailed breakdowns can be found at the BP, where the piece is free. The take-home message is this:
What this in-no-way-definitive study suggests is that a groundballer pitching at home -- exactly like Wang in Yankee Stadium -- would appear to be the best of the limited permutations available. Further research along these avenues is needed to clarify the matter, but at River Avenue and 161st Street in the Bronx on Thursday night, with the Yankees' continued presence in the postseason and Joe Torre's tenure in pinstripes riding on Wang's performance, it will have to do.
As somebody who spends much of my backwoods time slathered in Ben's 100 -- the no-bullshit equivalent of bug napalm, exponentially more powerful than OFF -- because I'm so prone to insect bites, I can't say Chamberlain's meltdown surprised me. When you're caught in a swarm, staying focused isn't easy. I'm not sure that the umpires should have stopped play on their own accord, but I wouldn't have blamed Torre for pulling the team from the field and engaging in a lengthy discussion with the umps and the grounds crew to buy his flustered pitcher some time to calm down. Still, part of being a well-paid professional athlete is keeping your cool under extreme pressure. Chamberlain did not -- hell, Jeter looked just as flustered, but the ball wasn't in his hands -- and it led to the Indians tying the game.
Blaming Chamberlain or the infestation for losing the game isn't appropriate, however. Over the course of nine innings, the offense simply couldn't solve Carmona, the Tribe's even filthier equivalent of Yankee sinkerballer Chien-Ming Wang. On the eve of the series, one pro-Yankee BP reader, responding to my series preview, suggested I wasn't giving the Bronx Bomber lineup their due going into the series: "Don't you think your undervaluing offense a little here? The Indians clearly have the better top two starting pitchers but the Yankees seem the perfect team to combat them with an incredibly patient offense that can push them out of the game early."
"You mean like the vaunted Yankee offense waited out the Tigers in the first round last year, and the Angels the year before?" I retorted. I got no reply.
Indeed, the storyline isn't too dissimilar to years past; the Yankee offense I "undervalued" isn't hitting (.121 through two games), and they left just three runners on base on Friday. By contrast the Indians left 14 on before finally breaking through against Luis Vizcaino in the bottom of the 11th. Vizcaino's capitulation was inevitable; the Yanks don't have a reliable reliever after Chamberlain and Rivera, nor do they have a lefty specialist to match up with lefty Travis Hafner, who stroked the game-winning hit.
With the Yanks facing elimination this evening -- I was none too optimistic about Roger Clemens in my preview, and here I'll predict a departure by the third, down 4-0, red-faced and limping -- the word on the street is that this may really be the last night of the Yankee dynasty. George Steinbrenner has stopped drooling long enough to assert that Torre's job is on the line: "I don't think we'd take him back if we don't win this series." With the Yanks having not reached the World Series since 2003, or the LCS since 2004, his point becomes increasingly valid. I'm not sure that what's behind door number two -- Don Mattingly, Joe Girardi or the Ghost of Billy Martin as skipper -- is anything to write home about, but I won't be surprised if we get to find out very soon.
For what it's worth, Torre reminds us why he's lasted this long in his job as Yankee skipper in this audio clip from Peter Abraham. If this is it, let the record show Torre remains the coolest customer around when it comes to the Boss' yapping, and for those of you calling for his head if the Yanks lose, don't be surprised when the next guy doesn't handle the heat so well.
• • •
With the first round of playoffs threatening to end tonight, the regular season already seems far off. Nonetheless, I couldn't achieve closure without running a season finale edition of the Hit List; it's up today at BP. Check it out.
One of my BP readers asked why a groundballer might show a substantial home-road split. Generally speaking, I tend to group the explanations into three categories:
• ballpark dimensions: in addition to the fence distances, the amount of foul territory can be a factor because even groundballers tend to get infield popups now and then. Here Jacobs Field is clearly less favorable, with smaller foul territory than Yankee Stadium. Ballparks.com classifies Jacobs Field's territory as "small," and Yankee Stadium as "large."
As for fence distances, as we saw last night, they do matter when a pitcher, groundballer or no, leaves one up in the zone. Jacobs (327-370-405-375-325) is longer down the lines than Yankee Stadium (318-399-408-385-314) but a hair shorter to centerfield and considerably shorter in the power alleys.
• the physical field: as we saw in the Diamondbacks/Cubs game that followed the Yankee debacle, groundskeepers can tailor the field to benefit that day's pitcher or work to the opposing pitcher's disadvantage. Shots in that game showed the Arizona groundskeepers watering down the homeplate area even the umpires watched and ordered them to apply drying compound to help groundballer Doug Davis. The result slows down balls that hit the dirt in front of the plate.
Keeping the grass longer can help a groundballer as well. For an opposing groundballer, a crew might dry out the home plate area and cut the grass shorter to help balls get to the infielders quicker. We don't know what steps if any the Cleveland groundscrew may have taken yesterday -- and it didn't matter much given that he got more air outs (5) than groundouts (4) -- but had Wang been matched up against Cleveland sinkerballer Fausto Carmona (who pitches tonight) the Yanks might have at least gotten "field parity," as the conditions would have been the same for two similar pitchers. Additionally, the mound can be an issue. Ask any pitcher and he'll tell you certain mounds are more favorable than others in terms of comfort level.
• the mental aspect: there's nothing like sleeping in one's own bed; hotels simply aren't as comfortable, and living out of a suitcase is a pain in the ass. Pitchers are creatures of habit and for some, the routine of coming from home to the ballpark is very proscribed, and any variation from that routine can mess with their heads.
Now, I don't have any actual insight into Wang's tastes in fields and mounds or whether he's a particularly poor traveler. I'm just saying that given three straight years of sizable home/road splits, we can't discount the fact that he may be more comfortable in Yankee Stadium than elsewhere. My nickel is on the ballpark and field issues based on a look at his actual splits, his projected ERAs from those splits using the Fielding Independent Pitching formula [(13*HR + 3*BB - 2*K)/IP + 3.20], and his Batting Average on Balls in Play:
Home IP ERA BABIP FIP dif 2005 66.0 3.55 .260 4.20 -0.65 2006 118.7 3.03 .267 3.79 -0.76 2007 111.3 2.75 .262 3.63 -0.88 TOT 296.0 3.04 .264 3.82 -0.78
Road IP ERA BABIP FIP dif 2005 50.3 4.65 .276 4.25 0.40 2006 99.3 4.35 .322 4.11 0.24 2007 88.0 4.91 .336 3.63 1.28 TOT 237.7 4.62 .318 3.96 0.66
Based on his peripherals which you can see at Baseball-Reference.com, Wang's performance at home and on the road yields very similar ERA projections. But his BABIPs at home have been consistently lower than league average (generally around .300) at home and higher on the road, to the tune of a .054 spread over the course of his career. This could be random, but it could also be an effect of the way the playing fields are treated on days he pitches. It's a subject for further inquiry.
One way or another, Wang had his ass handed to him last night, and there's at least some consideration being given to the possibility of the Yanks bringing him back on short rest in Game Four in New York, with Andy Pettitte pitching on normal rest in Cleveland for Game Five:
After pitching poorly Thursday, Wang said he wanted to start the fourth game on short rest. Ron Guidry, the pitching coach, said Wang could benefit from starting at Yankee Stadium, where he was 10-4 with a 2.75 earned run average. He was 9-3 with a 4.91 E.R.A. on the road.
“Maybe the next time will be different,” Guidry said. “There’s always that next time. He knows, if we bring him back in Game 4, he pitches at home, too. He pitches well at home. Maybe that’ll help him out.”
The other interesting aspect of last night was Cleveland manager Eric Wedge's decision to use his three best relievers for four innings to protect a six- to nine-run lead with a game the following night. Here's what Joe Sheehan had to say:
Up 9-3 in the sixth, with Aaron Fultz having warmed up in the fifth, Wedge instead went to Rafael Perez, one of his two best relievers. He would proceed to use Perez, Jensen Lewis, and Rafael Betancourt—his three best relievers—for 31, eight and 22 pitches, respectively, protecting leads of six, eight, and finally nine runs. It was a desperate display, and a waste of the pitchers involved. With a game the next night, why use your most valuable pitchers protecting a lead that your worst ones probably couldn’t blow? Wedge brought Rafael Betancourt in to protect a nine-run lead in the ninth; Yuniesky Betancourt wouldn’t be able to blow that lead. It was overmanaging, and if in the interests of getting his guys work, a waste of their energy. If there is even a one percent chance that the 53 pitches Perez and Betancourt wasted last night might affect what they can give Wedge tonight, then it wasn’t worth using them. When, exactly, do Fultz and Tom Mastny pitch, if not last night?
Good question. The Yankees better hope it has an effect, because they're already behind the eightball.
Make no mistake: this Yankee rotation and its deployment may be the team's downfall in this series. As good as Wang is, he's shown a decisive enough home-road split (2.75 home/4.91 away this year; 3.04/4.62 career) to prefer that he not start in Cleveland once, let alone twice if the series goes five games. Pettitte has enough postseason experience (34 starts, 212 innings, 4.08 ERA, 14-9) to add a line to his resume virtually identical to his 2007 stats. With his days of tipping pitches hopefully behind him, Yankee fans can hope he's the stone-faced killer of their 2003 run, because they'll need him to be.
The problem is Clemens, who has just one start (six innings) since September 3 due to elbow and hamstring injuries. The 45-year-old hurler has an unenviable recent track record in recent postseasons, one marked by early departures due to injury, departures that often left his club up the proverbial creek. Forget the glowing report out of Tampa after his simulated game on Tuesday; the decision to start Clemens feels more motivated by salary than common sense.
If the Yankees shadow Clemens with rookie Philip Hughes — who pitched well against the Indians on August 10 (6 4 1 1 1 6) and really hit his stride in September (2.73 ERA in five starts) — that leaves Mussina exposed. The 38-year-old Moose served a two-week exile in the bullpen in late August after three consecutive disaster starts. He posted three solid starts but was bombed during the season's final weekend. Unless he gets enough separation between his mid-80s fastball and his offspeed offerings, his outing could be every bit as nasty, short, and brutish as that of Clemens. A better alternative would be to start Hughes in Game Three, come back with Wang in New York in Game Four (short rest might actually help his sinker), and send Pettitte to the hill in Game Five.
• The Yankee bullpen lacks a lefty to face the top of Cleveland's order [lefty Grady Sizemore, switch-hitter Asdrubal Cabrera (more effective versus lefties), lefty Travis Hafner, and switch-hitter Victor Martinez (more effective versus righties), and their righty options don't match up well:
Elsewhere, Torre and company have opted to forego carrying even a token lefty, bypassing Ron Villone, who handled lefty hitters at a .239/.311/.343 clip. This leaves the Yanks at a significant tactical disadvantage. Beyond Rivera and Chamberlain, neither veterans Vizcaino (.265/.362/.427 versus lefties) and Farnsworth (.273/.379/.445) nor live-armed rookies Ohlendorf (.293/.371/.504 in Triple-A) and Veras (.273/.368/.394) handled lefty hitters very well. The Yanks' only means of mitigating this is to deploy Chamberlain (.132/.195/.211) against the top of the Indians' order, and at best they get to do this one time through instead of twice.
• The Indians' bullpen, on the other hand, matches up well versus the Yanks:
For the Indians, the story is happier. Their bullpen ranked second in the league in WXRL, just a few whiskers behind Boston. Borowski led the league in saves, but with a sky-high ERA thanks to early-season bombings, including a six-run one by the Yanks on April 19. Since mid-May, he's pitched much more respectably (3.91 ERA, 40/10 K/BB and 6 HR in 50 2/3 IP), right in line with his QERA. The real key to the Tribe bullpen is setup man Betancourt, who trailed only J.J. Putz in individual WXRL; he pitches in situations nearly as high in leverage as closer Borowski (1.87 to 2.09) and sometimes for multiple innings, justifying his usage in the set-up role rather than endowment with the less flexible Scarlet C. His splits are eye-popping: 80/6 K/UIBB overall, 41/1 at home.
Beyond that pair, rookie southpaw Rafael Perez ate lefties alive this year (.145/.209/.241), and was no slouch against righties (.213/.257/.324); he looms as a key figure in this series given the Yankee lineup's lefty tilt. Any stint of three batters or longer is likely to bring him in contact with two tough lefty hitters, and he's capable of tossing multiple innings as well. Fultz gives Wedge a LOOGY to deploy in the middle innings, if necessary. Though unconfirmed at press time, the presence of Laffey makes sense for long-relief purposes. Closer aside, there's a decided edge to Cleveland here based on matchups.
One reader already took issue: "Don't you think your undervaluing offense a little here? The Indians clearly have the better top 2 starting pitchers but the Yankees seem the perfect team to combat them with an incredibly patient offense that can push them out of the game early." Clearly this fellow has fond recollections of the way the vaunted Yankee offense patiently waited out the Tigers' pitching in 2006 and the Angels' in 2005.
If the Yankees do roll, I'll gladly eat crow, but the prediction is pain:
The Yankees have a threatening offense, but they appear to have committed to a much less than ideal rotation alignment, and they're at a clear disadvantage when it comes to late-inning matchups. The one-two punch of Sabathia and Carmona could easily push their team to the brink of victory before they even hit the Bronx, where the Yankees will need some good fortune simply to get quality starts. Indians in five.
Catch the rest of it at BP, where it's today's freebie.
• • •
I focused most of Tuesday's chat on the end of the regular season and what to expect in the postseason. A few of the better exchanges:
ntf8888 (Austin): [Matt] Holliday for MVP?
JJ: The NL MVP race is a very, very tough call. I'm a believer that the award has to go to to a player on a contender, which leaves us with numerous candidates.
Going into the weekend I'd have said David Wright gets the call, but I'm haunted by his screw-up of the forceout on Friday night. Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley and Ryan Howard are imperfect candidates, Rollins for his .340-ish OBP, Utley for missing a month, Howard for missing time and playing bad defense that holds his WARP1 down at 6.4. Holliday has very good numbers (fourth in WARP1 at 10.1, behind Pujols at 11.3, Wright at 11.2, and Peavy at 10.9), and while he had several key hits this weekend, he also had a near-fatal defensive lapse that leads one to wonder about the validity of his +13 FRAA.
In the end, I probably stick with Wright, who was still hitting the stuffing out of the ball even as the team faded. But I can understand Holliday before Rollins, who's probably the popular favorite.
James (MD): Jay, do you think a case can be made that in the playoffs, the strength of your bench and the very back of your bullpen is the most important? Teams are going to clearly lean on their 4 best relievers pretty much every night, and they will have to use their bench, especially in the NL. Philly has a great bench with Victorino or Werth, a versatile defender/pinch runner in Bourn, and then a defensive specialist in Nunez and a guy who can hit into the gap in Helms. Couple that with Myers, Romero, and Gordon, how could anyone pick against the Phillies at this point?
JJ: Intuitively that makes some sense, but systematically speaking, it's not the case. Nate Silver and Dayn Perry looked at this for Baseball Between the Numbers and found that the quality of the closer was one of only three statistically significant factors in forecasting the outcome of a short series. The other two are staff strikeout rate and the quality of team defense. Nate calls this the Secret Sauce, and he ran the numbers for this year's teams.
In a short series where off days make up about 1/3 of the schedule if not more, bullpen depth tends to play less of a factor except in cases where a starter makes an early exit (Roger Clemens, I'm looking at you). Benches are far more important in the NL, where pinch-hitting for pitchers is a factor, but the Creeping La Russaism move to 12-man pitching staffs has shortened too many benches and left managers without a proper counter to that third lefty.
As for picking against the Phillies, I like their bench, but as great as their run has been, their staff and bullpen still make me very nervous. I've been heartbroken by Tom Gordon one too many times to have much faith in him.
Jim Clancy (Exhibition Stadium): Why is the Mets' collapse from this year so much "worse" than clunkers before it--like the awful and touched-by-Satan collapse of the Blue Jays in '87 (despite their having at least one stellar right hander)? I mean, to hear people talk now, no one else ever collapsed so brutally as the Mets did this year. Even this year's Padres might qualify as similar.
JJ: From the Postseason Odds perspective that Clay Davenport invented and Nate Silver applied in his fine "Blowing It" article last week, the Mets' potential collapse ranked second behind only the 1995 Angels. Home field advantage for those final seven games, and quality of competition (all of them against sub-.500 teams) come together in an almost perfect storm.
In the Jays' case, four of those seven losses came against the Tigers, who won the division at 98-64, and the other three were against the Brewers, who wound up 91-71. Three losses were on the road. As bad as it is, from a degree of difficulty standpoint, it's much more understandable than the Mets.
But from a more subjective standpoint that paints Willie Randolph as History's Greatest Monster, it comes down to a rather bloodthirsty New York media ready to seize upon any sign of weakness because it sells papers in a hypercompetitive market. See Alex Rodriguez, September-October 2006.
I did pick the Yankees over the Indians during the chat, but as noted, it was in writing the piece that I reversed myself.
As for MVP and other award arguments, you can cast a virtual ballot in the Internet Baseball Awards voting between now and October 12. I'll post my ballot here once I've voted.
