One thing that’s been the subject of much discussion is velocity. Major League Baseball has switched from PITCHf/x to Trackman for in-stadium velocity readings, returning slightly higher numbers (around 1 mph).

The reason this switch has created so much buzz early on is best attributed to two factors:

First, we love overreacting to small sample sizes. The New York Post published a column after the Yankees’ first loss of the season on the possibility that the team’s ‘terrible’ start could out of hand in a hurry. That was after 0.617% of the season elapsed. One game. When our sample of action isn’t big enough to find interesting plots and sub-plots around the league, we analyze and over analyze the juicier bits we have.

Second, it has to do with the wave of statistics encompassing the game of baseball in this era. We drool for data early in the season so we can compare it to past years and project the other 161 games with a feverish hope for accuracy. I’m not afraid to admit I function as a member of those baseball fanatics.

Velocity is the quickest metric to stabilize, meaning it’s the piece of information we can hastily use to gain valuable insight. However, if we’re using incorrect, or merely different data, we’ll be about as successful as Aaron Judge trying to fit into a child’s highchair. 

So let’s see how velocity has found itself sitting with our top three starters this week against the Rays. Keep in mind, we’re not working with information that we have 100% consensus on at the moment, but BrooksBaseball, according multiple articles including this one from Fangraphs, seems to be less if at all impacted by the Trackman switch (notice “From 55ft” on the y-axis of the graphs, this relates to the switch in velocity readings now out of the hand as opposed to closer to the plate). 

Masahiro Tanaka

The first game of the season gets substantial television ratings, regardless of who is playing. Unfortunately, that meant a lot of the country got to see the worst of Tanaka. 67 pitches over 2 2/3 innings, yet even with what we’d normally consider half an outing’s worth of data, we can see how relatively similar Tanaka’s velocity is to the 2016 season. This is a good visualization of velocity stabilizing very quickly. 

Can we infer anything from these numbers? Seeing as the Opening Day start consisted of Tanaka trying, and failing to establish his sinker early in counts, I’m fine with believing in a jump of one mph on his primary pitch. He threw his sinker 38 percent of the time on Opening Day and saw a swinging strike percentage just below 10 percent, which would eclipse the highest swinging strike percentage he had, on average, for any one month last season. 

I have to admit, I’m proud of myself for actually saying something positive about Tanaka’s first start. It was after all, a glorified Spring Training outing, where he tried and failed to command his main pitch. In the process, omitting the opportunity to gain a feel for the depth of his repertoire. 

Tanaka’s start Saturday against the Orioles compared to opening day didn’t really vary much in the result. Lack of command and an inability to establish his sinker, setting up his split and secondary offerings. As the season progresses we’ll have a more data to work with regarding his peripherals and are bound to revisit this open case in due time.

CC Sabathia

Our ageless wonder seems more and more like Bartolo Colon as every outing goes by. Eating innings and spotting pitches, but the main difference is the lack of consistent entertainment with his bat. 

Sabathia has some noticeable upticks in his sinker and cutter velocity, both pitches he threw a combined ~60% of the time  in his start Tuesday. He also substantially limited his changeup used compared to last season, making his slider the even more predominant off speed offering. 

While the results were good through Sabathia’s five innings of clean baseball, it’s always tough to look at a pitcher like Pineda who only generated four swinging strikes on the 85 pitches he threw, and expect this to be the norm. A velocity uptick of any kind seems to only be a positive for a pitcher of Sabathia’s caliber, and if he can generate another batch of 165+ innings with a sub 4 ERA (like he did last year), we should be more than thrilled considering what the pessimistic projections were ballparking.  

Michael Pineda

The toughest thing not to overreact to are the consistencies that we hope can change. Your mind goes through confirmation bias during the spring, seeing and hearing about a Pineda changeup, only to observe very little difference in his pitch selection.

It’s simple. Pineda doesn’t pitch to his peripherals, and after a rough start Wednesday in Tropicana, it’s ever so easy to rolls your eyes and feel a bit of deja vu.

But again, let’s caution our brevity in decision making. Pineda has nearly identical velocity from last year to this year among any of the three starters I highlight here. Even with the changeup work over the Spring, as we’ll always refer back to come the regular season, it really means nothing if he doesn’t have the confidence to throw it in game. 

There is some very humorous logic with Pineda and his expectations. We all want him to be consistent. Girardi even wants him to be consistent. But what kind of consistency can we reasonably expect? If he’s consistently good, with a strikeout percentage north of 25 percent, he’s an ace caliber pitcher. At this point, that’s an outcome we can’t factor in meaningful odds for. 

What we’re really asking for is toned down consistency. Fewer strikeouts, better command, fewer homers, and fewer blow up starts. That’s not nearly as attractive as the imaginable ceiling on a pitcher with this level of bat missing ability, but it’s the reality. 

Pienda’s results are oddly consistent with last year, yet still bring increasing levels of disappointment. The velocity looks fine, and hopes can once again change colors quickly with a few eight-plus strikeout outings. What’s the definition of insanity again? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. 

Off into the Sunset…

So what’s the moral of the story with all this velocity talk?

If everybody looks like they’re throwing a few miles per hour harder than they were at the end of 2016, there may be an issue with the data as a whole. As the old adage goes, if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck. It’s probably a duck. 

We look at velocity early over other metrics because of this stabilization. It gives us concrete evidence of any alarming or encouraging change. This is why so many have been perplexed early in the season by the full switch to Trackman and the adjustment of velocity measurement. We simply want one of the most widely referenced stats for a pitcher to be consistent, without having to dive in and understand the decision to start tracking pitches at a different point on their path to home plate.

With Tanaka, Sabathia and Pineda, I strongly believe in focusing on stats like velocity early and gradually stitching in the underlying peripherals (swinging strike %, hard contact %, zone %, etc.). If velocity looks relatively stable, then we can bring in the fun stuff to intricately pick away at what may have improved or faded.

It may be very ineffective to tell anybody prone to overreacting not to overreact, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Maybe we can also tell the Post to ‘chill’ with the talk of a disastrous start lingering, even with the injury concerns that seems to pour in every game.

Or at least we can wait a few more starts for the ‘disastrous’ metric to stabilize. 

Markov Chains is a model that describes a sequence of possible events, in which the probability of each event depends on the state attained in the previous event. It is also the model that we will use to predict the type of pitch pitchers will throw.

Considering this site covers the Yankees, some might say the following analysis would be best applied for scouting opposing teams. For instance, if Yankee hitters knew what pitch was coming next or at least knew the probability of each pitch being thrown by opposing pitchers, they could better prepare for the daily pitching matchups. Since the Yankees play a new team every four to five days it would be tedious to constantly post these pitch type probabilities here at BP Bronx. I will leave that particular analysis to the Yankees front office. Instead, I will look at the predictive pitch types of Yankee pitchers. This might actually be more beneficial to Yankee fans considering it might provide a little more insight into the strategy of the pitcher.

The intention is to predict the pitches of Yankee starters and as I mentioned before, the PITCHf/x data applied to the Markov Chain model holds the key to accomplishing this goal. The current rotation includes Masahiro Tanaka, Michael Pineda, Nathan Eovaldi, Luis Severino and CC Sabathia. We will explore this pitching succession one by one in order to see how effective each pitcher is at mixing their pitch types.

Note: PITCHf/x data is from the 2015 and 2016 season up to April 11, 2016.

Michael Pineda

Michael Pineda technically has a pitch repertoire that consists of five pitches; a four-seamer, two-seamer, changeup, slider and cutter. In reality — when we look at the usage of these pitch types — Pineda only throws two pitches. As you can see from the table below he throws his four-seam fastball and slider 75 percent of the time.

Important Note: The pitch types are listed according to PITCHf/x classifications. Brooks Baseball shows Pineda throws more of a cut-fastball then a four-seamer. In this analysis, I extracted the cut-fastball’s based on their increased horizontal movement and left the one’s with less movement as four-seamers. My reasoning is that even if he is trying to throw a cutter, if it doesn’t move much it is being viewed by the batter as more of a four-seam fastball.

Overall Pitch Type Usage

Since Pineda mainly only throws the four-seamer and the slider, the batter typically only has to concern himself with two pitches. This is not necessarily a bad trait as long as he has overpowering stuff. The question then becomes, does Michael Pineda have overpowering stuff? The answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no.

Yes, Pineda throws hard. In fact, his average four-seam fastball velocity ranks 26th amongst qualified starting pitchers according to 2016 PITCHf/x data (Side note: there are around 25 starting pitchers with a fastball only one mph less than Pineda’s 92.8 mph four-seamer). Yes, his slider is nasty. Its average velocity ranks 34th amongst qualified starters and the horizontal and vertical movement of the pitch is well above league average. On paper it would seem his main pitches could overwhelm batters, but the optics do not always bear the resemblance. As Nicolas Stellini pointed out in this game recap from April 24, 2016, Pineda can miss – especially with his fastball – right down the center of the plate. Any major-league level hitter and even most Triple-A players would be able to handle that pitch quite often.

While Pineda has some execution issues when it comes to throwing his pitches he has shown flashes of success as Max Gelman pointed out in a previous article. Getting back to the focal point of this examination, let’s look at how Pineda has seen success with mixing his pitch sequence. Review the matrix below which shows us the predicted probabilities of each one of Pineda’s pitch types based on the previous pitch thrown.

Predicted Pitch Type Probabilities

For a player that relies so heavily on just two pitches Pineda does a pretty good job of blending them so that batters cannot anticipate the next pitch. As you can see, the most predictable pitches are the fastball and slider, but the probability of Pineda throwing one of those pitches based on his previously thrown pitch is nearly the same for each pitch type. In this respect, one could say Pineda is better than Masahiro Tanaka – the Yankees defacto ace – at being unpredictable especially considering Tanaka has a more extensive pitch weaponry (See analysis of Tanaka). However, as I mentioned in a similar post about Tanaka, the Yankee catchers might have just as much to do with pitch type selection and sequencing as the pitchers themselves. The pitcher is still ultimately responsible for his own success and failure so if a problem is caused by poor pitch sequencing it is up to the pitcher to make sure it is corrected.

If we look at Pineda’s first pitch offerings we get a glimpse of one pitch that might be predictable.

Pitch Type Probability of the First Pitch

He throws the fastball for the first pitch 48.4 percent of the time going back to the beginning of the 2015 season. If you include the cutter in the “fastball” class that number moves up to around 65 percent. Needless to say, opposing teams with this information are relaying to their hitters to look for first pitch fastballs when facing Pineda.

The only other pitch type that I can see that might allow a batter to foresee Pineda’s next pitch is the changeup. Pineda doesn’t throw the changeup that often – about 11.5 percent of the time – but when he does the model predicts with a probability of 43.8 percent that the next pitch will be a slider. Granted, there is a 33 percent chance it will be a fastball, but it is basically the only pitch – besides the first pitch fastball – that leads to any decent measure of predictability. If a batter where to see the changeup and afterword still maintains an advantage in the count he might consider taking the next pitch. He would take knowing the next pitch has a solid chance of being a slider and that Pineda rarely throws the slider for a strike.

At the beginning of my analysis I thought that Pineda would be more predictable than most pitchers because he really only uses two pitches. Now it is clear that my mind was playing tricks on me. Going forward, my hypothesis – with regards to analyzing the predictability of other pitchers – is that the more types of pitches a pitcher throws the more likely it is to find sequences of predictability.

Photo: Adam Hunger / USA Today Sports

A year ago I would have wholeheartedly agreed with Ben’s assessment. In fact, last September as a second straight non-playoff season wound to its end, I wrote that the Yankees were “destined for a down period, the type every other team goes through every few years, and this time there’s not much they can do about it.”

But the Yankees defied my expectations and reached the playoffs in 2015 thanks to surprising contributions from some players — notably Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira and Carlos Beltran — that I had assumed to be dead money.

Still, three months ago I still assumed a short rebuild period was on the way. The Yankees’ 87 wins in 2015 didn’t seem repeatable with the team’s core aging and its depth chart stuck with some hard-to-fill holes. Brian Cashman’s commitment to youth meant the Yankees’ wouldn’t sacrifice prospects to restock the current team, which meant they would stumble through the next three years making due with what they had.

Then, Cashman went out and traded for Aaron Hicks, Starlin Castro and Aroldis Chapman and parted with only a backup catcher, middle reliever and four largely insignificant prospects. Suddenly the 2016 Yankees appear better on paper than last year’s team, and 85 wins looks like the floor for the upcoming season.

After all that’s happened in the last calendar year, from a surprise playoff berth to an impressive off-season, I’ve come to believe the Yankees can in fact have it all. Cashman is walking a tightrope, trying to contend while counting down the years until Teixeira, Rodrguez, Beltran and CC Sabathia come off the books and a crop of superstars becomes available. He’s not only kept from falling during this high-wire act, he seems to have kept himself impeccably balanced.

Despite his pessimistic view of the short-term future, Ben concedes the Yankees will probably compete for a playoff spot in 2016. This will be a team without stars, but thanks to Cashman, one without serious holes, especially if a mid-rotation starting pitcher arrives before Opening Day.

Let’s fast-forward to 2017. Teixeira and Beltran will be off the books, and Greg Bird and Aaron Judge will likely inherit playing time with their departures. The Yankees will likely still have to pay Chase Headley, Brian McCann, A-Rod and Jacoby Ellsbury more money than they’re worth, but a young position-player core will be in place, and by that time the Tanaka-Severino-Pineda-Eovaldi starting rotation will have hit its prime.

There’s little sense in predicting as far into the future as 2018, but it seems reasonable to assume much of the emerging group of 20-somethings will remain assembled, with other additions to prop them up. Cashman has shown in recent years an impressive ability to acquire real big-league value without sacrificing much of consequence. Eovaldi cost David Phelps. Didi Gregorius cost Shane Greene. Starlin Castro cost Adam Warren. No general manager wins every trade, but Cashman seems to be coming close. If there’s any executive in baseball I trust to make the kinds of incremental improvements that boost a team from 80 wins to 85, or from 85 to 90, it’s the guy running the Yankees.

Ben’s forecast for a Yankee decline rests on the idea that though the 2015 core was overpaid, it provided value that will likely dwindle over the next few years. And while this is true, it doesn’t take into account the group whose value will presumably increase between now and 2018. The progression of Gregorius, Eovaldi, Severino, Pineda, Castro, Bird and Judge, plus any additions Cashman makes over the next few off-seasons, should counteract some of the graying and keep the Yankees above water. Like the 2013-15 Yankees, the 2016-18 squads will feature several high-mileage players trending downward. But unlike recent teams, these next few will also include a promising group of youngsters.

The Yankees are rebuilding, but so far they’ve managed to prepare for the future without totally sacrificing the past. It’s a tough act to pull off, but right now it appears to be working.

They likely won’t be great team at any point during the next three years, but the Yankees might very well be better from 2016-18 than they were from 2013-15. At the very least it remains quite possible they remain above .500 and in playoff contention each season until the 2018 cavalry comes to join the prospects and restore the Yankees to glory.

Lead photo: Noah K. Murray/USA Today Sports

However, the New York Yankees have two guys that are suspiciously similar. Their different sizes and appearances seem to indicate that they are different entities, but their statistics leave some room for doubt.

In Michael Pineda and Nathan Eovaldi the Yankees have two hard-throwing, fastball-slider right-handers born just over a year apart who haven’t reached their potential as they approach their mid-to-late twenties. They both similarly under-performed their peripherals last year:

Both were effective judging by fielding-independent metrics, and did a good job of keeping the ball on the ground, but were still undone by unfavorable BABIP marks. As a result, it would be reasonable to conclude that both were equally good last year and equally strong bounce-back candidates for 2016.

The difference between the two is surprisingly significant because they arrive at similar results through different means. The most important example is strikeouts and walks. Pineda maintains a low FIP with an extraordinary 7.43 K/BB ratio. Eovaldi’s mark, on the other hand, is 2.47. The former Mariner has excellent control and the ability to miss bats consistently. Those are arguably the most important skills a pitcher can possess.

Eovaldi’s low FIP, and the relatively high WAR that results from it, has a different source. What he specialized in was preventing long balls, allowing only 0.58 per nine innings. Not only does is that a fairly luck-reliant statistic, but having such a favorable result while pitching at Yankee Stadium is highly irregular.

In theory, Eovaldi could have found some kind of secret sauce that’s keeping the ball in the yard, but it’s safe to assume that he’ll have a hard time repeating what he accomplished in this domain last year. With a normalized HR/FB his xFIP sits at 3.81 — a tidy number, but hardly an extraordinary one. Meanwhile, Pineda’s xFIP was an excellent 2.95, even better than his above-average FIP.

Superficially, the two hurlers look to offer similar statistical profiles, but all things being equal the smarter money is on Pineda getting over the run-prevention hump next season. Eovaldi does have durability on his side and an intriguing new splitter, but despite his elite velocity he simply doesn’t blow batters away.

Pineda and Eovaldi are less similar than they appear on paper, although probably more alike than they appear in person. Both are interesting talents, but by this time next year we won’t be comparing them so closely. Pineda is likely to either surpass his strikingly similar teammate behind his superior underlying numbers or fall victim to a gruesome injury.

Lead photo: Adam Hunger/USA Today Sports

If the season started tomorrow, the Yankees’ starting rotation would look something like this:

Masahiro Tanaka
Luis Severino
Michael Pineda
Nathan Eovaldi
CC Sabathia

Ivan Nova
Bryan Mitchell

Now that’s not so bad. All seven of those guys have had some degree of success one time or another and could contribute in 2016. As a bonus, six of the seven are younger than 30 years old. But, like last year, the rotation carries a number of question marks. Will Pineda be healthy? Will we see the version of Sabathia that dominated September or the one that struggled through April, May, June and July (and that’s not even touching on the fact that he’ll be pitching for the first time since checking into rehab last October)? Can Nova bounce back from a bad season? Is Mitchell truly an MLB-caliber starter?

Given the uncertainty, it’s likely the Yankees will add to their rotation before Opening Day. And given their apparent commitment to youth and austerity, we can assume they’ll look for a young, cost-controlled option. But young starters certainly don’t grow on trees, and any team that has a 25-year-old, mid-rotation pitcher won’t likely part with him easily.

With Shelby Miller off the board and Jose Fernandez’s price prohibitively high, let’s look at some young pitchers Brian Cashman might think about placing calls on.

Category I: The Deep Rebuilding Team

Though most rebuilding teams want to hold on to their mid-20s players, occasionally a team embarks on a teardown so thorough it will part with even its young major leaguers. Here, we’re looking for pitchers young enough to help the Yankees in the near future but old enough that their current teams are willing to cash in for prospects.

• Julio Teheran, Atlanta Braves

The Braves have already traded the 25-year-old Miller and 26-year-old Andrelton Simmons, so they would probably be willing to part with the 24-year-old Teheran for the right price. This would be somewhat of a buy-low move, as the righty is coming off an unimpressive season on the heels of two good ones. Teheran would cost the Yankees at least one of their top prospects (Aaron Judge, Greg Bird, Jorge Mateo), but unlike Fernandez wouldn’t require a package built around Severino.

• Taylor Jungmann, Milwaukee Brewers

Jungmann had a nice rookie year in 2015 (3.77 ERA, 3.92 FIP in 119.1 innings), but he’s already 25 years old, and the Brewers aren’t anywhere close to contention. There’s no specific indication that the 2011 first-round pick is available, but he’s the type of low-ceiling guy a rebuilding team might consider moving under the right circumstances.

• Anthony Desclafani/Rasiel Iglesias, Cincinnati Reds

This could be a stretch, but the Reds have a ton of young arms, and maybe they’d be willing to part with one of the older, more developed ones. Desclafani and Iglesias are both almost 26 with solid rookie seasons under their belts. Would Cincinnati give up guys who don’t hit arbitration for a few more years? Who knows, but it’s probably worth a call.

Category II: The Low-floor/high-ceiling guys

The Yankees could pursue a young starting pitcher whose previous teams are ready to move on following early-career injury or ineffectiveness.

• Henderson Alvarez, free agent

The Marlins non-tendered Alvarez only a year after he posted a 2.65 ERA and 3.58 FIP over 187 innings, which indicates an enormous lack of confidence in his ability to come back strong from shoulder surgery. Still, the 25-year-old has shown he can pitch at an elite level and will offer high-risk upside to whoever signs him.

• Matt Moore, Tampa Bay Rays

The Rays are supposedly discussing trades involving the 26-year-old Moore, who has thrown only 73 innings in the past two years. Once upon a time, Moore was one of the top three prospects in baseball along with Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, and the Yankees (along with everyone else) will be tempted to try to recapture that potential.

• Tyler Skaggs, Los Angeles Angels

Skaggs hasn’t lived up to his top-prospect hype, with a career 4.72 ERA in 181 innings, but his 3.55 FIP in 2015 suggests a breakout could lie ahead. The Angels have more starting pitchers (Garrett Richards, Andrew Heaney, Hector Santiago, Matt Shoemaker, Jered Weaver, C.J. Wilson) than they know what to do with, so perhaps they’d consider dealing the 24-year-old Skaggs.

Category III: May I interest you in Brett Gardner?

The Yankees’ willingness to trade Gardner opens up the possibility of working with a contending team that simply needs an outfielder (plus some prospects) more than a starting pitcher.

• Taijuan Walker/James Paxton, Seattle Mariners

The Mariners have already reportedly turned down a deal centered around Gardner and the 23-year-old Walker but are open to giving up 27-year-old James Paxton. Given Seattle’s need for outfielders, this one makes enough sense for the teams to eventually find some middle ground.

• Danny Salazar/Trevor Bauer/Cody Anderson, Cleveland Indians

The Indians are reportedly listening to offers on all their starting pitchers, and though Carlos Carrasco’s price tag is likely greater than the Yankees are willing to pay, Cashman could make a move for Salazar, 25, Bauer, 24 or Anderson, 25. One of these deals could require forking over some good prospects in addition to Gardner, but the 32-year-old left fielder could be an appealing target for an offense-starved Cleveland team.

• Zack Wheeler, New York Mets

The Mets have an excess of young starting pitching, and the 25-year-old Wheeler, coming off Tommy John surgery, could be the odd man out. The question is, does Sandy Alderson need an outfielder to replace Yoenis Cespedes, or are they content to start the season with a Michael Conforto/Juan Lagares/Curtis Granderson alignment.

Lead photo courtesy of Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

It is not shocking that the resurgence of Alex Rodriguez has been the dominant narrative. For better or worse A-Rod is still the biggest name in baseball, a sport that has no shortage of stars but seems to lack star power. Everyone knows who Rodriguez is and he’s doing remarkable things for a player his age, especially one who took a year off.

To what degree that continues remains to be seen, but if you are even vaguely aware of baseball or the Yankees you are sure to hear plenty about it.

The reality is what’s driving this team right now is its pitching. The bullpen has been outstanding, picking up where it left off last season. While the Yankees lost stalwart David Robertson they gained the so-far untouchable Andrew Miller and the whole unit kept humming along.

A little bit less predictable has been the success of the rotation. Despite losing Tanaka after four starts, the unit currently sits second in the Major Leagues in WAR with 3.6 to date.

Michael Pineda is largely responsible for that number with his absolutely outstanding start, but the team has also gotten some great starts from the likes of Chase Whitley and Nathan Eovaldi as well. Whenever a team enjoys success that goes against the preseason prognostication our first instinct is to question the sustainability of said success.

In the Yankees’ case, from a performance point of view there are not very many regression indicators. The  teams’ starting unit’s peripherals have actually outpaced its run prevention. The 3.90 ERA is far from special, but the 3.64 FIP and 3.56 xFIP shows how well this rotation has pitched.

If the Yankees’ rotation has looked good so far, and only figures to look better as its ERA matches up with its fielding-independent numbers, then what the concern? For one, more starts from Whitley as opposed to Tanaka are likely to drag the numbers down to some degree.

More importantly, the group is likely leaning too heavily on their sliders. According to FanGraphs Pitch Value numbers the slider is the best pitch in baseball, but research done by Jeff Zimmerman has shown that increased usage of the pitch leads to greater injury risk. Not only are the Yankees throwing more sliders than any other rotation, they are doing so by a significant margin.

Top 5 Rotations by Slider Usage

The comparison between teams can be slightly unfair as some teams just have more starters that throw sliders than others. However, 66.1 percent of pitchers who have made a start in the big leagues have thrown a slider this season so it’s not as if the Yankees are stockpiling a rare breed of hurler.

Instead, the Yankees are watching their guys throw a scary amount of breaking balls. Injuries are very difficult to predict, but these pitchers are undoubtedly putting their arms in harms way. It is far from shocking that the biggest culprit is Pineda.

Yankees Starters by Slider Usage

Considering that 125 starters have thrown a slider this year it’s interesting that all six Yankees here are in the top half of that group. Pineda and Eovaldi are the two in worrying territory here, as Zimmerman identified 30% breaking ball usage as a worrying benchmark in his study.

The issue for the team is that this may be a problem without a solution. Without giving opponents a heavy dose of his slider, Pineda simply isn’t the same guy. His slider is one of the best in the game bar none.

How do you tell a guy who can do that to reign it in? You probably don’t. Pineda’s injury history is well documented at this point and the team is likely in ride-him-till-he-breaks mode with the big right-hander anyway.

Injuries are never inevitable individually, but they are as a whole. It’s easy to say that Pineda will get injured this year, but there’s always a chance that he goes well over 200 innings and wins the Cy Young. However, in an overall sense the Yankees are likely to experience rotation injuries if they keep up a slider-heavy approach.

The starters are cruising now, but this rotation is playing with fire.

All statistics current as of May 11th

Photo Credit: Anthony Gruppuso-USA Today Sports

Of course, “Big Mike” did the Rocket one better, tying a franchise record for strikeouts by a righthanded pitcher. Not even a loaded Baltimore lineup that led the majors in slugging percentage entering today with a .446 mark had much hope against this slider:

It’s too bad that Pineda’s pitch count was high and that given his injury history, it would have been difficult justifying leaving him in. A mere six men since 1900 have matched 16 strikeouts in a maximum seven innings of work. He was only two away from the franchise record and (no pun intended) within striking distance of the major league mark of 20. As it stands, he joined a prestigious club anyway, as only three other Yankees have ever fanned 16 men in a game, and all three were borderline Hall of Famers.

David Cone: June 23, 1997 vs. Tigers (16)

For some reason, I get the impression that most fans who didn’t grow up watching much Cone, save for the end of his career, have this image in their mind of him as a wily veteran scraping along by throwing pretty much everything and the kitchen sink at hitters. However, that’s not fair to Coney’s true talent, as while he was a smart pitcher, he also had electric stuff on the mound, as was most apparent during his famous 1999 perfect game:

Cone struck out 10 Expos during his perfecto, but two years before, he had an even bigger strikeout performance in Detroit. This was the righty record that Pineda tied on Sunday, as Cone struck out 16 Tigers over eight innings that night, utilizing what writer John Giannone called the next day “a vicious splitter, an overwhelming fastball, and a slick slider.” Tigers manager Buddy Bell said that Cone looked as good as Clemens did the year before when he tied his own record with 20 strikeouts.

The stone-faced starter was in such a zone that he didn’t even realize he had struck out 16 until teammate Andy Pettitte let him know after the eighth. Both Curtis Pride and Travis Fryman str He had thrown 127 pitches and the Yankees had the greatest closer of all time ready to preserve the 5-2 lead, so Cone departed. What’s amazing about Cone is that for most pitchers, this would be a career-best outing, and yet Cone also had the perfect game and a then-NL record 19-strikeout game with the Mets. Giannone had probably the best line when he ended his column with manager Joe Torre’s quote about how “it’s a manager’s day off when David Cone pitches.”

Giannone followed with “As well as the opposition’s.” /drops mic/

David Wells, July 30, 1997 vs. A’s

Another terrific pitcher from the ’90s dynasty known more for his perfect game, “Boomer” was a control artist who simply had everything working on this Wednesday afternoon. In over 10 big league seasons, he had never exceeded even 11 Ks in a game, but he blew past all personal marks and set a career-high with 16 punch-outs of the A’s. Unfortunately like with Cone, there is no readily available footage of that game, but based off his finest pitches from other outings, we can imagine how good his curve looked that day:

Wells had a rubber arm that could probably still produce some pretty curves today if called upon in a pinch. He pitched 21 years in the majors and was still productive at age 44 with a dazzling curveball despite an infamous lifestyle that led to many booze-filled adventures. (Wells still insists that he pitched his perfect game while hung over.)

As Wells dialed up the strikeout total, the Yankee Stadium faithful got into the spirit as well, denoting every K with “crudely drawn beer mugs” and (after they ran out), “flattened plastic cups” affixed to the upper deck facade. Wells of course loved it, remarking “I’ve been in the game a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like that. The fans are creative. They have a good sense of humor. You need that. This is your home crowd. They’re rebels up there. You’ve got to like that… I could have used a beer myself. I was getting pooped out there.”

John Hirschbeck’s big strike zone reportedly helped him out, as eight A’s went down looking during the three-hit, 138-pitch shutout, which combined with the strikeouts gave Wells one of the highest Game Scores in team history, an outstanding 94. Future teammate Scott Brosius struck out twice, and Mark Bellhorn led the way with four strikeouts. Amusingly, Joe Girardi has been involved in all three 16-K games to ever occur for the Yankees, as he caught both of Wells and Cone’s games, and then managed Pineda’s outing. The franchise went 94 years with just one game of at least 16 strikeouts, and then they notched two more within about a month of each other. Sounds about right.

Ron Guidry, June 17, 1978 vs. Angels (18)

Easily the most famous high-strikeout game in Yankees history, the record still belongs to the “Louisiana Lightning man,” as Phil Rizzuto called him. A crowd of 33,162 was in attendance that night in the middle of Guidry’s unbelievable 1978 season, which featured a 1.74 ERA, a 2.16 FIP, a 2.29 DRA, 248 strikeouts, and 9 shutouts. It was one of the best pitching years to ever come from the Yankees, if not the best. This was by far the top performance, even in that fantastic season:

This game has been very well-documented, and MLB Video has multiple features on it with player interviews and footage. The poor Angels had no hope with Guidry’s devastating slider at its peak. That slider had been perfected thanks to his relationship with closer Sparky Lyle, who employed a similar wipeout slider that just disappeared from the strike zone. Lyle himself had learned because while young with the Red Sox, Ted Williams told him it was the one pitch he felt he could never hit.

The Angels could surely relate to Teddy Ballgame on this night, as everyone in their lineup fanned at least once with DH Ike Hampton whiffing three times and right fielder Joe Rudi leading with four strikeouts in four plate appearances. A Yankee Stadium tradition was introduced that night, as any time “Gator” reached two strikes on a hitter, the crowd stood and clapped in eager anticipation of another one. More often than not, Guidry delivered. Like Wells, Guidry threw a crazy pitch count, 138 pitches in a four-hit shutout. Forget the Yankees, no lefthander in AL history had ever struck out 18 batters, a mark that stood until Randy Johnson surpassed him.

Just imagine–Guidry was only two years removed from threatening to leave baseball in frustration to getting sent down again. George Steinbrenner even wanted him back in the minors to start the ’77 season. Thankfully, GM Gabe Paul and manager Billy Martin supported Guidry, so he went north with the team in ’77, had a solid year, and the next season, he went bananas.

Pineda has tremendous company in Yankees strikeout lore now. It was a game for the ages that no Yankees fan who saw it will ever forget.

Photo Credit: Adam Hunger-USA Today Sports

The most obvious worry for the Yankees is losing a key piece of their rotation when the team has some momentum and a head start over the middling AL East. It would be hard to favor them for the division crown even now, but the division is so wide open that the playoffs seem more attainable now than they were at the beginning of the season.

Tanaka had not been quite the same pitcher this year as he was in 2014 in terms of velocity and pitch usage, but the overall results were about equal. The right-hander had spun two straight gems allowing one run in his last 13 and 1/3 innings with 14 strikeouts and only two walks allowed. That type of production is very difficult, if not impossible to replace and you aren’t going to get it from Chase Whitley.

However, the Yankees are likely to have a little more help than their sixth starter can provide in the form of Lady Luck’s favor. So far the team’s starters have accumulated 2.6 WAR, the third best total in baseball, and yet they have produced a 4.24 ERA, the league’s 18th best mark.

A great deal of this disparity is caused by some of team’s top starters not seeing results that come in line with their peripherals.

Sabathia and Eovaldi have had trouble aligning their run prevention with their fielding-independent numbers in the past but neither is exactly a Ricky Nolasco-like figure.

When trying to find the root of numbers like these the most obvious culprit is bad BABIP, and Yankees’ starters have allowed a .331 BABIP compared to the league average on .290. With numbers like that it is tempting to simply chalk it up to luck as we know for the most part BABIP lies outside the control of pitchers. However, it’s also worth seeing if there is anything in the batted ball data that would help explain the discrepancy.

There really isn’t a lot to chew on here. Perhaps the Yankees rotation could stand to get a few more pop ups, but that seems like nitpicking. It’s apparent that these starters are not giving up a batted ball profile that would justify their bloated BABIP.

At this point it seems fair to say that the Yankees rotation has been unlucky and deserves better. To the vast majority of baseball fans the ideas that any player belonging to the Yankees ever deserves better is foreign and distasteful, but the batted ball gods do not discriminate against a franchise for it’s wealth and success.

Without diving too deeply into a horrendously mixed metaphor that includes both Lady Luck and Batted Ball Gods in some massive and complex baseball pantheon it seems clear that the Yankees should see fewer of their opponents balls in play drop for hits going forward.

Although the team has not shown particularly well defensively so far they should be competent enough in the field to enable this regression to the mean to take place.

It may be impossible to place Masahiro Tanaka with Chase Whitley and expect better results, but Whitley plus a shift in BABIP for the team’s rotation should be a suitable replacement for everyone’s favorite splitter delivery system for now.

Photo credit: Kim Klement/USA Today Sports

Three and a half years later, it’s safe to say things didn’t go according to plan on either side. Montero played promisingly in 2012, hitting .260 with 15 home runs and 61 RBI’s. Since then he’s split his time between the big league club, the minors, the disabled list, and 50 games on Bud Selig’s naughty list for his involvement in the Biogenesis scandal. From the Yankees perspective the trade looked even worse as recently as last spring. Pineda missed all of 2012 and 2013 with right shoulder injuries and came into camp last year as a complete mystery. He again spent a good chunk of last year on the shelf with more shoulder injuries and serving a minor suspension for some tomfoolery (the pine tar incidents), but he managed to pitch 76 innings with a 1.89 ERA.

If each player retired on the spot today, we might call this one a draw. But as far as I’ve heard that’s not happening and the Yankees look poised to win the trade over the long haul. Michael Pineda showed a lot of promise last year and is healthy for the moment, while Jesús Montero can’t rid himself of the “AAAA” label on his bat.

Two starts into 2014 and nearing the 100-inning plateau in pinstripes, it seems like as good a time as any to evaluate Michael Pineda. We’ve seen enough from him since his shoulder injuries to get a good idea what type of pitcher he will be as a Yankee. For better or worse, he is not the same guy he was that first summer in Seattle.  So let’s take a trip down memory lane. The year: 2011, the city: Seattle, the music: fitting.

Note: the data included is from Brooks Baseball, a partner of Baseball Prospectus.

Mariner Mike: A Two-Pitch Power Arm

When he broke into the league in 2011 with the Mariners, Michael Pineda pitched like a typical 22-year-old; he relied on what had gotten him there. For Pineda specifically, this meant throwing his fastball and slider, two dominant pitches, almost 95% of the time. He rode these two pitches to a breakout first half (8-5 with a 2.58 ERA on July 4th) and an all-star nod as a rookie.

In Seattle, the four-seam fastball was Pineda’s favorite pitch.  His fastball had great velocity and great tailing movement (in to a righty).  He could throw it in any count against right-handed or left-handed hitters and the subtle, late run on the pitch prevented hitters from squaring it up. Pineda moved it up and down, in and out, ringing up strikeouts and using it to set up his other main offering, the slider.

His hard slider was filthy, especially paired with 95 mph heat at the belt. Batters were flailing all year at the pitch, and for good reason.  It too had fantastic late movement, diving at the foot of left-handed hitters and off the table for right-handed hitters. Batters whiffed at Pineda’s slider an absurd 20% of the time he threw it in 2011. The fastball and slider were his bread and butter, his pasta and marinara, his baa-gel and cream cheese.

Pineda also very occasionally used a changeup to keep hitters honest, though throwing it only 6% of the time kept them about as honest as a Bluth. And the sinkers that PITCHf/x thought it tracked may have just been wild fourseam fastballs, recording only 23 of them all year. I couldn’t locate video of either pitch back then so we’ll have to believe that at best, the changeup was a work in progress.

Relying so heavily on two pitches, no matter how great they are, is a strategy usually reserved for relief pitchers who see only a part of a lineup each game. As a rookie, teams were facing Pineda for the first time and he shoved the fastball-slider combo down their throats, but in the second half he began to struggle. Some combination of better scouting reports, a lack of a third pitch, and general fatigue caught up with Mariner Mike and his ERA jumped up one whole run the last two months of the year.

That being said, there was a lot of promise and strikeout-potential in his young arm, enough to convince the Yankees to acquire him.

2014 Yankee Mike: Less Power, More Refinement

One of the first things I noticed when I saw Pineda pitch his first game in New York last year was how different his stuff looked from what I remembered. In my mind he was a huge dude with a blazing fastball. And he was still a huge dude but the fastball had lost some of its oomph. He was being a lot more precise with his pitches and…wait…was that a cutter?

Mariner Mike reminded me of Joel Zumaya or Fernando Rodney but Yankee Mike reminded me of a much, much larger Dan Haren. Had Michael Pineda become Dan in real life? Had he changed as much as I thought?

Yes! His fastball underwent a sea change during the three years it took him to get on the mound for the Yankees. He no longer threw as hard, didn’t throw his fastball as much, lost almost all of the horizontal run, and his fastball was dropping more than it ever had. Everything about the pitch had fundamentally changed. He became more precise, throwing 3% more strikes with his fastball last year than in 2011 though he wasn’t having as much success with a falling whiff rate. Depending on the situation, Pineda will sometimes even cut his fastball now, something he couldn’t dream of doing in Seattle.

Pineda’s slider in 2014 might have been even filthier than it was back in his Seattle days. He has managed to maintain the velocity right around 85 mph and increased both the drop and sweep on the pitch. His slider is an improved weapon and last year Pineda’s catchers called the pitch nearly 35% of the time. Though the whiff percentage on the pitch has dropped a bit down to 17%, this is likely due to the smaller gap between the fastball and slider velocity.

Despite the numbers in this chart that would suggest otherwise, the changeup has been one of the biggest changes for Michael Pineda since he’s returned to the mound. Last year, before getting suspended and hurt in the middle part of 2014 his changeup was finally becoming a legitimate offering for him. While the movement is no different than it was in Seattle, his confidence in the pitch is growing and this season the trend has continued. Through two starts in 2015 the changeup has been his best pitch.  He’s now throwing changeups almost 15% of the time and getting whiffs over 25% of the time.

What Happened?

The obvious question that this analysis elicits is WTF? Why the Face?  How did Seattle Mike become Yankee Mike? Where did this big drop in velocity come from?  And the answer is pretty equally clear: his shoulder. Pineda has suffered an extraordinary amount of injuries to his pitching shoulder in his young career and is now three years removed on his only completely healthy season. A combination of a chronically injured shoulder and the normal velocity drop that happens as pitchers age is the likely culprit for that velocity drop.

More interesting to me is the change in movement on Pineda’s fastball and slider. I suspect it also relates to his shoulder issues but in a more roundabout way.

It’s pretty well known that arm angles and release points help determine the trajectory of pitches. A pitcher who throws sidearm will naturally have a lot of run on a fastball and a frisbee-like slider (see Brad Ziegler or Pat Neshek). Similarly in order to throw a perfect 12-6 curveball a pitcher needs to throw more-or-less over the top.

Michael Pineda nearly eliminated the run on his fastball, adding the ability to throw a near-cutter and added a lot of horizontal movement on his slider the same way. I suspected that this change came as a result of a more over the top motion and vertical release point. Thanks to one of the coolest features of Brooks Baseball, I was able to put my hypothesis to the test.

Since coming to the Yankees and recovering from shoulder injuries, Pineda’s release point changed quite drastically. He now throws nearly a quarter of a foot more overhead and similarly closer to the body, most likely to relieve some stress he naturally put on his shoulder from his old arm slot. This change in release point could very well explain the change in movement we’ve seen on his pitches with the Yankees.

The Outlook

Yankee Mike is a much smarter pitcher than Mariner Mike. This at-bat with Chris Davis from his start on April 13th shows he’s mixing up his offerings better and using more creativity to make up for a loss in fastball velocity. Whether his newfound refinement is an improvement on his “here try to hit this” Seattle style remains to be seen, as does his health. But it is clear that he will be a key player for the Yankees in 2015 and if he keeps improving can be the best pitcher on the team.