But we’re here to look at the present, not the past, and expectations of the former Cy Young award winner are not nearly as high. This year, we saw Sabathia in a spring training battle for the last spot in the Yankees’ rotation, and the Yankees enter the season with doubts surrounding who their ace was.

The results from Sabathia’s first two starts this season have been mixed. During the winter, Sabathia worked with both Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera on throwing a cutter, a pitch he hadn’t thrown at all before 2014. Now, Sabathia throws his cutter more frequently than his regular four-seam fastball. His cutter usage is at 39.46 percent so far this year, up from three percent in 2015 and higher than his 33.52 combined four-seam/two-seam rates. Additionally, the cutter has been Sabathia’s go-to pitch in two-strike counts, throwing it almost 50 percent of the time in payoff situations, and resulting in ground balls more than three times as much as line drives in such situations.

In his first start against the Tigers, Sabathia set down Detroit in order their first time through the lineup and utilized his cutter to great effect. One of Sabathia’s best early cutters came against Justin Upton in the first inning.

Out of the 38 cutters that Sabathia tossed two Saturdays ago, 19 induced swings. The cutter above to Upton was the first of 4 whiffs on the pitch and was set up by a 3-1 fastball that Upton fouled off on the previous offering. Sabathia continued mowing down Detroit hitters, needing only 34 pitches — 23 of which were for strikes — to navigate the first three innings, but the fourth inning brought a much different story.

To start, Sabathia nearly doubled his pitch count in the fourth, slinging 33 to bring his total to 67 once the inning finally ended. He walked the bases loaded and with two outs, James McCann and Jose Iglesias both hit line drive singles.

The most noticeable difference between these and the put-away cutter to Upton in the first inning is that neither pitch was on the outside third of the plate. Sabathia tried to come inside to McCann, (left GIF) but instead the ball flattened out and McCann turned on the 3-1 offering for a single to left field. Against Iglesias, (right GIF) Sabathia tried the same strategy as he did against Upton — a two-strike, high and away cutter — but left it too close to the middle of the plate and Iglesias lined it up the middle. Naturally, if Sabathia hadn’t walked three of the previous batters this jam would never have happened, but Sabathia may have been able to get away with pitches like these a couple years ago. However, in his current form he can’t blow by hitters anymore and generate a ton of swings and misses. He needed to be more accurate against McCann and Iglesias and missing by even a few inches, as seen above, ended up haunting him in the end.

McCann’s single drove in two runs for the Tigers, cutting the Yankees’ lead to 6-2. Iglesias’s single didn’t hurt New York though, as Mike Aviles followed with a lineout to end the threat. Sabathia departed after six innings and was charged with three runs on four hits and four walks with 3 strikeouts. Below is a chart of Sabathia’s pitch selection from his start against the Tigers and the outcome rates of each pitch, which illustrates Sabathia’s heavy use of his new cutter right out of the gate and its effectiveness in inducing swings.

In his next start against Seattle, Sabathia continued using his cutter but was much less efficient overall. He was able to get through the first four innings unscathed, scattering three hits and a walk, before he unraveled in the fifth. Sabathia was able to utilize his cutter more frequently against lefties in this start because of the composition of the Mariners’ lineup. Unfortunately for the Mariners, Nori Aoki fell victim to Sabathia’s new-found craftiness.

Aoki’s first at-bat (left GIF) ended with a weak ground ball back to the mound, coming on a low-and-away cutter. His second at-bat (right GIF) concluded with an up-and-in cutter that he swung through. Against a lefty like Aoki, who is normally a contact hitter, Sabathia was able to move his cutter anywhere around the strike zone. Both of these pitches came with two strikes, similar to the usage against the Tigers, indicating Sabathia has quickly become comfortable using his cutter to try to finish hitters off. And although lefties are easier for a left-hander like Sabathia to fool, it’s still a positive sign that he is able to handle them without much issue.

Sabathia continued to use his cutter very effectively to righties as well, as evidenced by this strikeout to Ketel Marte that’s almost identical to the Upton strikeout.

This is what Sabathia needs to keep doing if he wants to succeed as a finesse pitcher — entice opposing hitters with pitches that look like fastballs but break just a bit at the last second. However, Seattle’s best hitter is a lefty like Aoki, much to the chagrin of Yankees fans everywhere. Robinson Cano, the ex-Yankee who bolted to the Pacific Northwest for $240 million, came up to face Sabathia in the third inning, the only time Sabathia retired him. First, let’s see what Sabathia did well.

The first pitch to Cano is a cutter inside that completely fools him. Instead of saving the cutter for the pay-off pitch, Sabathia unleashes it right away and ties up Cano. When he can locate his cutter, Sabathia can easily be a top-tier back rotation pitcher, which is what the Yankees are hoping he’d be after he reinvented himself in the offseason. When he can’t locate his cutter though…

Sabathia left that cutter right over the heart of the plate and Cano made him pay, ripping a single through the middle even though Didi Gregorius nearly reached the ball when he was covering second base. You can see Austin Romine set up outside, on the black, but Sabathia’s pitch couldn’t quite get there. Again, Sabathia can’t afford to miss on two-strike pitches like this because he simply isn’t the same pitcher that he was a couple years ago. The life on his fastballs just isn’t the same. After Nelson Cruz doubled in Cano, Sabathia’s day ended at just 4 2/3 innings and 95 pitches. He was charged with three runs on seven hits with a walk and five strikeouts.

The bottom line for Sabathia and the Yankees is that he needs to continue honing command of his cut-fastball. Against right-handed batters it has already become his weapon of choice, as Sabathia has thrown the pitch 43 percent of the time and 65 percent of the time in two-strike counts so far in 2016. He has found some early success already with this, as shown by his strikeouts of Justin Upton and Ketel Marte on perfectly placed pitches. But his cutter is still a work in progress.

Sabathia could additionally benefit from going deeper into games, as his early pitch counts have been pretty high, though the excellence of the Yankees’ bullpen doesn’t necessitate this. The most important thing is to become completely comfortable with the cutter because over the course of his career, right-handed batters have a batting average against more than 90 points higher than lefties do. If he wants to regain some of the success he found early in his career, Sabathia should keep improving his cutter to the point where their advantage is relatively neutralized.

Lead photo: Noah K. Murray / USA Today Sports

The star power in that 2009 Yankees group leads to an important question: Could that be the best infield of all time? ESPN’s Buster Olney thinks it’s up there—in 2013, he ranked that Yankees group the second-greatest infield ever, behind only the 1976 Reds. The New York Daily News explored the question back in September 2009, quoting Jim Palmer as saying the Tex-Cano-Jeter-Rodriguez quartet belonged in the conversation for best infield in history.

So I decided to compare the total WARP of the four 2009 Yankees infielders with that of other notable infields. Alas, the Big Red Machine core of Perez, Morgan, Concepcion, and Rose topped the ’09 Yanks in both 1975 and 1976. The Philadelphia Athletics’ “$100,000 infield” had the Bombers beat in 1910, 1912, 1913 and 1914.* So did the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance Cubs in 1906.* And the 1999 Mets. But the ’09 Yankees did have the best infield since… actually they didn’t even have the best infield in their division that season, bested by the Rays. But they did form the top Yankees infield since… no actually the ’07 team, despite playing Doug Mientkiewicz at first base, edged the ’09 squad thanks to a huge year from A-Rod.

*Using Baseball-Reference WAR because WARP doesn’t go back that far

Now I found myself confronting defeat. It was clear the 2009 Yankees were not quite as special as I had remembered. Here’s a partial list of infields I tabulated before giving up.

So I tried moving the goalposts. Since none of the ’09 Yankee infielders graded out particularly well on defense that year, I looked at offense-only metrics. Suddenly they scoot past the ’75 Reds, a couple of the A’s teams and the defensive-focused ’99 Mets. But even in the offense-only category, it’s hard to argue with stats that the ’09 Yanks are in the conversation for best infield of all-time. They’re still behind by the ’76 Reds, several “$100,000 infield” squads, and even those ’07 Yankees.

But even though value stats don’t quite back up my belief that the Yankees infield in 2009 was the greatest of all-time or even the best-hitting of all time, it might not be wrong to say that year (and the following three as well) the Yankees had the best infielders of any team ever.

Because check out what happens when we add together the total career WARP and bWAR of notable groups of starting infielders:

Looking at career value, that Yankees group trails the Big Red Machine in WARP, whose formula is extremely harsh on Jeter and Teixeira. But three of the four Yanks are still playing, and Cano alone could make up the remaining 11 wins over the rest of his career. Per WARP, the 2009-12 Yankees will have the most prolific infield ever by 2017.

And according to bWAR, the contest is already over. The title-winning Yankees quartet tops the mid-70s Reds (Perez, Morgan, Concepcion, Rose) early-10s A’s (McInnis, Collins, Barry, Baker), late-00s Cubs (Chance, Tinker, Evers, Steinfeldt), late-90s Orioles (Palmeiro, Alomar, Ripken, Sufhoff/Bordick), and turn-of-the-century Indians (Thome, Alomar, Vizquel, Fryman).

I’ve racked my brain for other contenders but can’t come up with any. The ’94-95 Indians would have been up there if Eddie Murray had played first as much as he DHed. The Whitaker/Trammell Tigers teams had solid corner infielders but never incredible ones. The Jackie Robinson Dodgers were missing a third baseman. Some strong duos (Bagwell and Biggio, Ripken and Murray, Greenberg and Gehringer) never fit into strong quartets.

I did find one infield, however, that beats the 2009-12 Yankees in total career value: the 2008 Yankees. That team also had Cano, Jeter and Rodriguez, but manning first base was Jason Giambi, who out-WARPs Teixeira 51.5-38.5. So according to WARP, the most talented infield in baseball history was not the group that led the Yankees to a World Series title while inspiring breathless comparisons to the Big Red Machine, but rather the squad that produced the franchise’s first non-playoff season in more than a decade.

So can we proclaim the 2008 Yankees, in a shocking upset, the best infield of all-time? Nope. Career value doesn’t totally override who the players were at that moment, and in 2008 Giambi was past-prime, Cano had the worst year of his career, and Jeter and Rodriguez were sub-standard as well.

What we can claim, after all the manipulation of stats and changing of definitions, is what I already knew going in: The 2009 Yankees infield was pretty special, whether it was the best of all-time or not.

Lead photo courtesy of Gregory Fisher-USA TODAY Sports