The Futility Infielder

In what's become an annual tradition around these parts, I'll once again examine the Yankees' roster options as they retool following an unhappy October ending. In this installment, I'll look at the team's starting pitching; in the next, I'll evaluate the free agent pool and trade options.

The Yankees have made no secret of the foundation for their success during the Joe Torre era. Operating on the assumption that you can never be too rich or have too much starting pitching, they've spent top dollar on their rotation to buy not only quality but depth, insuring themselves against the likelihood that a key hurler might spend a few weeks on the shelf and setting up a relatively pleasant conundrum come October as to which of their heralded quintet is bullpen-bound.

The winter of 2003-2004 presented the Yankees with a rather drastic challenge where their rotation was concerned. First, Roger Clemens, who had kept Yankee fans on an emotional rollercoaster through the entire season, first in pursuit of his 300th win and then through a very strange October, retired as expected. Then Andy Pettitte, hot off a 21-win campaign and a stellar postseason, departed as a free agent for the Houston Astros, where he eventually lured Clemens out of retirement so successfully that the Rocket garnered a record seventh Cy Young award. Then David Wells, a free agent whose balky back had let the team down at the worst possible moment, reneged on a verbal agreement and signed with the San Diego Padres. In losing the trio, the Yanks saw over 630 quality innings and 53 wins walk out the door.

Not that they had anything to be ashamed of in doing so, mind you. Whether taken at face value or read against the Rocket's revisionist desire to pitch closer to home, Clemens' retirement meant the Yanks had zero chance to retain his services for 2004. Pettitte had shown himself to be a true stopper during the Yanks' playoff run, but management's concern about the long-term viability of his elbow steered them to finish a solid second in the bidding war against the Astros, and they watched with no small measure of relief as Dandy Andy was limited to 83 innings. Wells, at 40, was coming off of his second back surgery in three years, and his penchant for controversy during his second tour of duty in pinstripes -- the reneged deal with the Diamondbacks, the revelations in his book, the diner incident which left him without his two front teeth, and the instant karma for his remark about conditioning on the eve of his World Series start -- added up to another page that desperately needed turning. When he signed with the Padres in a fashion similar to that which led him back to the Yanks, it made a certain kind of sense.

Brian Cashman and company did their best to live up to the challenge of rebuilding their front-line rotation. They traded their most promising young hitter, Nick Johnson, to Montreal in a deal which brought them the highly regarded Javier Vazquez, a pitcher who looked for all the world like the next Yankee ace. They traded the frustratingly erratic Jeff Weaver and a minor-league live arm for Kevin Brown, expecting him to take over Clemens' role as the staff's elder statesman. They patched in Jon Lieber, whom they'd signed to an extremely creative two-year deal which included his Tommy John rehab on the front end. Along with holdovers Mike Mussina and Jose Contreras, they looked to have the deepest rotation in the league, especially with Orlando Hernandez rehabbing in the wings.

But the Yanks' best laid plans broke down when their starters did. Brown suffered a litany of injuries, from a bad back to an intestinal parasite to a self-inflicted broken hand. Vazquez pitched his way to the All-Star Game, then promptly fell apart in the second half with a 6.92 ERA. Mussina spent the first half of the season bent out of shape over the team's trip to Japan and eventually missed six weeks with elbow trouble. Contreras was such a bust that the Yanks cut bait on him at the trading deadline, acquiring 2003 All-Star Esteban Loaiza from the White Sox in trade. He pitched, for all intents and purposes, as though Contreras never left and was relegated to the bullpen a month of being acquired. Only Lieber, who put up a strong second half after missing the first month and suffering through a rocky May and June, and El Duque, who improbably won his first eight decisions after being recalled following the All-Star Break, kept the staff afloat.

The deficiencies among the starters were not easy to mask, even with a major-league record 61 come-from-behind wins and 101 victories overall. This Yankee rotation simply paled in comparison to its predecessors:

        IP    ERA   K/9   WHIP  K/W   HR/9

2004   942.3  4.82  6.55  1.36  2.55  1.27

2003  1066.0  4.02  6.91  1.25  3.52  0.91

2002  1024.7  3.97  7.32  1.24  3.07  0.97

The 2004 rotation pitched 123.7 fewer innings than the year before, about the workload of two solid relievers, or over an extra two outs per game. Their collective ERA jumped by four-fifths of a run. Their strikeouts fell off a bit, which was bad enough, but their walk rate shot up over 30 percent, which was worse, and homers rose by 40 percent, which was horrible. The result was a domino effect on the bullpen, one that saw the team's top three relievers, Mariano Rivera, Tom Gordon, and Paul Quantrill, combine for 240 appearances and buckle in the postseason. That is a topic for another day, however.

Here are the stats of the starting pitchers who finished the season wearing pinstripes:

Pitcher    W  L    IP    ERA  WHIP  K/9   K/W   HR/9  BABIP  dERA

Vazquez   14 10  198.0  4.91  1.29  6.82  2.50  1.50  .272   4.72

Lieber    14  8  176.7  4.33  1.32  5.20  5.67  1.02  .323   3.77

Mussina   12  9  164.7  4.59  1.32  7.21  3.30  1.20  .311   3.97

Brown     10  6  132.0  4.09  1.27  5.66  2.37  0.95  .282   4.09

Hernandez  8  2   84.7  3.30  1.29  8.93  2.33  0.96  .284   3.98

Loaiza    10  7  183.0  5.70  1.57  5.75  1.65  1.57  .311   4.91

As with previous seasons, I'm going to use batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and Defense Independent Pitching Statistic ERA (dERA) to complement the usual rate and counting stats. The gist of it is this:

Pitchers have less influence over the outcome of balls in play than we give them credit for, and we can do a better job of evaluating a pitcher's future performance by concentrating on the defense-independent things he does -- strike batters out, walk them, plunk them, and give up homers -- than we can by considering the effects of the defense playing behind him in converting batted balls into outs.

Defense Independent Pitching Statistics work from the assumption that since controlling the outcome of balls in play isn't a replicable skill -- one year's numbers don't have much correlation with the next year -- we can substitute a slightly adjusted league-average peformance in that department. With that in place, we then work from his K, BB, HBP and HR rates to reconstruct the pitcher's stat line to yield a DIPS ERA (dERA) that actually correlates better with a pitcher's future ERA than the actual ERA does.

If that sounds familiar, it's because I just cut'n'pasted the explanation from last year's rundown. Basically, what it comes down to is that dERA helps us to find which pitchers have all of their oars moving in the right direction. See here for my clearinghouse of DIPS-related links.

As the Yanks retool for 2005, the only sure bet to be wearing pinstripes from this group is Mussina. The Moose, who is signed through 2006 (with a club option for '07) had arguably the worst season of his career in '04, throwing for his fewest innings since his 1991 rookie season and finishing with his lowest ERA+ of his career (98, a couple hairs below league average, in other words). His strikeouts dropped by about one whole K per nine innings, and his walks and homers both increased by 30 percent. Were it not for the fact that he pitched well in September (3-1, 2.14 ERA in 42 innings) and October (1-1, 3.68 ERA in 19.2 postseason innings), there might be more cause for alarm. As it is, his spot in the rotation is set in stone, for better or for worse. Who else winds up there is anybody's guess at this point.

Brown, who couldn't make it out of the second inning in three of his five post-punch starts (all against Boston), is owed $15 million for the final year of his contract, and he's got a no-trade clause to boot. He is clearly damaged goods on both the physical and mental fronts, and a pariah in pinstripes. His strikeout rate dropped precipitously in 2004, a falloff of 2.23 per nine innings, though that reportedly had something to do with pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre's desire to see the fragile hurler put more faith in his defense. His 132 innings last year were about at his average over the previous three seasons, making him an unlikely bet to bounce back to the level of a 200-inning workhorse. He'll be 40 by Opening Day, and the Yanks would be better off paying a good chunk of that hefty salary for him to pitch elsewhere. The Phillies and the Braves have both expressed some degree of interest, though the Yanks would likely get little salary relief or player compensation from either in return. The latter makes more geographic sense because of its proximity to his Macon, Georgia home. Yankee fans would just as soon he go straight to hell.

The Yanks thought they were getting the Javier Vazquez they'd seen in the catalog, the workhorse who'd averaged 225 innings a year over the past four seasons, with an ERA 26 percent better than the adjusted league average. So sure of themselves were they that not only did they send their most tradeable talent to Montreal for him, they signed him to a four-year, $45 million contract after the trade. He won 10 games by the All-Star break, posting a 3.57 ERA in the process. But he was a complete disaster in the second half, with mechanical difficulties (opening his front shoulder too soon in his windup, messing with his command and control), gopher problems (33 homers allowed) and an ERA in Boeing territory (7.25 including the postseason). Tellingly, he told reporters he just wanted to pitch, he didn't want to worry about his mechanics. Fatigue may have been a factor in his troubles, though injury likely was not -- an MRI done following the Yanks' elimination cleared that possibility. A failure to communicate with Stottlemyre might have played a part as well, though given the penchant for pitchers to fall apart on the pitching coach's watch, that's more an indictment of Mel than of Javy.

The 28-year-old Vazquez still has three years and $36 mil on his contract, but notably, he lacks a no-trade clause. As such, his name continues to surface when the subject of trading for Randy Johnson is broached. My thumbnail hunch is that if the Yanks can get away with Vazquez as the only true talent included in that deal (throw in all of the Dioner Navarros and Robinson Canos you can eat), they should pull the trigger. That's not a likelihood, given the likely competition for the Big Unit's services, but with a no-trade, it's Johnson's hammer to wield. But such a deal would free up more salary beyond 2005, giving the Yanks considerably more flexibility down the road. He may bounce back in 2005, but his indicators -- a 38 percent drop in strikeout rate, a 23 percent rise in walk rate, a high dERA -- don't paint a particularly promising picture.

Thanks to his fine command and control, Lieber, who turns 35 in April, actually projects the best out of the 2004 Yankee starters, a good bet to continue building on his strong second half (a 3.94 ERA after the break, with a rise in K rate to 4.12 to 6.15). He yielded the highest BABIP of any potentially returning Yankee starter, something which will likely improve for him next year as well. But the Yanks declined their $8 million option on him last week, and they're said to be looking to sign him to a two-year deal worth $5 or $6 million per year -- a smart play by salary cap luxury tax standards, but one that exposes the possibility that other teams, particularly the Red Sox, may also be interested in his services.

Hernandez was the unlikely savior of the Yankee rotation during the second half, a prodigal son returned from the double-barreled oblivion of Montreal and rotator cuff surgery. With a fastball topping out at 82 MPH during spring workouts, the likelihood that El Duque would be baffling hitters later in the summer, let alone into October, must have seemed remote. But the ageless (believed to be 39, but who knows?) Cuban defector mustered everything from guile to moxie to a 50 MPH eephus curve to make that a reality, and for a stretch of about two months, he was the team's best pittcher. Alas, a tired shoulder finally slowed him down. He threw only eight innings after September 22; arguably, if he'd been able to coax one more frame out of that ancient body in Game Four against the Red Sox, the Yanks' unthinkable collapse might have been averted.

The good news is that when he pitched, Duque pitched very well. His strikeout rate was by far the highest among Yankee starters and he kept the ball in the ballpark. On the other hand, his control was less than amazing, and he averaged under six innings per start -- as much a precautionary measure as an indication of his durability. The tired shoulder isn't much to worry about in the grand scheme of things; it's a common occurrence among pitchers whose workloads increase and a protection against more serious fatigue-related breakdown. He'd be an ideal back-of-the-rotation starter if the Yanks bring him back, and last year's feel-good saga makes that a likelihood while remaining in the realm of financial viability.

Esteban Loaiza finished second in the Cy Young voting in 2003 on the heels of a career year which saw him go 21-9 with a 2.90 ERA and start the All-Star game. Take that year away from him and you've got a pitcher who's been five percent below the adjusted league average in ERA over the course of his 10-year career. The exact nature of the aliens inhabiting his body during that magical 2003 campagin are unknown, but whatever they were, they were as absent from the Bronx as they were from the south side of Chicago. Beyond the $14 million in salary relief he represented, he did little right after the trade, save for some emergency innings in the playoffs (1 run in 8.1 innings). Godspeed, Mr. Loaiza, and may those aliens find you a willing vessel yet again.

So the Yanks currently find themselves with three starters under contract -- Mussina, Brown, and Vazquez -- with the likelihood that either or both of the latter two might be traded. Moose and the Four Question Marks? Things probably aren't that dire, given that Vazquez would likely be part of a deal for the Big Unit. But even if Lieber and Hernandez come back, the Yanks are still at least one and more likely two starters away from filling out their 2005 rotation, and unlike last year, they're bound to tap at least one left-handed pitcher. I'll look at their options for those slots in my next installment.