The Futility Infielder

I've made the case a couple of times in the past that Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre has reached his sell-by date in the Bronx. It's become a topic of frequent conversation among my Yankee-fan friends and fellow writers, and the idea is gaining some momentum in the mainstream.

The other day Alex Belth pointed author Allen Barra, who was in the process of writing this piece on Stottlemyre for the New York Sun (subscription required), in my direction for some support. I've had the pleasure of meeting Barra on a couple of occasions, and he of course has popped up here a number of times as a contributor to a wide variety of publications from this blog's infancy to this past week, so I was flattered for him to ask my opinion on the matter. I chatted with Barra and forwarded him some of my writing on the topic and he ended up quoting me in the piece -- another nice little clip for the files. Here's Barra:

There are a few pitching coaches whose staffs are consistently under the weather, and, considering his team's natural advantages in wealth and resources, many would argue that Mel Stottlemyre is one of them.

From his 1984 season with the Mets, through April of this year, any positive effect that Stottlemyre has had on his pitchers is difficult to trace. He's hindered by a penchant for forcing pitchers away from their best power pitch and toward a second pitch that puts more strain on their arms, as well as an inability to correct a troubled pitcher's mechanics.

Stottlemyre is one of the best-liked men in the Yankees organization, a respected former pitcher with a link to old Yankee royalty and a man who has shown courage in the face of adversity and personal illness. As a pitching coach, though, he is the sacred cow of the Yankees organization, the Teflon man to whom no failure sticks.

This year's poor start for the Yankee staff aside, this is familiar territory, so much so that I've got a handy clip-and-save chart that I've circulated a few times. It shows a number of successful pitchers who went to seed on Stottlemyre's watch, updated through the end of the 2004 season:

                Years   IP  ERA   Car. ERA*
Kenny Rogers    96-97  324  5.11  4.13
David Cone         00  155  6.91  3.27
Denny Neagle       00   91  5.81  4.16
S. Hitchcock    01-03  140  5.84  4.68
Jeff Weaver     02-03  237  5.35  4.20
Esteban Loaiza     04   42  8.50  4.60
Javy Vazquez       04  198  4.91  4.12
* besides listed seasons

Hitchcock and the place-setting that might be reserved for Jaret Wright aside, there aren't really any health issues here, these are serious collapses of previously effective pitchers. Furthermore, whether it's incompetence on the part of the team's player development system or simply an acknowledgment of the organization's $trengths and weaknesses, the Yanks have almost completely avoided the business of developing pitchers since Stottlemyre's arrival. Both Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera arrived in the majors in 1995, the year before the Torre-Stottlemyre regime did, and while they went on to flourish under Stottlemyre, the only other Yankee product to do so has been Ramiro Mendoza. Every other pitcher of lasting note during Stottlemyre's tenure arrived in the Bronx a finished product, for better or for worse (the italicized parts are what Barra quoted). Many of them did fare for the worse, and when they did, Stottlemyre was powerless to pull them together. Meanwhile, traded Yankee prospects such as Jake Westbrook, Zack Day, Ted Lilly, and Damaso Marte have been effective and inexpensive (if not always healthy) contributors elsewhere, and after shaky starts, Weaver and Vazquez have shown signs of ironing themselves out in their new environs.

Barra delves back into Stottlemyre's tenure with the Mets (1984-1993) when he did have some success with youngsters, most notably Dwight Gooden. I don't agree with the way he tries to blame Gooden's demise on Stottlemyre, however. Though drug problems limited his innings and doubtless took their toll on him, Gooden was a spectacular-to-merely-good pitcher for the entirety of Stottlemyre's tenure, rather than a trainwreck on the order of Javy Vazquez or Jeff Weaver. That said, Barra does offer a compelling account for Stotttlemyre's negative impact on Doc via some quotes from Jeff Pearlman, author of The Bad Guys Won:

"Mel had this stubborn insistence that Doc had to develop a third pitch, a breaking ball, to make him more effective," Pearlman told me." 'He's striking out too many batters' was his attitude. He didn't seem to understand that the breaking pitches put a lot of strain on a very young arm. You could see the difference right after the '85 season. He was a great pitcher in '86, but he struck out fewer hitters, gave up more hits and more walks, and his ERA climbed sharply."

..."Mel had this thing about strikeouts," said Ed Hearn, the Mets' backup catcher in 1986. "He wanted Ron [Darling] to throw more breaking stuff. He did, and he was never quite as good afterward as he was in '86."

..."Mel just wasn't very good with mechanics," said a former Mets reliever who asked not be named. "If you had a problem with your delivery or if you were trying to work things out after being hurt, you were pretty much on your own."

Those paragraphs should turn the stomachs of Yankee fans, who have seen the team's strikeout rate plummet dramatically over the past few years, shifting the burden onto a shaky defense whose ability to convert balls in play into outs isn't so hot. Observe:

       K/9 (rk)   DER (rk)  ERA (rk)
1998   6.67 (5)  .713 (1)   3.82 (1)
1999   6.95 (3)  .699 (3)   4.13 (2)
2000   6.57 (3)  .693 (4)   4.76 (6)
2001   7.85 (1)  .684 (10)  4.02 (3)
2002   7.04 (2)  .690 (9)   3.87 (4)
2003   6.89 (2)  .682 (13)  4.02 (3)
2004   6.60 (6)  .688 (7)   4.69 (6)
2005   6.25 (7)  .646 (14)  4.80 (10)

The numbers in parentheses are the team's AL ranking in that category. The pattern that this data shows is that when the Yanks have had a top-notch strikeout staff, they've been able to overcome subpar defense to remain one of the top pitching teams in the league. When they had less of a strikeout-oriented staff, they were fortunate enough to have had excellent defense (man, was that a long time ago...). Now, they have neither, and the team's ERA is suffering for it. If indeed Stottlemyre is emphasizing more of a put-it-in-play approach -- and such a notion surfaced often last year in reference to Kevin Brown -- it's a misguided emphasis that's going to end in tears.

As for the injury and mechanics elements of that above quote, consider that among the starting rotation alone, Brown, the disabled Wright and the decreasingly effective Mike Mussina will all require direction and TLC that Stottlemyre just can't deliver. Once again, a bulk of innings will be shifted to the bullpen (which logged 105 more innings in 2004 than it did in 2003, about the workload of one and a half good relievers), testing a unit whose cast numbers seven -- including the rarely healthy Steve Karsay, the enigmatic Tanyon Sturtze (whose positive ledger rests on a 20-inning spree spread out between last September and early April that may well qualify as an out-of-body experience), the shellshocked Tom Gordon (who hasn't looked the same since David Ortiz got through with him), and the overcooked Mike Stanton -- but appears to be about a mile wide and an inch deep.

The Yanks had the opportunity to nudge Stottlemyre into retirement last fall, but perhaps more out of humanity -- this is a multiple myeloma survivor we're talking about -- than rationality, they stubbornly refused to so, though they did position Columbus pitching coach Neil Allen as the heir apparent by promoting him to big-league bullpen coach. But the bottom line is that Yankee fans ought to assume the crash position. When this pitching staff goes over the cliff, don't expect Mel Stottlemyre to be the one to pull it up to safety.