The Futility Infielder

If you're a frequent reader of this space, you know that the buzzards had been circling Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre long before he made his departure official last week. Stottlemyre's sacred-cowness within the Yankee organization was a drum I've been banging since last fall, and I certainly wasn't the only one.

The Yankees' slow start in April amplified that drumbeat. No less an authority than Allen Barra even asked me to provide some data and perspective for an article he wrote for the New York Sun addressing the topic. I called Barra's attention to the fact that the Yankees not only had a lousy recent track record when it came to the performances of their imported high-profile pitching talent (Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright joining the ranks of Kevin Brown, Javier Vazquez, and others), but that the organization had virtually no success at developing pitchers from within since the likes of Andy Petttite, Mariano Rivera, and Ramiro Mendoza. As Barra's piece was being published, I wrote up the latest of my findings in a piece called "Mystery Stottlemyre Theater" which to my surprise became one of the most widely circulated in the history of this site, being cited on just about any Yankees-themed site when the topic came up for discussion.

Not everyone agreed with my take, however. My good friend and Baseball Prospectus colleague Steven Goldman defended Stottlemyre, calling my response "frothing" (ouch), took me to task for my admittedly selective list of Bronx bombing pitchers and promised a debate between the two of us over at his Pinstriped Blog, one which never materialized due to scheduling issues.

But in debating Stottlemyre's effectiveness with him and others, I had resolved to attempt to study the matter more objectively. Now, there's no easy way to do this, but I figured that rather than continuing to harp on Mel's Greatest Misses, I should examine the records of as many pitchers as possible during Stottlemyre's Yankee tenure, which began in 1996 alongside Joe Torre. With the help of my trusty research assistant, Peter Quadrino, I gathered the year-by-year stats of all pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in a season on Mel's watch and compared their Yankee stats with what came before and after.

By the time I completed this task, it was August, and it was quite apparent that with so many new faces in the revolving-door rotation, it would be worthwhile to include the current crop of Yanks in the study, so I tabled publishing my findings until the end of the season. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, Kilgore Trout, NOW IT CAN BE TOLD. I've written up my findings for a premium piece at Baseball Prospectus, "Pell Mell: Evaluating the Departed Yankee Pitching Coach."

For starters, the Yankee starters this year underperformed drastically. Besides Randy Johnson, the other four projected members of the rotation, Brown, Pavano, Wright, ad Mike Mussina (incidentally, the highest paid pitcher in the game last year at $19 million, and the fifth-highest paid player overall -- but where's the A-Rodesque outrage at him?) combined for just a 2.7 VORP on the year, virtually replacement level. They did that at a cost of $46.7 million, more than the entire payroll of the postseason near-miss Cleveland Indians, as well as four other teams. A market value formula devised by BP's Nate Silver showed that the entire starting five underperformed at a level $44.6 million short of what could be expected, another staggering number. Here's a chart showing some of BP's metrics along with salaries (in milllions), market valuations, and the difference between the two:

         GS   IP     ERA   VORP  SNLVAR WARP   Sal    Val     Dif
Johnson  34  225.2  3.79   44.1    5.7   6.8  16.00  12.56  -3.44
Mussina  30  179.2  4.41   23.3    3.4   4.7  19.00   6.58 -12.42
Pavano   17  100.0  4.77   -1.3    1.0   1.0   9.00   0.61  -8.39
Brown    13   73.3  6.50   -9.5   -0.5   0.4  15.00   0.19 -14.81
Wright   13   63.2  6.08   -9.8    0.1   0.2   5.67   0.09  -5.58

Wang     17  116.1  4.02   17.3    2.1   3.6   0.32   4.20   3.89
Chacon   12   79.0  2.85   25.1    3.1   3.9   0.94*  4.80   3.86
Small     9   76.0  3.20   22.1    1.7   3.6   0.32   4.20   3.89
Leiter   10   62.1  5.49   -1.7    0.7   0.8   0.15*  0.46   0.31

*pro-rated shares for players acquired via trade

In other words, Mussina's performance was worth about 6.58 million on the open market according to Silver's formula, some $12.4 milllion less than he was being paid.

After reviewing the starters' season and the decisions and strategies which brought the Yankees to this juncture, I dug into the meat of my study, those before-during-after numbers. The pool consisted of 39 pitchers who had thrown nearly 59,000 big league innings and won 3,912 games -- yes, you read those numbers correctly. This is a venerable bunch of hurlers.

Now, I don't want to spill too many beans (y'all should be subscribing to BP), but basically the data shows that while the Yankee pitchers as a whole performed at a level below what they had done before coming to the Bronx (using ERA+, the park-adjusted indexing of a pitcher's ERA to the league average), they were still considerably better than league average. Furthermore, they performed even less well upon departing, suggesting that the Yanks at least did a reasonable job of harvesting the value from these pitchers.

But some interesting things happened when I sliced and diced the data further. The veterans, skewed by two very notable ones (whose identities I'll leave to your imagination), underperformed during their time in the Bronx relative to both before and after. But the previously inexperienced pitchers (including the international free agents) performed much better during their Bronx tenures than beyond, though the sample sizes were considerably small enough to send off some warning bells.

On the whole, my findings suggest that while the group of pitchers failed to live up to their collective expectations in the Bronx, they still performed at a level well above league average. It seems apparent that while the Yankee front office imported a lot of high-priced veterans, they failed to provide Stottlemyre with pitchers who played to his strength, younger and more malleable hurlers that he could influence.

At the same time, there was no doubt the recent Yankee staffs had underperformed:

At the base of the complaint was an undeniable decline in the quality of the pitching staff's performance, one that appeared to have something to do with Stottlemyre's directive for the team's pitchers to rely less on their ability to strike hitters out in favor of putting the ball in play and subjecting it to the whims of a subpar Yankee defense.

      ERA (rk)  K/9 (rk)   PIP (rk)   DE  (rk)
1996  4.65 (5)  7.12 (2)  .677 (11)  .683 (11)
1997  3.84 (1)  7.15 (3)  .688 (10)  .685  (8)
1998  3.82 (1)  6.67 (5)  .697  (9)  .713  (1)
1999  4.13 (2)  6.95 (3)  .680 (12)  .699  (3)
2000  4.76 (6)  6.57 (3)  .690 (10)  .693  (4)
2001  4.02 (3)  7.85 (1)  .672 (12)  .684 (10)
2002  3.87 (4)  7.04 (2)  .706  (6)  .690  (9)
2003  4.02 (3)  6.89 (2)  .714  (6)  .682 (13)
2004  4.69 (6)  6.60 (6)  .707  (2)  .688  (7)
2005  4.52 (9)  6.20 (6)  .714  (7)  .689 (10)

...[T]he broader trends show that the Yankee pitching staff had been moving backwards for the past couple of years relative to the league, and if Stottlemyre was in fact advocating a more contact-centric approach, he was doing so on a team ill-suited to withstand more balls in play. It may be unfair for him to have endured so much criticism given his track record, but it's also apparent that the time for change had arrived.

DE is Defensive Efficiency, the percentage of balls in play the defense converts into outs, while PIP is balls in play (both hits and outs, but not sacrifices) as a percentage of all plate appearances. The number in parentheses are ranks within the AL. Note the staff's recent decline in ERA went hand in hand with the decline in strikeout rate and more or less with the rise of more balls in play, something the Yankee defense has done a lousy job of for quite some time.

As someone who spent a good deal of time hammering Stottlemyre and egging others on in the service of same, I must admit that I'm somewhat surprised at some of the results in this study. But I think they're important, and they show a lot more nuance than the original arguments I and others had made. I'm very proud of this study and hope that those of you interested enough will find a way to read it, if only so that we can elevate the debate the next time a pitching coach comes under fire.