October 21, 2005

Pell Mel

Evaluating the Departed Yankee Pitching Coach

by Jay Jaffe

Last week, the Yankees' season ended atypically early and in disappointment, with the team's elimination at the hands of the Angels in a five-game Division Series. As is always the case when a pinstriped season ends short of a celebratory dogpile, speculation about whose head might roll predominates the postmortem analysis, overshadowing even the usual finger-pointing and second-guessing. On Tuesday, manager Joe Torre ended a tense week of silence by announcing that he would return for another season at the helm (he has two years and $13 million remaining on his contract), and GM Brian Cashman is weighing his options as his contract approaches its expiration at the end of this month. But one familiar face has already departed. Pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre resigned in the wake of the team's defeat, with some parting shots aimed at owner George Steinbrenner.

Stottlemyre nearly didn't make it this far. In the season's first month, as the Yankees struggled along with a sub-.500 record, the unimpressive performance of the pitching staff renewed calls for his dismissal that had been heard at the end of last season. 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)

ERA and K/9 should be familiar enough. DE is Defensive Efficiency, the percentage of balls in play a team converts into outs. The numbers in parentheses are the relative ranks within the AL. Note that for all of the team's success, the defense has rarely even finished in the upper half of the league in doing so, placing the staff's ability to miss bats at a premium. PIP is the percentage of balls opposing hitters put into play, by the formulas:

BIP = BFP - HR- SO - BB - HBP - SF - SH
PIP = BIP/BFP

In Stottlemyre's first eight years with the Yanks, the team finished in the top three in the AL in strikeout rate seven times, and had a top-three ERA five of those times. In the year they finished outside of the top three in strikeout rate, their league lead in Defensive Efficiency helped them win the ERA title. In the three years they finished outside the top three in ERA, their DEs ranked in the lower half twice. In the past two years, the team has posted unimpressive middle-of-the-pack finishes in strikeout rate and DE, with ERA rankings that are subpar compared to what preceded them.

More perceptible than that decline, of course, was the underperformance of a pricey group of starting pitchers and the lack of continuity with the previous rotations. Recall that following the 2003 season, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and David Wells left via free agency, while Jeff Weaver was traded--an unprecedented amount of turnover for such a successful team. The end of 2004 saw more upheaval, with Jon Lieber, Orlando Hernandez and Esteban Loaiza (acquired for the enigmatically disappointing Jose Contreras) departing via free agency and Javier Vazquez sent away in a trade for Randy Johnson. Signed as free agents were Carl Pavano (four years, $39.95 million) and Jaret Wright (three years, $21 million), two injury-prone pitchers who were being paid on the basis of strong 2004 seasons but who possessed rather sketchy track records.

Here is what the Yanks got from their starters, along with how that performance compared to the market value, using a formula recently unveiled by Nate Silver:

         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

All salaries are in millions of dollars and include prorated signing bonuses, but not incentive bonuses, and no allowance has been made for deferred money. Shawn Chacon's and Al Leiter's salaries are pro-rated shares for midseason acquisitions; the rest of Chacon's $2.35 million contract and nearly the entirety of Leiter's deal were picked up by their previous teams (salary info provided via Cot's Baseball Contracts, Hardball Dollars, and the USA Today Baseball Salary Database, three very useful sources).

Beyond Johnson, who at least pitched his share of innings at a level most mere mortals would be jealous of, the rest of the Yankee staff had trouble just making it to work, let alone pitching to the high standards expected of an expensive hurler on a contender. The quartet of Mike Mussina, Kevin Brown, Pavano and Wright made just 73 out of the 120 starts that could have been expected of the #2 through #5 pitchers, about 61 percent. All four missed significant time due to injury, and were a combined 2.7 runs above replacement level according to VORP, all for the low, low price of $46.7 million--more than the entire payroll of the Cleveland Indians, who narrowly missed the postseason, not to mention four other teams. Mussina was the game's highest-paid pitcher, and ranked fifth in overall compensation behind Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, and Derek Jeter. As a unit, the starting five (including the biggest Unit) performed at a level that, per Silver's formula, was $44.6 million short of the expected performance at that market value.

Some of the blame for this catastrophe can be pointed at management (presumably not just Cashman but the multi-headed hydra that resides in Tampa, whispering sweet nothings in Steinbrenner's ear while undermining the Cashman/Torre/Stottlemyre axis) for failing to properly assess injury risks and provide adequate backup. The 2005 season was the first in recent memory that the Yanks didn't have a spare starter (Orlando Hernandez, Jose Contreras, Sterling Hitchcock, etc.) waiting in the wings amid some controversy, expensive but effective allegiance to the dictum, "You can't have too much pitching." In the end the Yanks were able to call on rookie Chien-Ming Wang and a pair of pitchers, Chacon and Aaron Small, whose track records foreshadowed little of the high-caliber contributions the team got from them. That trio saved Stottlemyre's bacon, and with it, the Yanks' season.

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