Game 65: Slow Train Coming

I'm not sure what's more mindboggling, the fact that Jamie Moyer is still pitching in the Major Leagues at age 47 or that, ever since they've been tracking with PitchFX, his fastball has been clocked at speeds roughly between A.J. Burnett's curveball and slider.

In a lot of ways, Moyer is the inverse of what Burnett used to be. When he was with the Marlins, Burnett used to throw hard for the sake of throwing hard and lighting up the radar gun, strike a lot of guys out but also walk a ton of them too. He was a young, tall, menacing presence on the mound for a team in Southern Florida. Meanwhile, Moyer was already well over a decade into his MLB career, an average-sized and easy-going type, pitching in the opposite corner of the country, left handed, throwing in the low 80's and just trying to hit his spots.

Still, their level of performance was pretty similar. From 1999-2005, Burnett had an ERA+ of 111. Moyer? 110. They both struck out about twice as many as they walked, but Burnett was giving out four free passes per nine innings while Moyer was allowing just 2.2. Their WHIPs during that span were a very similar 1.284 and 1.258.

Before last Friday, Moyer and Burnett each had six wins and ERAs under 4.00 on the season. However, Moyer got absolutely hammered in Fenway, allowing nine runs in 1+ IP and raising his ERA a full run in the process.

Burnett hasn't exactly had a smooth go of it as of late, either. He's given up 13 runs in his past three starts against Cleveland, Toronto and Baltimore and hasn't turned in a so-called quality outing in over a month (the five shutout innings he threw in the rain-delayed affair against the Twins not withstading). After sporting an ERA under 2.00 through his first six starts, Burnett has tallied a 5.61 mark over his next seven, raising his overall tally to a much-higher-but-still-respectable 3.86. The lefty-heavy Phillies lineup - as anemic as it has been lately - isn't likely to provide much of a relief for A.J.

The same could be said for the Yankee hitters in relation to Moyer. The Bombers tagged Roy Halladay for three homers and six runs last night but are going to be seeing a wildly different look from the crafty lefty on the hill this evening. Look out boys, the slow (and slower) train is coming.

They say loose your inhibitions, follow your own ambitions
They talk about a life of brotherly love,

show me someone who knows how to live it,
There's slow, slow train coming up around the bend.

[Song Notes: Matt here with the song notes. "Slow Train Coming" is a Bob Dylan song, and was the title track to his controversial 1979 album of the same name. The album was Dylan's first release since announcing his conversion as a Born Again Christian, and most of the songs on the album have some element of spirituality to them. The above performance comes from the North Mississippi Allstars at the 2007 Newport Folk Festival.

As Jay detailed last year, it was at Newport where Dylan became embroiled in the first major controversy of his career, as he played his notorious first electric set at the 1965 Festival. The 2007 Festival was also distinctively un-folk, as the NMA set was sandwiched after the John Butler Trio, and before Gov't Mule and the Allman Brothers Band. Perhaps as a nod to the non-traditional line up that year, but certainly as a nod to Dylan, NMA wove a mini-Dylan set into their performance that day, playing Dylan's "Masters of War", "Oxford Town", and "Slow Train Coming"

I was at that show, and if I recall correctly, I was standing just to the right of the guy filming it (and no, I am not of the shirtless hippy dancers in the video). This was the second of seven NMA shows I saw in a ten day period that summer, and it was a very cool trip. Newport was great - right on the water, excellent views, a great line up. That was also the day Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th career HR.]

-Lineups-

Yankees: A-Rod comin', yo. After five games out of the lineup, A-Rod's groin or thigh or whatever injury has apparently healed up enough for him to return. He'll be eased back into action with an appearance at DH as Jorge Posada tries catching after being removed a bit early from Sunday's game. Kevin Russo is playing third base and hitting eighth but this is the closest the Yanks line up has been to Opening Day form in quite some time.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Jorge Posada C
Curtis Granderson CF
Kevin Russo 3B
Brett Gardner LF

Phillies:

Victorino CF
Polanco 3B
Utley 2B
Howard 1B
Werth RF
Ibanez LF

Dobbs, DH
Schneider C
Valdez SS

Game 54 Recap

Despite the fact that the Orioles brought the tying run to the plate in the 9th inning, the Yankees' sweep never seemed to be in danger. Unlike last night, their Win Expectancy never cracked 50%.

The O's managed just six baserunners this afternoon but unfortunately for CC Sabathia's ERA, half of them scored on home runs he allowed. It doesn't seem right, but Sabathia has allowed 12 dingers already, two more than Javy Vazquez. Adam Jones and Luke Scott both caught with with poorly placed fastballs from the Big Fella today, but that wasn't enough to keep pace with the Yankee bats.

With the help of a goofy mistake by Kevin Millwood, the Yanks jumped out to an early lead. Jeter and Swisher hit back to back singles in the first inning and Jeter stole third with Mark Texeira at the plate. Getting nailed at third with no one out is a great way to kill a rally but Jeter pulled it off and apparently got into Millwood's head when he got there.

With the count 2-2 to Mark Teixeira, Millwood lost his balance and attempted to deliver a "pitch" anyway. I wish PitchFX had clocked it because it went about thirty miles an hour and forty feet in the air, thereby distilling the Orioles futility this season into a couple blissful seconds. The umps ruled it a balk, the Yankees took a 1-0 lead and never looked back.

The rest of the Yankee runs came in more traditional fashion. Robinson Cano continued his hot hitting, driving in a run in that first inning. A-Rod hit a two run shot in the third, Curtis Granderson chipped in an RBI single later in that frame and Brett Gardner lofted a home run just barely into the short porch in right in the seventh.

After Sabathia left the game, Joba Chamberlain worked a perfect eight inning and Mariano Rivera put two men on base in the ninth via a hit and hit by pitch but didn't allow either to score. They nailed down the win for CC, his first since he started against Baltimore a month ago.

The Yanks just wrapped a 6-1 homestand and they'll be heading up to lovely Toronto for a weekend set with the Jays. Tomorrow night's game is at 7:00.

There Is No Such Thing As '07 Joba

Like many fans who adamantly believe that Joba Chamberlain was born as a relief pitcher and should stay in the bullpen forever and ever, Steve S. over at TYU looks at the one inning Joba pitched last night and sees him re-emerging as a dominating force:

The first batter he faced was Scott Sizemore, and he went 96-97-97-97 and struck him out on three swings and misses. The next batter was Gerald Laird, who managed to see 6 pitches and foul off two but struck out looking. The final batter was Adam Everett, who looked completely over matched, striking out swinging on 4 pitches. All totaled Joba threw 14 pitches and hit 98 three times during Adam Everett’s at-bat.

Scott Sizemore (OPS+ of 74 this season), Gerald Laird (35) and Adam Everett (28) - talk about a Murderer's Row! They've combined to strike out 20% of the time this year and have 14 extra base hits (two homers) in 231 plate appearances.

Questions were raised on air by Kay about the radar gun, which also seemed to have every Detroit reliever throwing somewhere between 97-101 MPH. But don’t shortchange that Tigers bullpen, it’s currently the best in Baseball and the best in the AL by a wide margin. Zumaya throwing triple-digit heat should surprise no one, he’s been doing it for years. Gameday had Joba sitting at the same 96-98 MPH with little variation pitch by pitch. It was for real, and hopefully was a sign of things to come.

Just because the Tigers' bullpen is the best in baseball doesn't mean they all throw extremely hard. The wind was blowing in from center all night long so the readings - be they from PitchFX or YES's radar run - were probably accurate in a technical sense but not indicative of how hard guys were really throwing or are likely to their next time out.

Jose Valverde usually sits around 95 and was living at 97-98. Phil Coke is typically around 92-93 was up to 95. Ditto for Boone Logan. Zumaya averages about 99 and was consistently in triple digits, running it up to 102. It was 50 degrees last night, there's no way all of these pitchers just happened to be pitching with significantly more velocity than normal. Is '06 Zumaya back too?

It was not "for real", just like it wasn't after the second game of the season. Examples of confirmation bias don't come much clearer than this. Joba struck out the side, and that's great, but he did with the wind at his back against two veterans who have never been able to hit and a rookie that has struggled to thus far.

Chamberlain is who he is now - a guy that throws about 95 (sometimes a little higher, sometimes lower), gets a lot of strikeouts but has somewhat spotty control. He's not all of a sudden going to become the pitcher he was for 24 innings one shoulder injury and three years ago, no matter how much we'd love him to.

Has A.J. Burnett Changed His Approach?

It's common to hear baseball players talk about altering some element of their personal strategy but not have the numbers back up their story. The tasks that both pitchers and batters have to perform occur on a razor's edge with tons of variables and are complicated by the fact that there is someone else on the other side of the equation who wants the exact opposite thing they do. So a player can say they are taking a different tack, try very hard to do it, but struggle to get quantifiable results.

So far this season, A.J. Burnett has fallen on the opposite end of the spectrum. He's hasn't done much talking about adjusting his approach, but he's been pitching great and gotten it done a way that runs counter to the type of pitcher he's been in the past.

Traditionally a guy with a propensity to both strikeout and walk a lot of batters, A.J. has seen both of those rates drop to roughly 2/3 of their career norms. At the same time, he's given up more hits, throwing slightly more strikes and is getting more outs on the ground.

About 3/4 of the pitches Burnett has thrown in 2010 have been fastballs, a proportion that he hasn't approached since his days with the Marlins - and back then he was a different kind of pitcher. Burnett has admitted that in those days he was overly concerned with trying to light up the radar gun, but one of the reasons that Brian Cashman was impressed by him during their free agent courtship was that he claimed that Roy Halladay has instilled in him that pitching was about much more than velocity. So far this season, Burnett has been pitching like a poor man's version of his old mentor - with a two-seamer instead of a cutter and a curve instead of a slider -which is still pretty damn good.

Why the increase in fastballs this season? According to Burnett, it's partially because he's still not comfortable using his curveball.

On paper, it doesn't make sense that Burnett would benefit from throwing more heaters. Last year, his fastball was one of the worst in the Majors and his hook one of the best. So far (working with small sample sizes obviously) both pitches have been pretty close to average.

If you believe the PitchFX data from FanGraphs, Burnett has thrown more two-seamers than in years past. Like, a lot more. Since 2007, only about two percent of his pitches were classified at two-seamers, but this year that proportion is nearly 1/4. It's worth noting that Joe from RAB thinks that this could be a result in a change in the PitchFX system, but based on Burnett's results and comments, I'm inclined to believe there is something there, even if the change isn't as drastic as the the numbers seem to indicate.

In last night's postgame interview, A.J. said that his two-seamer "was running all over the place". He also talked about letting batters hit the ball more than once:

I don't have to strike everybody out. I can let them put the ball in play - here it is, hit it - and more times than not, they'll make plays behind me.

...I’m learning more and more how to throw the ball to both sides of the plate with movement, and trusting my defense. We've got Hall of Famers everywhere behind me playing, so just let them hit the ball.

To distill this into a neat little cliché, he seems to be talking about pitching to contact. And the fact that he's walked fewer batters, struck out fewer and allowed more hits than in the past backs that up.

Perhaps putting the ball over the plate and trusting his defense wasn't something Burnett had planned on, but a place he's found himself in somewhat accidentally because his hook wasn't there for him yet. He's been forced to mix in his two-seamer and found that it could be an effective out pitch - except it's useful for inducing ground balls instead of tallying up strikeouts.

I don't mean to imply that Burnett has reinvented himself as a pitched on a whim at age 33. Of course, everything we are talking about in this post comes with a small sample size caveat and could be nothing more than a fuzzy memory when July rolls around. But he seems to be pitching differently and getting positive results and when he finally finds his curveball, he could be even more dangerous. One way or another, he's not going to finish the season with a 2.43 ERA. But it's hard not to be encouraged by what we've seen so far.

What Went Wrong With Wang

As a fan of the Yankees in general and of Chien-Ming Wang in particular, it was extremely difficult to watch the demise of the former staff ace play out over the course of the past two years.

Wang started out 2008 strong, winning 6 of his first seven starts. Then he hit a rough patch, working up an ERA of 6.45 over his next six outings before briefly getting back on track just as the second round of interleague play was beginning. Of course, he injured the arch of his foot running the bases after 5 innings of shutout ball in Houston and it was all downhill from there.

When he came back in 2009, he had one of the worst three game stretches possible to begin the season. In just six innings, he gave up 23 runs. Wang had transformed from a dominant sinkerballer to a batting practice pitcher.

What caused this seismic shift?

According to pitch f/x data from FanGraphs (which only dates back to 2007), 73% of the pitches Wang threw in '07 and '08 were sinkers. However, in 2009, only were 57% sinkers. Is that possible? I know it's a small sample size, but it's hard to believe that he would have changed his repertoire that dramatically.

From my read of the data, it seems as though Wang was throwing the same amount of sinkers, but some were so flat that they were being miscategorized as two-seam fastballs. Two-seamers move similarly to sinkers but less downward and more to the right. Lets take a look at the velocity and movement of Wang's versions of those pitches:

In 2009, it appears that Wang's sinker was actually straighter and sunk more than in previous years. However, that can be explained.

Wang has always thrown sinkers that were miscategorized as two seamers, but there was a sharp increase in 2009:

So the movement on his sinker looked better in pitch f/x because all of the ones that were so flat that they were identified as two-seamers were taken out of the sample. So it's not that Wang's pitches sank less, instead they started running more side to side. So much so that they basically became a different pitch.

As Pat Androila pointed out at the the Hardball Times yesterday, Wang's numbers against lefties have always been bad, but were especially terrible in 2009. Why? I have a bit of a theory about this. I think Wang's increased side to side movement in '09 caused him to have difficulty throwing strikes (highest BB/9 of his career at 4.1), in addition to making the pitches that did travel through the zone much more hittable, particularly to lefties (gave up a 1.146 OPS against southpaws).

In general baseball terms, some pitches travel through the strikezone on planes that are more difficult to square up with than others. My contention is that those elite pitches find slots - angles of movement - that run counter to the barrel of the bat and minimize the time that they can be struck squarely. From the batter's perspective, this is similar to a golf swing. The longer your clubface is square through the impact zone, the better chance you have of hitting the ball straight. If your club is turning on the way through, you need to get very lucky to hit it flush.

Randy Johnson's slider was death to lefties because it crossed the zone from an extremely wide angle, diving down and to the right. Mariano Rivera's cutter is even tougher than lefties than it is on righties because it veers in on their hands and away from the thick part of the bat.

Though it seems odd to say now, Wang's sinker was one of those elite pitches over the course of almost three full seasons. Batters knew it was coming 3/4 of the time and still had trouble making solid contact. I remember Brandon Inge saying during an interview played on a broadcast that he used to literally try to swing under the pitch and would still sometimes drive it into the ground.

Take a look at these two graphics I made from Wang's at bat against Nick Markakis in the first inning of the game on April 8th, 2009. But keep in mind that this is far from exact; I'm trying to provide a 2-D visualization for a 3-D problem. The yellow lines represent some potential slots that Markakis' bat could fall into while the red represents the trajectory of Wang's pitch. The graphic on the left is meant to resemble a sinker and the one on the right shows what pitch f/x would classify as a two-seamer.

An effective sinker by Wang is running nearly perpendicular to the bat once it reaches the strikezone, while his drifting 2-seamer is much closer to parallel. They often say baseball is a game of inches and the break on Chien-Ming Wang's sinker is a perfect example of that.

Of course, this doesn't get to the part of the scenario that any team looking to sign Wang actually cares about: Will he ever be able to command the sinker that made him so effective before his injury in Houston again?

When Wang is finally able to pitch this year, it will have been almost two years since he could throw enough effective sinkers to be a solid Major League starter. It seems as though the Yankees messed up his rehabilitation by telling him not to exercise his legs when recovering from his lisfranc sprain, which probably contributed to his inability to find his old sinker. It took an intricate combination of forces and no small amount of touch to toss that pitch and his failed rehab might have thrown him irreparably off course. To continue with the nautical analogy, he might have already run ashore and there's no telling if he will be able to rebuild his ship.

The troubling part is that the line between being awesome and awful for Wang is so thin. It only takes one bad pitch to ruin an at bat, and just a 17% drop in good sinkers made him one of the worst pitchers in the history of the game over his first three starts. He's never thrown good enough offspeed pitches to get guys out so any team who gives him a deal is betting on whether or not he recoups the magic sinker. Personally, I hope Wang finds it. Objectively, I don't think he will.

The Fine Line Between Awesome & Awful

Monday at The Hardball Times, Nick Steiner attempted to figure out what stats (particularly Pitch f/x) could tell us about the difference between a pitcher at their best and at their worst. We continually lean on clichés like "He didn't have his best stuff today" to explain why a pitcher has a bad outing. It seems apparent fairly early in a game, at least in hindsight, when a starter is dealing or is not.

But how much of that is confirmation bias? In other words, how much does the outcome of the start effect how we remember our perceptions of the beginning of the game? Maybe the difference between a 7 inning shutout and a 7 run disaster isn't "stuff". Perhaps, from the pitcher's perspective, there isn't much difference at all. Is it possible that Joba Chamberlain really did "throw a lot of good pitches" in some of his poor outings?

For a subject, Steiner chose A.J. Burnett, because of the stark difference between his best and worst outings. When sorted by Game Score, Burnett's 10 best starts in 2009 added up to an ERA of 1.06 while his 10 worst came out at 9.13. He went (6-2) in his top 10 and (0-6) in his bottom 10.

There should be some major differences between these two groups of starts. You'd expect to see some patterns emerging in terms of velocity, or movement, or location or pitch selection, right?

In short, no. There was almost no difference at all.

Steiner dug through all of Burnett's Pitch f/x data for this year, painstakingly categorizing it by pitch type (4-seam fastball, 2-seam fastball, change up, curveball, slider), movement (horizontal, vertical), location (outside, border out, border in, middle), batter (lefty, righty) and count (pitcher's, hitter's, neutral).

He sliced the data in lots of intuitive ways but found almost no significant differences between Burnett's good and bad starts. And for every directional variation which might explain his better starts (fewer pitches down the middle in good starts), there is another which runs counter to what is expected (better velocity in bad starts). In my own look at the numbers, I found that Burnett actually walked fewer batters (29) is his bad starts than he did in his good ones (32).

So what separates a great start from a terrible one, if not for pitch selection, movement and location?

For one thing, there is a whole lot more luck involved with pitching than we realize. In a span of three starts this year, Burnett bookended a 4 2/3 inning, 7 run outing against the White Sox with two shutouts against the Rays and Red Sox, each at least 7 innings. Three starts, two absolutely brilliant ones and one that a AAA call-up would be ashamed of. (Relax conspiracy theorists, Jorge Posada caught all three of them.) There are few other professions where such wild variations between success and failure are common at such a high level.

Part of this is the fact that it only takes one pitch to alter the outcome of a game. One three run home run can change the complexion of a start entirely. And the difference between it ending up as a round tripper and a fly ball on the warning track is a matter of a fraction of an inch on the bat. That's just one pitch out of 100 or more.

If you look beyond Pitch f/x, some other things turn up in Burnett's starts. While his percentage of strikes looking was almost exactly the same regardless of the type of outing (18.7% to 18.5%), the occurrence of strikes looking was much higher in his better starts (10.4% to 6.6%). He also allowed almost twice as many fly balls and line drives in his 10 worst starts while ground balls were between 7% and 8% in both.

Are we to believe that he is throwing the same quality of pitches in both groups of outings and getting wildly different results just based on luck? If it was a random chance, the swings and misses, line drives and fly balls would be more evenly distributed. I think it's more likely that there is something that Pitch f/x isn't capable of telling us.

Especially in a broad analysis like the one Steiner conducted, it's difficult (maybe impossible) to zero in on the things that separate a curve ball that induces swings and misses from one that results in an opposite field single. It would have a hard time telling a fastball down the middle in a 3-0 count (unlikely to be swung at) from one when the batter was ahead 2-1. It can't tell which locations are preferable to which hitters, given that some like the ball inside while others favor it out over the plate, for example. Mistakes made with men on base are most costly than ones with the bags empty. What about pitch sequencing, or the amount of pitches hitters saw, how often Burnett was working from behind in the count and so on and so on...

One of the great things about baseball is the amount of data available, but it's a double-edged sword. It makes general questions like this one almost impossible to answer because of the endless number or variables. No two outings are exactly alike and something tells me that even if there was a parallel universe where two of the same games began at the same time, they would probably turn out completely differently anyway.

We Didn't Think It Would Be That Easy, Did We?

Good morning, Fackers. That's not one of you on the left with your head down, is it? If it is, we'll just assume that the glass of white wine is there because your girlfriend got up to go to the bathroom. Either way, cheer up. It was a tough loss but let's just take a deep breath.

It's funny how no one picked the Yankees to sweep this series (well, except Iracane) but we still feel like they should win every time they play, isn't it?

The same thing happened against the Angels in the ALCS. We nodded along with all the predictions saying how the series could be "one for the ages" and knew the Halos were a formidable foe, but were still shocked when Vlad Guerrero hit that homer off of Andy Pettitte and when Nick Swisher popped out to end Game 5 (another miserable A.J. Burnett outing with an unlikely comeback) against Brian Fuentes. Similarly, we applauded the notion that the Fall Classic featured the two best teams in baseball and assumed it would be a great series. Unfortunately, for the series to be great, both teams have to lose some games.

Did anyone assume that we were going to take all three games in Philly? I highly doubt it, but after the Bombers took the first two, our expectations completely changed.

After the top half of the first inning, it was easy to imagine Cliff Lee finally realizing that he was human and A.J. Burnett pitching well enough to beat him. Even when Derek Jeter came to the plate in the 9th, it was hard not to picture him poking a hit through the infield and bringing the go-ahead run to the plate with no one out.

Unfortunately, both of those fantasies were squashed almost immediately by a homer off the bat of Chase Utley and a double play turned by he and Jimmy Rollins, respectively.

As for Burnett, he threw 56 pitches and exactly half of them were strikes. He faced 15 batters but retired only 6. He walked twice as many men (4) as he struck out (2). IIATMS ran down the gory details of his outing via pitch f/x. Judging by the charts, it becomes even more apparent that Burnett had all the accuracy and precision of a greased up fire hose.

There will surely be the temptation to point to the fact that he only had three days of rest as the reason his command was so poor but we've seen this plenty of times from Burnett on 4 and even 5 days of rest. In fact, we just saw it early in Game 5 in Anaheim. As much as we don't want to realize it, his dominant performance in Game 2 of the series was about as likely as his meltdown in Game 5.

But the Yankees knew what they signed up for when they inked Burnett to that $82.5M deal: Incredible stuff with so-so command. If they wanted a guy who they thought could be consistently average all the time, they would have went after Derek Lowe instead. So we take the good with the bad and move on.

Nick Swisher Futility Update

[Photo]

In some ways it's a little unfair to single one person out after and impotent offensive output like last night, but this has been a long time coming for Nick Swisher.

It's not that Swish is having bad luck at the plate, hitting balls hard but having them find defenders. He's having poor at bats, not working walks and missing hittable pitches. In his three at bats last night, he popped out softly to first, flew out softly to right and struck out looking on a change up right down the middle in the 8th inning.

In the first two at bats, Lee threw a lot of tough pitches, staying away from Swisher or keeping it below his knees. But in the third one, six out of the seven pitches he threw were directly in the middle of the strikezone (follow the link for higher resolution):

Swish was even given a generous ball on the second pitch of the at bat - the green square which was clearly high enough and right down the pike. So what did Swisher do with the five (really 6) pitches that were in his - or Major League hitter's - wheelhouse? He took three for strikes (and one for a ball) and fouled the other two off.

You don't take three four strikes in those respective locations in one at bat unless you are completely lost at the plate and are simply resorting to guessing. You don't foul the other two off unless your rhythm and timing are out of whack.

It was as if Lee & Ruiz had figured out that Swisher wasn't going to hit the ball no matter where it was and decided to just lay it right down the middle.

Yes, it's one at bat, but it's emblematic of how awful Swisher has been since Game 2 of the ALDS. He got a great pitch to hit in the last at bat of Game 5 out in Anaheim from Brain Fuentes and couldn't do anything with that either. He's hitting .114/.205/.143 this postseason and still starting every game. He's walked three times and struck out 12. He has four hits in 40 plate appearances, only one of which has gone for extra bases.

Swisher is prone to extended slumps and he picked a pretty terrible time to have one of his worst of the year. The sporadic schedule has probably negatively affected as a switch hitter since he has two swings that he needs to keep working and both have seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair.

I'm well aware that this is going to sound stupid and I'm certain Joe Girardi won't do it, but what has to happen for Brett Gardner to start in center field and Melky Cabrera in right? How bad does Swisher have to be before you give him the night off? Because I don't think he could get much worse. At least the alternative would provide a significant defensive upgrade in the outfield, something that's not nearly as hit or miss from game to game.

With Pedro starting in Game 2, Swisher is going to have to spin around and hit from the left side of the plate. He hasn't batted lefty since Game 5 in Anaheim which was a full week ago, but again, pretty much anything would be an improvement over how he looked last night. In his career, he tends to get one base a little better against lefties and hit for power more successfully against RHP. Either of those things would be fantastic.

I would love for Swisher to go out tonight and jack a homer or drive in a couple of runs and shut me and his other critics up. But there are absolutely no signs that he will. You can say he's due, but that's not what his at bats are saying.

Please Nick, do something, anything before the postseason is over. Bad Octobers make for long offseasons. And it's going to be a couple days longer if you don't get it going soon.

The One That Got Away

It came down to a 3-2 count with the bases loaded in a one run game. For different reasons at various points throughout, it didn't seem like it would end up quite that close. But it did, and that made the outcome all the more excruciating.

The Yankees led off the game with two singles by Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon and for a second, it looked like they might jump on John Lackey as they had done in Game 1. Mark Teixeira strode to the plate, looking to bust out of his postseason funk and get the Yanks out to an early lead. He fell behind 1-2 but took two balls to force the count full. Lackey then threw a back door curveball that was called a strike despite being off the plate inside according to Pitch f/x. Instead of having the bases loaded with no one out for A-Rod, Lackey had men on first and second with one down. He got A-Rod to pop up in foul territory and Hideki Matsui to ground out to first.

The Yankees came away empty handed and they began to regret it immediately.

A.J. Burnett left the offense in a 4-0 hole before recording an out. He stopped the bleeding right there with the help of a double play, but the damage was done; the hole was dug. Twelve pitches, four runs. It was like he blew two tee shots on the first hole out of bounds. Not the best way to start off an outing.

Lackey allowed only 4 baserunners over the next five innings and held the Yankees scoreless. A.J. Burnett was just as good, settling in after his shaky start, efficiently working through the Angels' line up, leaving himself with 80 pitches through 6 IP.

In the seventh, after Nick Swisher flied out to begin the inning, Melky slapped a double to right and Jorge Posada then worked a walk. The last pitch to Jorge was a fastball low, but should have been called a strike. It was not and Lackey promptly lost his mind, gesturing wildly to the home plate umpire even though it was just one pitch and he had got some favorable calls from the umps, including the strikeout of Teixeira in the first inning and an obviously blow call at first base in the third inning when Johnny Damon should have been called safe. Lackey then lost the strike zone, walking Derek Jeter on 4 pitches to load the bases. After retiring Johnny Damon, much to Lackey's dismay, Mike Scioscia pulled him for Darren Oliver.

Oliver wasted no time, giving up a three run double to Teixeria on the first pitch he threw and an RBI single to Matsui that tied the game at 4. All of a sudden, the Yanks were back in the game. Scioscia again went to the pen, this time for Kevin Jepsen who allowed a 2 run triple to Robby Cano before getting Swisher out to end the inning. (Yes, Swish made the first and last out of the frame)

Sitting on a lead for the first time in the game, Girardi brought A.J. Burnett out to begin the 7th presumably because he'd throw only 80 pitches and had been cruising since the initial meltdown in the first. His faith was not rewarded as Burnett allowed a single to Jeff Mathis. Despite have two men up in the pen, Girardi stuck with Burnett to face Eric Aybar. After getting ahead of him 0-2, A.J. threw him 4 straight balls.

Damaso Marte was then summoned from the bullpen. Chone Figgins sacrificed the runners over, and Marte got Bobby Abreu to ground out to first, bringing the score to 6-5 in favor of the Yankees. Next up from the 'pen was Phil Hughes. Hughes needed one out any way he could get it and the Yanks would have escaped the inning with the lead. However, he walked Torii Hunter, gave up a game-tying single to Vlad Guererro on an absolute meatball in the middle of the plate and the go-ahead base knock to Kendry Morales.

The Yanks were sat down in order in the 8th, and Joba Chamberlain was called on to keep them within one in the bottom half of the inning. He began the inning by giving up a double to Juan Rivera, then got Jeff Mathis swinging before Eric Aybar bounced a slow infield single to second and the Angels were in position to add some some insurance runs.

Girardi has no intention of allowing Joba to face Chone Figgins and began using some blatant stall tactics - a mound visit, Joba stepping off the runner, some throws to first - to allow Mariano Rivera a few last moments to get ready. Mo finally jogged in and did his thing, getting Figgins to line out to shallow right and Abreu to fly out to center.

The Yanks had one chance left at the plate to tie the game and the heart of the order due up against Brian Fuentes, starting with Johnny Damon. Four pitches later, Damon lined out sharply to first. Then, Teixeira jumped on the very first pitch he saw, hitting a high fly to right that landed in the glove of Bobby Abreu. Down to their last out, A-Rod represented the Yanks' last hope, but Scioscia called for the intentional walk. Fuentes then unintentionally walked Hideki Matsui and hit Robinson Cano with a breaking ball to load the bases for... Nick Swisher. After falling behind 0-2, Swish took a ball. Then fouled one off. Two more balls. The count was full.

And then he popped out to end the game.

If the Yanks had simply faded away after Burnett dug that 4 run hole in the first inning, the loss would have been a little easier to stomach. But they came up with that huge top of the 7th and took the lead by two runs only to give it right back in the home half. And then they tantalized with the threat in the 9th, only to have to head back to the Bronx and play at least one more.

There were some questionable decisions by both managers and more questionable umpiring. It's going to be a long 36 hours until first pitch on Saturday.

TBS PitchTRAX: Informative or Infuriating?

Those of you watching the game in HD last night were exposed to a new feature on the TBS broadcast. On the right hand side of the screen, for the view in from center field only, the displayed a sort of pitch tracker like you see on ESPN and FOX, except it was on the screen at all times.

As the pitches come in, they show up as little numbered balls corresponding to the location they are thrown. It's the type of thing I hate in principle - a flashy graphic imposed on us by a network that doesn't really know much about broadcasting baseball - but I don't totally despise it (yet, anyway). Anything that makes you pay less attention to Chip Caray, you know?

The one thing I wonder about is whether this is computerized like MLB Gameday and PitchFX or they have someone on the production team manually assigning locations. If it's the latter, then we might as well be judging balls and strikes from the couch, but if it's the former, I can see some utility in it. Regardless of the accuracy, it does show you the approach being taken by the pitcher and displays it a lot more clearly that your mental record could.

Aesthetically, it looks kind of terrible, even though the portion of the screen that it's blocking is never really going to show anything, save for a flash of a grounder to third. It's certainly no yellow first down line in terms of value add, but it does give you some interesting context. For instance, when Phil Hughes faced Orlando Cabrera, you could see that every pitch he threw was either high or outside, nothing close to down or in:

It tells you that A) Cabrera is a low/inside, pull type of hitter and B) Hughes was consistently hitting his spots. I watch the games pretty closely but I've gotta admit that some of the pitch sequencing gets lost to me.

I wouldn't want to see this on every YES game, but for the postseason, I guess I don't really mind it. Ideally you'd like to be able to turn it and off via remote, but we're obviously a little ways down the road from that kind of functionality. I'm trying to look at the bright side here, but I'm sure there are a bunch of you who are going to vehemently hate it. I'd be willing the bet the umps do.

Haters? Appreciators? Agnostics?

Not To Rain On The Pettitte Parade, But...

[Update: I need to work on my PitchFX interpretation a bit. Will from IIATM,S sets me straight and you should probably just read that]

It wasn't just the magic in the air and the abundance of Yankees fans at Camden Yards cheering him on last night that helped Andy Pettitte flirt with perfection:

[The red squares are called strikes and the green squares are balls]

According to the PitchFX tool on Brooks Baseball, Home Plate Umpire Marvin Hudson called 24 of the 104 pitches (23%) Pettitte threw last night as strikes when they should have been balls. Conversely, he called only two balls inside the zone strikes, both very close pitches at the knees. Not that the strike zone is perfect denoted by the black box in the chart above, but it is the width of home plate and gives you a pretty good idea of what is what.

Pettite threw 73 "strikes" last night, but only 8 of them were swinging. He threw 32 breaking pitches, 24 of them for strikes, no whiffs. None. Is ths because he has all of a sudden developed an incredibly deceptive curveball and slider, or because the pitches were not in the zone?

Below, I drew the red box to represent what Pettitte's actual strike zone looked like last night.

When you look at the red box as the strikezone instead, there are 13 "strikes" being called balls, which makes it twice as accurate as Hudson's zone, with which he incorrectly identified 26 pitches. The only problem is that the zone is roughly twice the size it should be. Home plate is 17" inches wide, but apparently to Hudson last night, it was nearly 36". The difference between the highest and lowest pitch he called for strikes, just for Pettitte, was more like 39".

Sure, Hudson was more or less consistent in calling pitches for both teams, mainly in terms of expanding the strikezone inside to right handed batters (which was more beneficial to Pettitte as a lefty), but in what other profession does being consistently wrong make it okay? The strikezone has to be a little subjective since it varies with each hitter, but not to the point where it can be doubled in size, right?

At certain point, Hudson had to know that he was calling pitches that were well off the plate for strikes. Andy Pettitte sure did, because he took advantage of it again and again. He also changed speeds beautifully, but some of the credit has to go to the extra-large target he was throwing to.

So while some might be tempted to blame Jerry Hairston, Jr. for his error in the 7th inning which broke up Pettitte's perfect game, they should be thanking Marvin Hudson for his ridiculous strikezone which made Pettitte's dominant performance possible in the first place.