Yankees Pitching: I’m Surprised You’re Surprised

I thought I could no longer be shocked by both fan and media reactions to the Yankees, but watching, listening to, and reading reactions to the last two batting practice sessions disguised as baseball games – I am kind of shocked.

Here’s the thing: If you want to scrape my social media accounts and blog for verification have at it, because I’ve been saying this all season. The Yankees pitching has not been good – by and large, they’ve been big beneficiaries of good fielding and the gods of baseball randomness.

Furthermore, just to show that I’m not piling on and overreacting to two awful games, let’s pretend Luis Gil’s debacle against Baltimore and Carlos Rodon’s tear inducing (literally) BP session against Atlanta last night never happened.

Here are the realities about the Yankees pitching prior to the last two games:

The staff ranked 16^th in K-BB% and 21^st in xFIP across MLB. For you non-nerds out there, those numbers are about as close as you can get to evaluating pitching performance only on matters the pitcher controls – and 16^th and 21^st out of 30 is not good.

“But they are good at keeping the ball in the park though” you might say.

OK, let’s look at that.

It’s true the Yankees have not allowed many home runs, but it’s not because they’re good at keeping the ball on the ground, as they have the 22^nd lowest ground ball rate in MLB. It’s also not because they’re inducing soft contact as they have the 6^th highest exit velocity allowed, nor is it because they’re allowing inconsistent hard contact as their hard-hit percentage is the 13^th highest in MLB.

Despite allowing consistently hard-hit balls in the air all season, the percentage of those batted balls reaching the seats is the second lowest in baseball. If your eyebrow isn’t raised, it should be, because allowing many hard-hit balls in the air will eventually lead to many home runs, based on the law of averages.

But wait, there’s more…

Despite giving up consistently hard contact, rather remarkably, the staff’s batting average on balls in play allowed is the third lowest in baseball.

As mentioned, part of that is good fielding – the team defense has ranked in the top eight in defensive runs above average all season and they turn batted balls into outs at a higher rate than all but three teams.

Yet it would be hard to argue that many hard-hit balls and a low batting average means many batted balls have been hit right at defenders and caught. (If you want to argue that’s smart defensive positioning, you’re making my point for me – it’s not the pitching that’s been good.)

In particular though, Yankees fans and media have really embarrassed themselves this season with their assessments of the starting pitchers.

To wit…

Out of 71 MLB pitchers with enough innings to qualify:

The Yankees don’t have a starter in the top half of the league in xFIP. AGAIN – THIS IS NOT COUNTING THE LAST TWO BLOWOUT LOSSES. Luis Gil ranked 37^th, Nestor Cortes 43^rd, Carlos Rodon 59^th and Marcus Stroman 67^th.

Although they have plenty of representation in the giving up scorched line drives rankings. Rodon yielded the 6^th highest exit velocity in MLB (altogether now…not counting last night’s debacle), while Nestor comes in 12^th, Stroman 28^th and Gil 32^nd, making all of them above average at getting hit hard.

Pretty consistent hard-hit balls too – in the percentage of batted balls hit 95 mph or higher Nestor has the 4^th highest average in MLB, while Rodon was also in the top ten even before yesterday’s BP session.

The K-BB% rankings aren’t bad but aren’t good either as Nestor is the only one of the four to crack the top third of the league.

But (as you would expect) on BABIP, Gil (remarkably) had the second lowest in MLB, while Stroman (15^th) and Rodon (22^nd) also made the top third.

Yankees pitchers getting knocked around the past few days shouldn’t be a surprise, as they’ve been getting knocked around pretty good most of the time. At the risk of being overly officious, I’ll remind you again to stop using ERA* (or worse, pitching wins) to evaluate pitchers – if you did that, you wouldn’t be surprised when the water seeks its own level.

(*If you’re curious, “The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics” is the best book on baseball statistics I’ve ever read. Read it and you’ll learn that most of the debates about stats today have been occurring for over 100 years, and if you’re like me, you’ll be embarrassed that you ever took some stats seriously.)

Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments, or yell at me @mybaseballpage1 on Twitter and/or the “My Baseball Page” on Facebook.