Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I was without internet for a bit and just had it hooked up this afternoon. Anyway, via Josh Norris, the Yankees will be sending these five guys to play for the Phoenix Desert Dogs:

That's a solid group of prospects that we'll be able to follow this fall. I'm a bit surprised that the Yanks are sending Romine; it seems like he got worn down a bit as the season progressed. Kontos has pitched well since coming back from Tommy John surgery, and this is a way to get him some more innings. Laird, of course, is having a breakout season and is now in Triple-A. I'm a big fan, but Joseph has struggled since his promotion to Trenton, so it will be interesting to see how he does in the AFL.

You can expect my regular(sporadic) posting to resume after these past few days off.

Mo

See how most of the pitches are clustered on the outer and inner thirds of the plate? That's a pretty graph right there.

Joba

This graph is not so pretty.

Percentage of pitches thrown over the middle third of the plate:

17% Mo

64% Joba

Wow.

*graphs are from Trip Somers' pitch f/x tool. I got the data from Joe Lefkowitz' pitch f/x tool.

This year, Javy has a 4.96 ERA, a 5.43 FIP, a 4.82 xFIP, and a 5.32 tERA. In other words, he's been really, really bad this year. In fact, he's been so terrible, that according to WAR, he has actually cost the Yankees a tenth of a win this year.

Should the Yankees have known that he would have pitched this poorly? Well, it turns out that in 2009, Javy was pretty darn good. He had a 2.87 ERA through a whopping 219.1 innings. It wasn't just luck either; he had a tremendous 2.82 xFIP, which is really hard to do. However, this had been a career year, so naturally we would expect some regression. Here was how he was projected to do this year (before the year began), via Fangraphs:

There's a pretty high level of agreement here; all five systems see Javy as basically a 3.63 ERA pitcher across 205 innings.

So why isn't Javy pitching as well as his projections? An obvious explanation would be that his lesser performance can in part be attributed to switching from the NL East to the big, bad AL East. Does this claim actually hold true? If so, we should see a significant increase in the difficulty of batters faced. We can check this at baseballprospectus:

2009: average OPS of opposition: .731

2010: average OPS of opposition: .727

At first glance, it appears that Javy actually faced more difficult batters in the NL East. Yet we must consider the fact that 2010 has had a depressed runs scoring environment (some call it the year of the pitcher). In 2009, the league average OPS was .751, while in 2010, the league average OPS is .732. From this information we can tell that Javy faced below average hitters in 2009, and about average hitters in 2010. It seems that the slightly lower OPS of opposition in 2010 is a combination of a lower run scoring environment and better opposition canceling eachother out. Because these two variables just cancel eachother out, we still haven't found anything that would explain why his performance is different than his projections.

When we consider ballpark factors, we find that Yankee Stadium (NYS - New Yankee Stadium) has a park factor of 1.237 in 2010, while Turner Field has a park factor of .946. If I'm interpreting the ESPN park factors correctly, NYS is 30.7% more conducive to runs scoring than Turner Field. However, park factors are not that consistent, so I'm going to average the 2009 and 2010 figures to get better park factors. This makes NYS 1.1 and Turner Field .92, which seem like more reasonable figures.

If we divide 90 runs by two, we get 45 runs (you divide so you can apply the park adjustment to runs allowed at only the home ballpark). If we divide 45 by .92 (Turner Field adjustment), and then multiply by 1.1 (NYS adjustment), we get about 54 runs allowed. Add this to the 45 runs allowed at away ballparks and we get a projected total of 99 runs allowed. Now we divide by 1.08 to scale to earned runs allowed, and we get about 92 earned runs allowed. This would give us an ERA of 4.04 for Javy.

*this is assuming the averaged projections I used don't already account for ballpark.

The next factor is the drop in velocity. Based on the pitch f/x data at Fangraphs, we know that his velo has drop 2.1 mph, from 91.2 to 89.1. How much does this make a difference? Based on Mike Fast's research, we know that on average, a drop in 1 mph for starting pitchers means an increase of .25 runs allowed per nine innings. If we calculate this for Javy, and scale to earned runs allowed, we would get an increase of .486 earned runs allowed. Mike Fast also says that based on how much the pitcher depends on his fastball, the number can vary, with young pitchers being the most dependent on changes in velocity. Javy has not relied much on his fastball in recent years, so we will throw out a number of .400 earned runs for him.

This would bump his ERA up to 4.44. Interstingly, this is very close to his current rest of season ZiPS projection of 4.50. This still leaves a difference of .52 to account for (his current ERA is 4.96), and I believe this can be mostly explained by a loss of command.

Anyway, there was no way the Yankees could have predicted such precipitious drops in velocity and command, so it is likely that they were expecting a low 4's guy across 200+ innings, which would have been quite valuable.

Last night, I attended the Staten Island game with Leonora of The Girl Who Loved Andy Pettitte, and she put together a much better post about the game than I did. We say a bunch of the same things, but she has a good video of Burawa and some good pictures as well. Go check it out.

Jeremy Greenhouse at Baseball Analysts discusses contrasting swing zones, and I found the first one to be awesome:

CC Sabathia has said that he won't be opting out of his contract, and Ben Kabak of River Avenue Blues discusses that and the decision Joe Girardi has at the end of the season. When Sabathia was originally signed, I figured him exercising his opt-out clause would be good news for the Yankees. That would have meant that they got three exceptional seasons from him and wouldn't have to pay for any of his decline phase. At this point, I'm not sure if I still agree with that.

Mike Axisa discusses Ivan Nova's first start and how the rotation shapes up going forward for the Yankees. I hadn't thought about Nova's innings limit, but Mike has. I wonder how they'll use him going forward; Right now, I'd prefer to see Nova over Vazquez. At least he can throw the ball harder than 86.

I didn't get a chance to watch Ivan Nova's first career start, as I was at the Staten Island game instead. I still thought it would be interesting to take a look at his Pitch F/X data to see a bit of what I missed. Everyone is pleased with Nova's performance, and I don't think anyone could have expected much more from him.

Nova pitched 5.1 innings, gave up 6 hits, one walk, and one run. He also struck out three and threw just 73 pitches, 44 of which were strikes.

Looking through the data, the thing that jumps out the most is Nova's velocity. When he had two relief appearances earlier in the season, he averaged 92.8 with his fastball. In the offseason, Sean wrote that his fastball sits 91-94, so that fit in. Surprisingly, Nova averaged 94.4 in his first career MLB start, a very large and encouraging jump in velocity.

Pitch F/X got all 73 of Nova's pitches. He threw 47 fastballs, 18 curveballs, and 8 changeups. The curve averaged 82.9 and the changeup averaged 86.9. What I don't like is that Nova got no swings-and-misses on any of the curveballs that he threw. That brings him up to 27 career curveballs thrown in the majors with a 0 percent whiff rate. Batters did swing and miss at three of his eight changeups, though.

This could have been by design, and I don't know the counts that his changeups were thrown in, but only one of them was in the strike zone. As Sean also noted in his prospect profile of Nova, he has trouble throwing his fastball inside to right-handed hitters. We can see that happens here. This is probably Nova's biggest problem at this point.

Overall, I'm happy with what I see from the data. If any of you watched the game and have something else to chime in with, please do so in the comments. I'd be interested to hear more from people who actually saw Nova's debut.

(Edit, 3:50): Commenter Jamal G. fills us in with some things he noticed from Nova last night:

[Nova] definitely showed wildly inconsistent control of his curveball. Quite a number of them were non-spinners up in the zone, also.

I noticed something strange in Nova's pitch f/x but didn't want to just guess what it was. Jamal saying he threw a few non-spinners, which I think explains what I was seeing.

There are those four curveballs way out of place on the right side of those chart. I'd imagine those were the non-spinners. It was Nova's first career start, so he can be cut some slack for now.

Photo Credit: Warren Toda/EPA