It’s that time again! Avert your eyes or click elsewhere if you have any triggers based around graphs with baseball stats.
Let’s kick this off with the usual staff overviews.
Well, it stayed mostly flat. That’s not bad as a whole. Probably not what the Yankees were expecting but that’s what happens when some guys pitch terrible and some guys pitch really well. And that’s generally how baseball goes.
Here’s a focus on the rotation’s year so far:
June was the first big stumbling block for the Yankees’ rotation. When Javier Vazquez was bad early in the year, everyone else was good. In June, A.J. Burnett was flatout awful and Phil Hughes hit a few bumps. Here’s the individual rotation results:
| June | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ERA | FIP | xFIP | |
| A.J. Burnett | 11.35 | 9.16 | 6.03 |
| Phil Hughes | 5.17 | 4.01 | 4.49 |
| Andy Pettitte | 3.18 | 3.76 | 3.88 |
| CC Sabathia | 2.19 | 3.06 | 3.47 |
| Javier Vazquez | 3.23 | 4.40 | 4.08 |
A.J. gets a special star for having a HR/9 of 3.52 for the month of June!
Javy is crawling back to where he should be, his strikeout numbers have been picking up and his walks have been ticking down. As has been discussed to death he will always be hurt by homeruns, but that’s just how it goes. I’m not overly concerned about him outpitching his peripherals at the moment because they are improving. He also had a very weird start in Arizona where he walked 2 guys but only struck out 1 over 5 innings (4R/ER). Over the course of a year, those things work themselves out and get lost as blips.
Phil Hughes had a few rough starts, including one where he managed to give up 7 runs to the Mariners and fail to retire Rob Johnson. It happens, and he’ll just have to work through things like that and make adjustments. I believe he can do this, and so does pretty much everyone else so it’s not anything to be concerned about.
Here’s the K/BB stacks for the rotation:
That sure is a red bar you’ve got there, AJ.
Finally, the bullpen:
The bullpen was much better in June than May for a few reasons:
- Their numbers are always skewed by Mariano Rivera, who pitches a lot of excellent innings.
- David Robertson pitched a whole lot better last month.
- Joba Chamberlain only had one terrible blowup all month (yay).
Imagine what this would have looked like if Chan Ho Park could get his act together? Oh, to dream.
That’s all I’ve got this month, stay tuned for the next installment of As The Graphs Turn.
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