This video (not involving hitters hitting) is helping keep me sane. Maybe it will help you too.

Did You Know? The last homerun hit by any Yankee was Juan Miranda’s shot off James Shields 5/20. A whole 3 game series without a homerun is most unYankees-like. Send help. Send dingers.

The Yankees have re-signed Andy Pettitte for one-year at $11.75 million, the Post has learned.

The two sides quickly hammered out an agreement once Pettitte signaled he did want to play again in 2010 — and only for the Yankees.

The contract this time around is not incentives based, which makes sense. Last year, the team was worried that Andy’s shoulder/elbow/arm in general wouldn’t hold up and it turns out that it did pretty well. He only missed one start over the season, and once again finished up around the 200 innings mark. Almost all of his incentives were hit (not hitting the actual 200 innings mark was the last one, I believe), so it’s reasonable to expect that he’d do that again.

I am pretty happy that this year was drama-free compared to 2008 (retirement pondering station) and 2009 (money squabbling). This was obviously also important to the team since Brian Cashman stated that signing Andy was Priority #1, whereas last year they were in CC Sabathia land at this time. It probably made him feel important, plus I’m sure that whole winning the World Series thing puts you in a good mood.

Again, I’m doing these now because the absolute last run through the rotation is probably going to feature abbreviated starts unless something special is happening and that’s honestly pretty unlikely.

Andy is a guy who has always had ups and downs. He had an awful May–there’s no way around that one–and then two months where we found out later he was a bit achy. June, July and September all featured the usual assortment of quality starts and clunkers. His FIP says that maybe he was getting a bit unlucky those months but when you put a lot of balls in play that tends to happen.

August sort of came out of nowhere and Andy somehow lead the AL in FIP that month, don’t ask me how that happened but it was pretty obviously not going to keep up.

In the end, the Yankees got what they were expecting out of Andy which is an ERA somewhere between 4 and 4.5 and a good number of innings put in.

Looking at this it’s pretty easy to tell why he was so horrible in May, kinda bleh in September and amazing in August.  The quality of competition (Seattle, for example) helped for sure but strikeouts are strikeouts.

One thing I found troubling about this season is that his BB/9  is .5 higher than his career norm. Was it an aberration? We may never know since his future is not locked up, but perhaps his pitching through some minor injuries hurt his command.

Interesting that Andy Pettitte was a groundball machine in the month where he performed the worst. But then again, maybe not so much as he gave up 7 homeruns in May which may indicate that he was just getting hit hard, and hard hit groundballs often find holes.

Other than that, it’s pretty standard Andy recording a few more flyouts for his groundouts. His numbers are down from his normal GB/FB ratio but that’s might be just a blip. About 10% of the flyouts he’s gotten this year have been infield pop-ups so maybe that’s the difference.

This is the sort of thing a Pitch F/X expert could analyze, but I am not one so I am not going to make an attempt at that.

Just in case you weren’t sure about how awful Andy was in May and part of June, here’s another way to look at it. A simplified way to look at this is batters facing Andy hit him like Robinson Cano hits everyone. That’s pretty bad unless he’s pitching for the other team, which Andy was not as far as I know.

Unlike May, in June his numbers are bumped by some real clunkers but he actually had a few good starts as well, and then he went on a roll before leveling out a bit in September.

Overall, Andy has had the season that was expected from him. Would I make him the #2 in my playoff rotation? No, probably not when you consider the quality of pitcher he’d be facing from the ALCS on and that his home/away splits show that he has pitched rather badly in Yankee Stadium and pretty well on the road this year.

And I’m very happy to talk about his because he went through a stretch where he just wasn’t pitching very well. And unlike a most of his bad stretches, it was pretty long. Here are his splits by month:

And then something happened in July and towards the end he started pitching much, much better. Here are gamelogs for Andy’s last two months:

What’s caused this other than the completely berserk and unexpected strikeout surge? I’ve heard him say that his cutter and other pitches are working better, but I haven’t done the pitch F/X legwork to see if this is really true.

More balls in play are getting converted into outs, that’s for sure. Unfortunately we are still in a world without Game F/X and Hit F/X so I can’t comment on whether or not it’s because of how they’re getting hit, but his BABIP for August was a bit low (.267) whereas it was outrageous in June (.370).

Hopefully when regression kicks in, it’ll only be a slight pain and Andy can stay effective for the whole of September and October and the first week of November.

Here’s the basic stats:

CC Sabathia is giving the Yankees a lot of innings, and though he’s had some bad starts he has overall been very good. He had a rough April and has rebounded nicely from it, though there have been some bumps along the way since then.

Andy Pettitte is obviously underachieving quite a bit, or maybe that’s just his current level of skill. He was supposed to be the 5th starter this year, and he’s pitching like one. Unfortunately circumstances have changed and that’s not really true right now. What he is managing to do is give the Yankees about 6 innings a start, which is pretty useful. It will be more useful if he gets better, and if he doesn’t get better don’t be surprised if the Yankees look for someone to replace him.

A.J. Burnett’s basic line shows us what we all knew already: he throws a lot of wild pitches, walks a lot of guys, and strikes out a lot of them as well.

Joba Chamberlain’s 2009 season has been a hair-pulling experience so far: his ERA is very deceptive because of those 10 unearned runs, and he doesn’t give the Yankees very many innings.

And overall, the Yankees’ pitchers have been giving up a lot of homeruns. The short porch in right doesn’t help but it also doesn’t explain why lefty Andy Pettitte has suddenly seen his HR/9 spike at home.

Now that we have the basics of what’s going on, let’s take a look at some more of what is going on.

CC’s K/9 rate sitting at 6.66 is kind of scary. It’s a huge drop from his last three years when he posted K/9s of 8.93 (2008), 8.03 (2006) and 7.8 (2007). In addition to that, his walk rate is up a tick (it was just about 2BB/9 last year and 1.3BB/9 in his Cy Young year). Why is this happening? I have no idea, and both of these can improve in the second half but it is concerning. These changes turn CC into a very good pitcher when the Yankees need him to be an excellent pitcher.

Andy Pettitte has always been a guy who pitches to contact and seen a lot of hits get through, but has put up sustainable numbers in a few different ways. 1) His pickoff move; 2) Doesn’t walk dudes; 3) Lots of groundballs. The not walking batters probably being the most important part in the equation, especially as he doesn’t have a lot of pure stuff and needs to be more of a “Crafty Lefty”. Unfortunately, he’s not been so crafty and his BB/9 has ballooned. It’s not the worst it’s ever been, but whenever his BB/9 reaches 3.0+ the quality of his pitching drops dramatically. Maybe he’ll have one of those Andy Pettitte second-halves but it could just be age catching up. Step #1, though, is getting that walkrate down.

Speaking of walks, A.J. Burnett gives out a lot of free passes. Always has, always will. They seem to come in bundles and his ability to strike out guys at a high rate gives him a bit more wiggle room. His groundball rate is still very off from his career norm (about 1.5GB:FB), and it would be nice to see it get back where it is but other than being really frustrating to watch when he loses the ability to throw strikes there’s not much to complain about out of his pitching. The less flyballs he gives up, the less we’ll see drop over the short porch in right, though.

Lastly, the by far most frustrating of all Yankees starters: Joba Chamberlain. Here are some more advanced stats from Joba this year:

Joba’s fastball is not as explosive. You expect to see a drop here to a certain degree because he isn’t pitching in relief at all, but it should still be closer to his 2008 number than where it sits currently. In relief in 2007, he averaged 97MPH on the fastball so that 94 is probably just about where it should go (think: A.J. Burnett). But it’s not, though in his last start it was a lot closer to what it’s been. But why does he have so many starts where we don’t see that? It’s a mystery to me, and I think most people. It could have to do with the mechanical tweaks the Yankees say they had him do in Spring Training but I’m no expert and can’t comment there. All I know is that Joba should be able to break out a high 90s fastball when he reaches back like Justin Verlander but we haven’t really seen a lot of that.

F-Strike% and Zone% tell us another thing that we know: Joba simply is not throwing a ton of strikes. He starts behind in the count almost half the time and then continues to…not throw strikes. And on top of that, batters aren’t swinging at his stuff at much. But that happens when you stop throwing pitches in the zone.

And no, none of this will be miraculously fixed by putting him in the bullpen. Going into the bullpen doesn’t magically give you the ability to throw strikes.

It’s so rare for a young pitcher to come on the scene and destroy it like a Tim Lincecum that I think we all expected Joba to hit some bumps. The problem is that nothing is getting better and people are starting to get really irritated (this is helped alng by his “I think I pitched great!” post game blurbs recently).

I am trying to be patient but when you’ve got another member of the staff under-performing in Pettitte and one who has not been able to pitch well at all this year in Wang it’s very frustrating. If the bottom half of the rotation does not fix itself at least a little bit and the Yankees do not do something to add at least one pitcher better than Chamberlain and Pettitte, they are going to be overtaken by the Rays and miss the playoffs.

First, results only. Because as we all know, results are what are most important.

Hey, that looks like there’s some pretty okay and valuable pitching going on. Yeah, there’s a few bad games in there but nothing completely awful that immediately takes the team out of it, right? So there should be nothing to worry about.

Just for laughs, let’s take a closer look and include something other than the raw results. MOB is the total baserunners over the course of the game, it doesn’t include homeruns hit because nobody is on base after one of those happens.

With that next context, things don’t look so great do they? Including the Cleveland start where he was yanked out with a back problem, Andy has allowed 44 baserunners in 21 innings. That’s terrible. It’s Sidney Ponson-esque, even. He had some real clunkers before then too (with 5/18 being the one where he got the luckiest) but he seemed to rebound against Philly–4 runs in 7 innings isn’t great but it’s okay–before descending into bad. If you put lots of men on base, your luck will run out and they will eventually come around to score (another thing we saw first hand during the Sidney Ponson adventure).

Now Andy has always allowed more men on base than people would normally be comfortable with, but in the past has made up for it by having a decent strikeout rate and not walking anyone and getting a lot of groundballs.  He’s still getting those groundballs but his K/BB ratio has taken a nose dive from the 2+ you expect to 1.5 this year. His BB/9 is sitting at 3.73 and his K/9 at 5.67.

Only the foolish expected Pettitte’s 6.97K/9 from last year to hold up, but that 5.67 that he’s sporting now would be perfectly fine when you take his GB% into account if he weren’t walking almost twice as many batters. Thanks to that and an increased homerun rate (which is a bit flukey if you look at the gamelogs–four homeruns in one game will certainly bump that number up) , his FIP is 4.77 which is not what the Yankees really expected when they brought him back.

And on top of that, Andy’s just not putting in the innings you expect and laboring through games only to log in the minimum you want out of a starter (5 innings).

These things could all fix themselves, sure. Andy is known for having a good second half, and he did start out pretty well so the potential is there. However if something is wrong with him physically, as was hinted at when he was yanked out of the Cleveland game, the team has got to make him rest though. I don’t know if it’s the cause here, but we do know that they let him pitch through an “achy” shoulder with no rest last year and it did nobody any good. This year, Andy’s got an incentives based contract and there is no way he is going to willingly take a break so someone else (Girardi? Eiland? Cashman?) has to step in at some point. He’s pitching at his worst levels in years, and last year we saw that a Pettitte in decline was still useful.

Of course, this would be a lot easier to do if Chien-Ming Wang were pitching better and you could slip Phil Hughes in a few times. Still, I feel like if someone is looking winded (Andy’s fastball was pretty consistently touching 90 and his last start he hit that number just twice) you have to give them a break. Especially when that someone is almost 40. Stretch out Alfredo Aceves and have him fill in once or twice, maybe. Sure, that hurts the bullpen for a few weeks but it does give the team a better chance to win.

Andy’s first three starts in 2008:

Andy’s first three starts in 2009:

On the surface they look pretty similar but there are a few small things. I like that he is walking less batters (yes even one less a game means a lot–Tampa and Oakland do have guys who excel at getting on base), but I don’t like that he is getting a lot more air outs right now. Hopefully the groundballs will come as his secondary stuff starts working consistently well, it’s a minor nitpick for the time being.

I also really like that he’s pitched 7 innings in each game. After the Wang disaster, and Joba and CC not lasting very long the bullpen really needed some rest and Andy has been able to help out there.

So, three quality starts in a row. I don’t know how long it will last–especially since his next start is in Fenway–but I’ll take it. He definitely did not have his best stuff or control tonight and was let down by a certain third baseman who is not Alex Rodriguez a few times but he battled out of it. The A’s don’t really have a great lineup by any means but that middle three of Jason Giambi-Matt Holliday-Jack Cust is tough if only because they are patient as Hell.

Other minor game notes:

Brian Bruney’s streak of scoreless innings ended but he looked pretty good still. Holliday was a tough out for him, but he got it done.

The play of the game was Orlando Cabrera trying to bunt for a hit off Mariano, though. It popped up and Mariano just sort of reached out his glove. I wish I had a screencap but MLB.TV doesn’t put up the archives for local games until the next morning.

The will call window area was very slow, and although they have many lines inside the office everyone gets stuck on one waiting outside. That means that unlike at the old stadium you can’t just jump onto a line with less people because folks around aren’t paying any attention.

Here are my pictures from today, mostly from the Great Hall. I didn’t get a chance to check out the Yankees Museum and whatever else there was because the will call line delayed my entry by more than I was expecting and I didn’t want to miss the actual baseball going on:

I plan on hitting up the other areas by getting to my first Friday game early since I am taking the day off to attend anyway (I still don’t get why it’s a day game but that’s neither here nor there).

I also took some random videos.

First off, Andy Pettitte’s 2009 intro video:

Next up, the stupid baby picture thing. I happened to have my camera ready so I just let it go:

Lastly, the new Yankees memory match game. If you saw it last year, you may remember that it was just like a flip the Yankees logo and the guys underneath are revealed very quickly thing. This year, they went all Brady Bunch with it for reasons beyond my comprehension:

The weather was really inclement and there is no hiding area in the tier (er, excuse me, I mean the grandstand) the same way as there was in OYS. It’s very open with no shelter, which is how they are doing things at newly built stadiums these days (it was the same at both Great American and PNC–the latter of which is used as a model for new buildings). That means when it’s very windy like today was, you’re going to get creamed if you don’t go to one of the overpriced restaurants or bars if you come unprepared. Luckily for me, I’ve got my blanket-thing that I drag to Yankee games when the conditions call for it ready.

It’s also worth noting that because of the slats in the back of the grandstand the covering doesn’t really protect you that much from rain if you are in the upper rows and your seats get soaked.

We’ll be here. The team’s going to be here. We’re going to support him. We’re like family in here. You guys know, I’m big on relationships. I feel like I’ve built up a good relationship with Alex. I care about him. I’ll try to help him get through it as much as I can.

No surprise here, the two seem to have become good friends last year and if anyone was going to stand by his side it would be the guy who was in a similar place last season. Plus, if you recall, Andy was the cause of the greatest A-Rod quote of all time. If you don’t, here it is again because it will never stop being funny and strange.

Andy is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met. I have two daughters — well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter, I would want ‘em to marry Andy Pettitte. The age difference might be a little awkward, but in today’s day and age anything is possible.

Surprisingly that is not the most bizarre thing to come out of A-Rod’s mouth ever, but it’s pretty clear at this point that he lives in his own little crazy world. Those of you who watched enough Yankee games might (like me) still be scarred from Michael Kay talking about Andy Pettitte being tired because “Alex kept him up all night”.

Here are some quotes from the call:

There never was a point we got to where we were at the end of the line and I needed to make a decision. Until it was brought to me that this was the Yankees’ final offer, that’s what I waited for. I just made a decision and I’m extremely happy to be coming back.

It’s too bad his agents fished around looking for a bigger deal, and stretched this out though it’s important to forget that it is always about the money. His deal with incentives still isn’t bad as he should be able to hit them pretty well (read on for details). It’s weird to see him “wait for a final offer” too when you consider if he had taken the first deal he would be making almost twice as much guaranteed.

There was no other team ever brought into the equation. My mind never changed. I wanted to come back to the Yankees, and in my mind, I was going to be back.

Of course this is what you say during a press call, but it sheds some light on all the rumors his agents were trying to kick up. Keep this in mind in future postseasons, it’s part of the job of an agent to try and stir up interest. Remember Tom Hicks outbidding himself because of Scott Boras’ mechanations? Yeah, it doesn’t always work out best for the agent in question. Boras himself tried that again this season with Varitek and failed (though the contract the Red Sox offered him is probably still too much–not that I mind).

Later on in the call, his agent Randy Hendricks revealed that none of the offers that were floating around were true. Number of people surprised: none.

The contract itself is worth 5.5 million guaranteed, with incentives that can push it up to 12 million. All the incentives are based on innings pitched and days on the roster (i.e., not on the Disabled List) so that shows that the team was concerned about his health coming off the 2008 season. He’ll get $500,000 for hitting 150, 160 and 170 innings pitched and then that escalates to $750,000 for hitting 180, 190, 200 and 210 innings. The roster bonuses are $100,000 for 120 days on the active roster and escaltes to $200,000 for 130 days, $250,000 each for 140 and 150 days, and $400,000 each for 160, 170 and 180 days. So if Pettitte stays healthy all year (on the active 25 man roster) he’ll get about $7.5million not accounting for the innings incentives. If he can stay healthy and pitch 210 innings or more at an average or slightly above level that would be fantastic (though I think it’s unlikely).

That said, during the conference call it’s finally actually revealed that Pettitte did have a shoulder injury that affected his pitching. Hopefully this won’t hurt his performance in 2009 but it’s something of a concern. He’s going to be 37 during the season and arm injuries are a concern (though in the past it’s been his elbow). In any case, Andy Pettitte as a fifth starter is great and I and all Yankee fans should be excited about the 2009 rotation.

Other than really adding to the rotation this affects some of the younger pitchers in a positive way. Someone is going to get hurt, and Joba has an innings limit so Phil Hughes and company will be making appearances. This takes the pressure off of them which will allow Hughes and Ian Kennedy to continue developing their on-the-cusp pitches in AAA. It even makes Kennedy and Alfredo Aceves somewhat expendable so if the fight deal comes along it’s not a tragedy to ship either of them out. You can never have too much pitching depth, and you can’t just go and trade it all away of course but it’s nice to have the option there.

Edit: At the end of the conference call Mark Hale from the Post asked if they really call ARod “Afraud” in the clubhouse with all that Torre book stuff floating around. Thanks Joe Torre!!

Update on 1/27: Found out the exact incentives and put them in for the world to read about.