Not Just a River in AJypt

Amen IH…not much else to say about that.

Glad that folks are finally coming around on Meathead. It was only a matter of time before he showed how little he’s developed. I know I wouldn’t be surprised to see him pull a Brown in the next few weeks.
How does a guy with that much “stuff” never learn to throw a simple circle change? Hell, throw a frickin’ Stanley-special palm ball for all I care. The problem is he’s never been a pitcher. He’s a chucker. And they paid $82 million for that slop. Now when he can’t locate the curve he’s in big trouble because hitters just sit on the fastball. Seriously, he couldn’t develop one pitch to keep hitters honest?
Just horrid and for four+ more years. Ugh. But at least Hughes is in the pen.

Great game tonight. For once – FOR ONCE – the Yanks beat the Angels at their own game, double-stealing Gardner and A-Rod in a tie game in the 8th with each advancing on the wild throw into the outfield by the catcher. Speed kills. For once it killed the Angels and not the Yanks. Homefield throughout not so far off…

Awesome game…huge win. Joba wasn’t awful for once.

playoffs are going to be a crap shoot in any event, and the last aj outings don’t inspire confidence, but don’t get too crazy. he’s still got that k ability, there’s a short leesh in the playoffs. the yankee pen is strong, the yankee hitting can make up for some mistakes, and no team out there has a series of top of the rotation guarantees. yanks are the best team going. they might not win it all but that’s the best you can hope for.

Sadly, either AJ or Kyle could be Jonathan Papelbon’s tutor.

Nice IH…

Let’s see Burnett dominate, or squander, even one playoff game before we start comparing him to Beckett.
I really hate this crapshoot stuff though. Was starting Jaret Wright a crapshoot? Was starting Wang on short rest, after an awful Game 1, a crapshoot? Somehow I don’t think the Yankees won four championships in five year because they were lucky every year. It’s because they had Hall of Famers at SS, CF, and, in 1998-on, C. In 2001 when they were the luckiest (Jeter flip, homeruns against a closer who shouldn’t have been in there), they lost.
No, the Yankees have by far the best team this season. It’s not even close even after all their injuries. We’re talking a 110 win club. If the Yankees lose the first guy I’m looking at is AJ Burnett. And how he performs isn’t a crapshoot. He’s been in the league for 11 seasons and got paid well for that “experience”.
The real problem is the second-best pitcher on the staff is stuck in a largely meaningless role. Just as he could have helped in 2007, and perhaps 2006 too, instead they’ll throw inferior pitchers for more innings. It makes no sense, and especially not after how much time they’ve had to get things right.

I should have said it seems. Of course he’s not that guy yet. However, it’s just as unfair to label him a guy who will torpedo a playoff series as well. I just see him as a boom-or-bust type of playoff pitcher, and noted that Beckett has been the same way. No doubt Beckett is a superior pitcher, and has had the superior career.
And yes, the playoffs absolutely are a ‘crapshoot’. No doubt about it. The only reason why the Yankees had to rely on Jaret Wright (who, by the way, was no less of a pitcher than Jake Westbrook, or Nate Robertson, or Kenny Rogers circa ’96, and their teams all won a postseason series), was because Mike Mussina couldn’t hold a lead. Mike Mussina was a top 10 AL starter in ’06.
And you can’t tell me the Yankees should have expected Wang, another top ten starter in ’07, to completely implode.
Should the Red Sox have expected Beckett to single-handedly cost them a trip to the World Series last year?
Basically, once you enter postseason play, you have a 1 in 8 chance of winning it all. Sometimes you can have a talented enough team to have, say, a 1 in 4 chance, but the nature of the short series dictates that even the ’27 Yankees would lose a 5-game series 20% of the time against any playoff opponent. It’s what makes the playoffs at the same time wonderful and terrible.
And it’s pretty stupid to call Hughes the ‘second-best pitcher on the staff’. He’s the second-best RELIEVER on the staff. He has proven pretty much nothing as a starting pitcher, and would likely be doing worse than Joba is currently had he been a starter. And then Brian Bruney and Phil Coke would be manning the 8th inning, and the Yankees wouldn’t be hard-pressed to hold a lead or keep it close. Having Hughes in the bullpen for the playoffs is going to help the Yankees a hell of a lot more than having him as the fourth starter over Joba Chamberlain. This is the one time where an 8th-inning guy is more valuable than a fourth or fifth starter.

Hmmm, Wright was on his way out of the league. Where is he now? And Wang shit the bed in Game 1. But they still ran him out there on short rest. How many years of burying a guy like Hughes before they actually try to use him in the best possible way? They’ve only been running Mitre and Gaudin out there for two months.
For all the faults with how the Sox handled their pitching this year, they’ll have their best pitchers fronting their playoff rotation. For the Yankees and in the first round, they’ll have two of their top three pitchers in the bullpen…because the eighth inning is so important when you’re already down six runs.
Now, as for the crapshoot idea, I guess getting heads up for four out of five years, was luck? Please. I’m not saying there’s no luck. It’s just overstated – like saying the ’27 Yanks lose 20% of the time. That’s ridiculous. I’m sure the simulations have been run. Sure, anything can happen…but it’s very, very dependent on the players involved.
If the Yankees fail most people will realize the problem was paying a guy with a career 110 ERA+ like a #1 or 2 and expecting him to ever pitch like a #1 or 2. He’s not that and has never been. He’s never received a single Cy Young vote in 11 years and he’s never started a playoff game. He’s a fine #4 or 5. And by the end of his contract hopefully that’s exactly what he will be when the actual pitchers in the organization are finally given the length of rope they deserve.

Just trying to keep it topical. Is this not a joint YF and SF web site?

“It’s just overstated – like saying the ’27 Yanks lose 20% of the time. That’s ridiculous.”
No, it’s not. Simulations have been run, and the nature of the 5-game series is that, yes, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.
And I’m certainly happy the Yankees paid AJ Burnett instead of Derek Lowe. They needed another starting pitcher. That’s what happens when you give a rotation spot to a rookie pitcher and he completely screws it up.
“How many years of burying a guy like Hughes before they actually try to use him in the best possible way?”
The Yankees handed Hughes a spot in the rotation in the beginning of 2008. He was really, really bad. The Yankees gave Hughes a spot in the rotation this year when Wang went down. He was still pretty bad. The Yankees put Hughes in the bullpen so he could actually provide positive value to the team this year. He was really good. Maybe, this year, the Yankees are using him in the best possible way? Next year, when Joba doesn’t need innings limits, the Yankees can turn Hughes into a starting pitcher, ready to contribute positively to a Yankee team.
Phil Hughes is the fifth-best starting pitcher on the team. Maybe sixth-best, if you like Aceves. Stop with this nonsense that A) The Yankees ‘buried’ him, and B) he’s an amazing starting pitcher. It’s just not true.

Show me a simulation, any simulation, that shows the ’27 or even the ’98 team losing 20% of the time.
As for Hughes, time will tell. But Burnett has had 11 years to get better and hasn’t. I think you’re going to be very wrong on Hughes. But no one can deny that his development, even more than Joba’s, has been helter-skelter.
I hammered the Sox on Smoltz and Penny. But they’ve got a formidable front three. And Buchholz, like Hughes, has been projected for years to be better than Burnett has ever been. Now he’s showing that.
Worse, for your case, explain why these last two months they couldn’t figure out what Hughes could give? Oh wait, what about the 8th inning? Nah, then they would have only won the division by 7 games.

I agree with Andrew re: handling of Hughes. They tried, he showed flashes of brilliance, but wasn’t fully ready. He is now both gaining experience, learning from the veterans around him, and contributing substantially to the team’s success. Could they have bounced him back from pen to rotation late in the year? Sure. Except they already had one starter in the rotation who was nearing his innings-limit so to tax the bullpen (not to mention the other 3 starters) with another starter who for sure wouldn’t be going deep into games while simultaneously depleting that same pen of the guy whose addition marked its turnaround-as-a-unit this year doesn’t strike me as a very good idea. Not to mention that mid-season pen-to-starter transitions are much more problematic and prone to injury than the reverse mid-season transition. The Yankees have handled Hughes just fine. And I certainly do hope that when he gets another shot at starting next year that he is markedly better than he was in that role the last two years – even good enough to bumped veterans down the rotation. But let’s not act like a successful Hughes in 2010 will be at all proof that he should have started earlier. On the contrary, the more success Hughes has from here on out the more it will seem like the Yankees handled him perfectly.

Let’s not be ignorant of the math, please. Hell, the 116 game (or something like that) winner Seattle in 2001 lost to the Yanks, who had 95 wins, which is _21_ games behind the Mariners! And the Yanks won in 5 games!
Of course there’s a bit of luck, and err, as you can see by the next 9 years, the Yanks only even got to the World Series twice or so, despite having insane records in the regular season. Ya, you can say the Yanks weren’t built for playoffs, but really it’s just odds evening out.
Most of the reasoning is that there are simply more playoff series – more chances for luck to dominate skill. I don’t have to tell you that back in the day, they didn’t have 5 game series, and they only had the World Series..
And even then, they lost the World Series with some frequency..

You know, these sorts of statistical arguments about postseason series are kind of silly and tiring.
First off, talking so incessantly about the odds of one team winning over another eventually makes it seem like nobody’s actually playing the games. This isn’t a game of DnD.
Second, I don’t see how all those stats really show that a 5-game series is a “crapshoot,” any more than any game or series is a crapshoot.
Right now, the 8 playoff teams have an average win% of .586. So, against their average opponent, they’d only win 2.9 games in a 5 game series, 4.1 games in a 7 game series, and 11.7 games in a 20 game series. That’s not a crapshoot, that’s what happens when you tend to win fewer than 60% of your games.
In professional sports, the difference between ok and good and great isn’t very dramatic on paper. The Red Sox are a very good, playoff-worthy team, while the White Sox are pretty mediocre, but if they each played 10 games against their average opponent, Boston would only win 1 more game than Chicago. One!
It just gets to the point where we’re talking like it’s not people playing against each other. Good teams don’t lose playoff series because they had bad luck, or because the numbers were evening out. Luck can play a role, but more often than not they lose because they played poorly, or made bad decisions, or, you know, because the other team is maybe pretty good, too.

I opened up that can and obviously I was wrong based on the simulation data. But I should have been clearer on the type of data needed, and I’m not sure simulations really help all that much. I think RMD has done a better job expressing my particular problem with “crapshoot” – especially the difference based on WPCT between obviously good and obviously bad teams. But I’m going to have to think about it more. For instance, what are the odds that an AL East team makes the World Series in 7 out of the last ten years? I have no problem seeing a simulation that could predict that “streak” from odds alone, but that’s very different from saying the AL East just tends to be better in the wild card era. That sort of gets at my real problem. In using winning percentages to predict outcomes, they already have a huge swath of data (162 games per team) influencing the predictions. That isn’t
isn’t a crapshoot because the prior conditions are very much tied to the outcomes – a set constrained to almost universally fall between .700 and .300. A roll of the dice it ain’t. Still, I need to think about why that formulation bothers me so much.
On Hughes, it would perhaps be justifiable given his 2008. However, now they’re looking at having to restrict his innings in some way in 2010 – bullpen or this shortened start silliness. With how long Wang has been out, and now with his replacements, it’s simply inconceivable that they’ve buried him in the pen. And yes, they buried him there in 2007 when he was a far better choice to start Game 4 ahead of Wang (though maybe they don’t win Game 3 without him saving Clemens). And in 2006 I also thought a kid who dominated the minors like he did should have absolutely been used in the post-season. Most other organizations in those playoff runs use the dominant kid. They played it conservative instead – for three post-seasons now. How’d the first two turn out?
Back on topic: The problem isn’t Burnett. The problem is the expectation that he’ll ever be more than a #3 or #4.

To turn that around – 60/40 odds are also like a .600 team playing a .400. Sure, if you simulate enough series you’ll get a non-significant number going the underdog’s way. But I wouldn’t call that a crapshoot. It’s the game but it isn’t random. Some teams really are better than others and the point of 162 games is to ferret out which is which. The next 11 wins may not always go to the best team. But I can’t simply shrug and say it’s luck when I’ve watched a team dominate for a season.
I wonder if Pythagorean records could help, but I’m dubious.