The trial should be over quick, maybe they can get Clemens to come back too. I'm sure he would be better than Hughes or Garcia.
They are emphasizing that Pineda will be out a "full year". I assume that means he can't even pick up a baseball until next May and probably not return until July...great.
Actually, they are predicting a return to the team by mid-May 2013. Obviously, it's early and a lot can change, but no, your assumption is not correct.
I'm not sure it is. Mid-may may be when he can start throwing again which would be a return to team. We see how long it is taking Pettitte to actually be able to start a game for the Yankees. Otherwise they would probably say he would be ready at some point during spring training.
It should be noted that while many will blast the Yankees or declare the Mariners the instant "winner" in the big trade, but don't forget Jose Campos. The other pitcher sent to New York, the 19-year-old right-hander is 3-0 with a 1.23 ERA in four starts at low-Class A Charleston (S.C.).
*shrugs* I'm going by what they explicitly said on the broadcast. I'm not just pulling it out of my ass. Believe what you want to believe.
Pettitte went 5+ with 7 hits and 3 ER. "“I don’t feel like the strength is there yet,” Pettitte said. He added: “I got another start, and all of it is going to be how my body reacts. I don’t want to have a setback.”" Pettitte's the man.
Despite how bad Phil has been, why on Earth would they keep Garcia over him? They would have 3 of 5 starters fluff ball pitchers (Kuroda, Pettitte and Garcia).
Kuroda's not quite a fluff ball pitcher (91.1 average FB velocity), although his velocity is lower this year than years past (he's averaged over 92mph on his FB for the past four years). Not compared to Hughes, anyway. For reference, Garcia averages 87.0mph, Pettitte last averaged 89.0mph in 2010, and Hughes is averaging 91.7mph.
Hughes: 4.66 xFIP, 2.83 K/BB, 3.91 SIERA, 2.81 HR/9, .373 OppBABIP, 56% LOB Garcia: 3.93 xFIP, 2.67 K/BB, 4.21 SIERA, 1.50 HR/9, .409 OppBABIP, 47.2% LOB They've been basically equal. If anything, Garcia's been a little better.
Eh. Hard to glean too much information out of those kinds of stats when you're talking about 3-4 starts. One great/awful start can skew it drastically.
Sample size is small but it's much more reliable than strictly looking at W's, L's, ERA, K's, BB's, and WHIP at this point. Regardless of their sample sizes, a comparison shows that Hughes and Garcia have pitched about equally as well this year. It would be concerning if I were to, for example, try and compare Garcia's 2012 numbers to his 2011 numbers this early in the season.
Right, but while you might be using more reliable metrics of performance than the standard set, the context is in making predictions about future performance (if you're trying to decide who should stay in the rotation). And any metric is going to be noisy/bumpy with a limited data set. It's like saying you could be more accurate/reliable if you peed into a 40mph headwind as opposed to a 70mph headwind. Either way, you're not likely to be hitting your mark. For example, oppBABIP tends to normalize for pitchers over the course of a season, but it doesn't always regress, and it doesn't always tell the entire story without further context. (e.g. Is the BABIP abnormally high because the pitcher is throwing 86mph meatballs or the team's defense has become significantly older/slower?) So while their performance might be similar right now, I wouldn't read much into the information provided in 3-4 starts.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. The broadcasters said that the Yankees have said they expect him back pitching in a year. Here's a separate quote from the LoHud Blogs: Link
I was just trying to assert that there's no evidence Hughes is a no-brainer over Garcia at this point. As to your BABIP commentary, statistically I compare Garcia's ERA-xFIP/SIERA differential and, with LD% and such, use that to predict how inflated Garcia's oppBABIP is. His opponent xBABIP is approximately .365, meaning that, regardless of his pitch quality, hitters who have faced Garcia this season have been generally lucky against him. The defense has been slightly below average behind Garcia than expected (+0.30 SIERA-xFIP) but nothing significant. Alas, it is too early in the season to make a definitive decision of who would pitch better down the stretch.
I understand all of that, but my point in the previous post is that you really cannot make any statistical claims about who is going to do what going forward based on this year's body of work. There's no evidence that Hughes is a no-brainer over Garcia statistically because it's so damned hard to make anything out of such a small sample. It's not because their performances have been statistically comparable. I mean, when you are at the point in the season where one start could see a pitcher's season go from horribly unlucky to horribly lucky, the information itself is rather useless except as the most basic of observations. If you flip a coin three times and get three heads, do you have a weighted coin? Or is it chance? You don't know. You cannot say. You need more information. And given that the stats are more or less meaningless at this point in terms of their predictive power, I would say there is a rather large heap of more qualitative evidence in favor of keeping Hughes in the rotation, despite his shitty performances so far. Age, (supposed) talent, long-term team plans, etc. Maybe that plays out, maybe it doesn't. I wouldn't pretend to know at this point. I do know that I don't trust the advanced metrics at all at this point in a season. Since we're (more or less) talking about weighted random number generation in terms of baseball outcomes, the more you try to refine your data, the more you are going to deal with propagation of error. On a separate note, here is some more information on Pineda for Don just to show again that, you know, I wasn't making up the whole pitching for the big league club in 12 months thing: Link
