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July 6, 2009

Under The Knife

Bombed Out

by Will Carroll

Andy Roddick may not have won at Wimbledon, losing to the man who may be the greatest of all time, but his serves are still astonishing. A couple of years ago, I came really close to getting Roddick to throw a baseball as part of the RCA Championships' "The Best Athletes" ad campaign. His agents stepped in, but I'm still convinced that his 135 mph serve would convert into a 95 mph pitch. I'm not saying that he immediately steps into a bullpen, but maybe if he'd gone for baseball instead of tennis back as a teenager, we might be looking at him the way we do with Joel Zumaya. I'm not alone here, either; both Tom House and Peter Gammons thought that his serve and arm speed would translate to a mid-90s heater. The other interesting point is that Roddick's serve stayed at the 130+ mark for the entire four-hour match. That's 243 first serves, plus 75 second serves, a number closer to a softballer than a baseball pitcher. I'd be curious why tennis players can keep this up without loss, though my guess is that it has as much to do with the long follow-through as their inherent athleticism and conditioning it takes to play at the highest level. Andy Roddick once played tennis against a writer while using a frying pan instead of a racquet; would it be so much to have him throw a couple pitches?

Powered by Starbucks' Africa (red) blend, on to the injuries:

Chien-Ming Wang (45 DXL)
Wang has had two situations that may have, inadvertently, led to his latest problem. Yes, I think the foot injury and the related "hip imbalance" led to small imperceptible changes in his delivery that ended up causing problems in his shoulder. The problem is, we'll never know. The Yankees, as far as I can tell, have never had a high-speed video analysis or a computerized force analysis done on Wang, or on any of their pitchers for that matter. For a team that spends in excess of $200 million on their payroll, and more still on bonuses, while charging the ticket prices that they do, it's as outrageous as anything in baseball. Not only could they send any of their pitchers to Birmingham, Cincinnati, or San Diego (three locations I know of with this equipment), they could have their own right there in Yankee Stadium. They could offset the cost by allowing local kids to come in for their own analysis; you can't tell me that kids from miles around wouldn't flock to that kind of operation, even at a couple hundred bucks a pop. Instead, the Yankees are guessing like I am, with the only data being an MRI that shows the results, but not the cause. Wang will miss at least a month, perhaps longer due to a shoulder strain and "severe" bursitis, both which suggest some sort of inflammation and/or impingement.

Phil Hughes (0 DXL)
Because of Wang's injury, the Yankees will need to replace him in the rotation with someone. The first name on virtually everyone's lips is that of Hughes, who would be coming back out of the pen. My feelings on his success in the role aside, the Yankees immediately waved this thought off, saying that Hughes couldn't move to the rotation because he's not "stretched out." Really? Hughes has spent the better part of his life as a starting pitcher, and only the last month or so as a reliever. He threw 90 pitches in five of six May starts (yes, I'm including the one 89-pitch outing), and he threw 63 in a relief outing on June 10. Are we saying that a month in the pen de-conditions starting pitchers so much that they're unable to slide back into the rotation? Isn't that precisely what the Yankees did last year with Joba Chamberlain? Granted, that was the "plan" for Chamberlain, but having done it once, couldn't they easily do it again? I'm not saying that Hughes could go from the pen to 100 pitches, but I do have a hard time believing that any pitcher loses so much capability in such a short time. There's likely a lot of data that could support my position here, but common sense does it effectively enough. Again, all that said, I don't think that Hughes should be moved, just that he could.

Jorge Posada (2 DXL)
The Yankees' backstop has been dealing with a sore thumb. It's one of those things that catchers deal with, and what makes it so difficult for catchers to keep hitting effectively over the course of a season. Posada's been both healthy for a catcher and a very good hitter for a long time, which highlights a couple of different skills. First, he has to be able to perform at less than 100 percent, but he also has to be able to avoid injuries in the first place. The latter seems to be more a matter of luck than skill, but time and again catchers at a young age demonstrate that they are either injury-prone or not, and it seldom changes over the course of a career. The survivor's effect is strong here, but that's not a statistical problem; the survivors are what we're looking for. Posada homered on Sunday, so it appears the rest helped. The Yanks don't have any days off until next week's All-Star break, so look for Joe Girardi to find Posada a day or two off.