SABATHIA ISN'T DONE YET

Coming out of Spring Training, the starting rotation looked set behind our ace, CC Sabathia. We have seen a lot of commentary about how important it is for the rotation to have Sabathia delivering as the ace of old. So far, he has given more reasons to start to wonder than to have confidence in him. Can he turn it around?

What we know is that he is working on adjusting his approach to facing hitters. Some games it works and some it is not working. Last year, Sabathia sported a 4.78 ERA. Somehow, that does not match up with what I remember seeing. It seemed like he succeeded in putting up a good outing more often than a bad one. I checked the numbers, especially the ones that relate to Quality Starts. To be clear, the definition of a Quality Start is a start where a pitcher goes at least 6 innings and gives up three or fewer earned runs. I decided to compare his performance in Quality Starts vs. non-Quality Starts over the last three years. Here is what we found.

	Quality Starts			Non-Quality Starts
Year	Pct	W-L	ERA	Pct	W-L	ERA
2012	67.9%	13 - 3	2.40	32.1%	2 - 3	5.77
2013	57.1%	10 - 4	2.64	42.9%	4 - 9	7.39
2014	25.0%	2 - 0	2.08	75.0%	1 - 4	6.55

I think it is pretty interesting. Two observations stand out to me. As the old saying goes, I have good news and I have bad news. First, the good news. When C.C. is on, he is on. This is very encouraging. It shows that he still has the wherewithal to get the job done and win some games. He is still averaging 6 strikeouts per game. Besides, this is still early in the season. C.C. heats up every year as the season goes on. Here are the percentages of Quality Starts, broken down by month, over the same 3 seasons:

2012-2014	Quality Starts	Games	Pct
Apr-Jun	19	40	47.5%
Jul-Aug	11	18	61.1%
Sep-Oct	7	10	70.0%

If the trend continues, C.C. should be improving dramatically. However, as I said earlier, there is bad news in the stats. You may have noticed the trend on the percentage of Quality Starts over the last 3 years shown above. It is dropping dramatically. This is a warning sign.

As pitchers get older, you see the velocity of pitches drop. You see them start to lose their endurance, to have a shorter pitch count. That is certainly the case with Sabathia. His days of throwing in the mid-90’s are over. His endurance also is showing signs of diminishing. This season, through his first 45 pitches, opponents’ batting average is .271. After the 45th pitch, that stat jumps almost 100 points to .360. Clearly, he is not the same pitcher later in the game.

Every pitcher that gets to that age, especially the great ones, learns that adjustments are necessary. When the maximum pitching velocity drops, they learn that they need to reduce the velocity of all their pitches, to maintain variance and keep hitters guessing. They need to focus more on movement and location. They make changes to the conditioning program to build up endurance, to be able to get to the 100th pitch. The great ones are able to make those adjustments. CC needs to learn to make them too. The stats show that he still has the stuff – it is just not coming through as consistently as it once did. Once he makes those adjustments, we are pretty confident that we will better results. Then the boo birds claiming that he is finished will be silenced and we can get back to enjoying some good Yankee baseball.

--Ike Dimitriadis, BYB Writer
Twitter: @KingAgamemnon
My blog is: Shots from Murderer's Row

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