What To Think About CC's Future?

(Courtesy of the AP)

It was a weekend of rotation problems on full display for the Yankees.  Hiroki Kuroda continued to get killed on misplaced pitches in the strike zone and lack of offspeed bite on Friday.  Ivan Nova looked like an absolute mess on the mound last night, both physically and mentally if you subscribe to Orel Hershiser's way of thinking when looking at pitchers' body language.  But by far the biggest rotational black eye was the continued ineffectiveness of CC Sabathia on Saturday.  The big guy gave up 13 combined baserunners and 5 ER in 6 innings of work, the latest in a string of poor starts that stretches back months and has shown no signs of being corrected.

Sabathia's season ERA is up to 4.90, which ranks him 79th out of 83 MLB starters who've pitched enough innings to qualify for the ERA title.  His 4.12 FIP is not quite as bad, although it does place him firmly in the bottom third of qualified starters.  By most statistical measurements, Sabathia has been one of the worst starting pitchers in baseball this season, with the worst of his worst coming post-ASB.

There's no way to sugarcoat a 6.58/4.31 second half split, but what does this downtrend in Sabathia's 2013 performance say about his future?  Last night, SJK of NoMaas pointed to CC's K and BB rates as reasons to still believe in CC and expect a bounce back from him in 2013.  While it's a valid argument that shows he still has the stuff to pitch successfully, addressing the "how" of that bounce back is really the key to determining just how rapidly CC is going to continue to decline.

Jeter's First Week Back Not Pretty

(Courtesy of Texas Leaguers)

That's Derek Jeter's spray chart since returning to action on Monday.  Needless to say, it doesn't look good.  Jeter has just 3 hits in 21 plate appearances this week, with 5 strikeouts and 3 GIDPs, and only 1 went for extra bases.  That was a line drive double down the right field line, the only real solid contact Jeter has made in his 5 games back.  Of all the other balls he's put in play, all except 1 have been ground balls.  Even his 2 singles up the middle were on groundballs, and that extreme GB split is indicative of Jeter still not being anywhere near ideal game shape.

The good news is that Jeter has been able to play a week's worth of games without suffering another leg injury.  The bad is that there hasn't been much in his performance at the plate to suggest there is a lot of strength in those legs.  Jeter isn't hitting the ball with any kind of authority and his high whiff rate against offspeed stuff suggests he might be cheating heavy on the fastball just to make that contact.  A turnaround would give hope that Jeter can get back to 100% for next season, but it doesn't seem like a very likely outcome given what we've seen this week.

What Kind Of Production Would You Take From Jeter This Year?

(Courtesy of J. Conrad Williams Jr./Newsday)

After watching player after player go down with injuries this spring, the Yankees finally got to see a few come back from injuries yesterday when Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter played in their first ST games.  Mo struck out two in a scoreless 5th inning and Jeter went 1-2 at the plate as the leadoff DH, and both used their performances to answer the question about whether they'll be ready in time for the start of the season.  For Mo, that question wasn't as big a deal.  He's been throwing bullpen sessions, going through everything he would in a normal spring, just not in an actual game setting.  For Jeter, the question has hung over him all spring as he's been limited to light fielding drills, light running drills, and batting cage sessions.  He still has to play a few games in the field, which sounds like it might happen this coming week, but if Jeter can at least hit three weeks before the start of the season, that's a pretty good sign that he'll be ready.

So now that Jeter has answered the first big question, we can move to asking the second one.  What kind of production can we reasonably expect from The Captain this year?  The offense has already taken a lot of damage in the past four months and change, and a 39-year-old shorstop coming off major ankle surgery isn't going to be the savior, but without any reliable backup options in sight the Yankees need something good from Jeter this year.

A Demonstration In Extreme Roster Rigidity

(I pictured Cash doing this in his office after yesterday's game)

I've tried to touch on the subject in more positive ways over the past few days, but after yesterday afternoon's debacle, I really don't have the energy to try to put a positive spin on the situation.  I really don't even have the energy to try to analyze or hypothesize what could be done to help the situation.  So instead, I'm just going to state the facts and the numbers that make up this ever-expanding 25-man roster of underperforming platoon players.

Waiting For "The Kick" To Come From The Horse

Maybe I just didn't pay close enough attention to the big declines in his overall power numbers the past couple reasons.  Maybe I saw what Kobe Bryant's offseason PRP therapy did for him this year and got overly optimistic.  Maybe I'm just too much of a homer.  For whatever reason, I really believed that Alex Rodriguez was going to have a big year this year.  He got healthy in the offseason, he looked good in camp, and Joe made a point early in the season to start getting A-Rod regular rest through either DH days or full days off.  Yet here we are, just days away from the midpoint of the season, and The Horse is having a pretty pedestrian year.  The 13 homers are nice, but his slash line of .266/.357/.436 is down from last year, as is his ISO (.170), his wOBA (.352), and his wRC+ (119).

The assumption going into the season was that a healthy Horse in 2012 would be a more productive Horse, and that just hasn't been the case.  Rodriguez is already well on pace to exceed his games played and plate appearance totals from his injury-plagued 2011 and he's still seeing declining numbers across the board.  There haven't been any reports about there being any physical problems with him, and with 19 games at DH A-Rod should be plenty rested, so what gives?

Warning Track A-Rod

(And this reaction wasn't even on the HR swing.  Courtesy of Getty Images)

It was a rough weekend for supposedly elite horses.  Bodemeister got run down again on the home stretch of The Preakness on Saturday and Alex Rodriguez failed to hit a ball that he thought he got all of over the wall in the 8th inning of yesterday's 5-2 loss to the Reds.  In Bodemeister's case, he did pretty much everything you could do to win a race, he just got beat by a better horse.  In A-Rod's case, the failed HR was the latest example of a troubling trend in his game and a perfect visual representation of the Yankees' collective offensive struggles.

We've been conditioned since 2004 to know when The Horse hits a big home run.  There's the brief split-second pause at the finish of his follow through, the bat flip to the on-deck circle, the turn to the dugout, and the beginning of the slow victory lap jog around the bases to bask in the moment of triumph.  All of those trademark A-Rod moves were in play yesterday when the ball left his bat in the 8th inning, and all that had to be done was watching to see just where the ball was going to land, bullpen or stands.  But then a funny thing happened.  Chris Heisey settled under the ball about halfway onto the warning track, raised his glove, and made the catch to keep the go-ahead runs off the scoreboard and put the 2nd out on it.