The baseball media hyped last night's game against the Yankees as a great pitcher's duel: CC Sabathia versus Roy Halladay. It didn't turn out that way. Halladay gave up six runs in only six innings of work, and yielded three home runs, which tied his career high.The match up didn't live up to the hype but the praise was deserved. Although CC has been good but not great this year, he has the potential to shut down any lineup in baseball, which he demonstrated until the 4th inning. Halladay, meanwhile, has simply been brilliant this season (AAAA, anyone?), which Larry pointed out yesterday.
The problem wasn't the hype itself, but how it was justified. There should be pregame excitement anytime the Yankees face a pitcher who is having the kind of season Doc is having. But the game was sold to fans on the basis of Halladay's career numbers against the Yankees. This kind of sloppy journalism is prevalent in the baseball media, and should be criticized.
While it is true that Halladay's numbers against the Yankees are great (9-2, with a 2.51 ERA over the last three years), the Bombers hit him harder than usual in 2009.
Last season the Yankees faced Halladay five times (the team really does face this guy every time his team comes to town). He wasn't always the Doc we've come to admire but fear. On May 12th he allowed only one run in a complete game, but on July 4th and August 4th the Bombers got to him. He gave up three homers in each outing. The homers were relevant to tonight's game. Of the six, he gave up one to Jorge Posada and one to Mark Teixeira, players he would face tonight. The other four blasts were two apiece to Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui, players who are no longer on the Yankees, but whose success against Halladay at least would indicate a possible weakness against a lefty-heavy lineup.
Halladay returned to the form we expect from him when he faced the Yankees again on September 4th, but he demonstrated vulnerability less than two weeks later on September 15th. The complete game shutout he tossed earlier in September is something all Yankee fans would like to forget, but that aside he gave up doubles to Alex Rodriguez and Nick Swisher in the later game. Doc gave up only two runs in the contest, but he provided more evidence the Yankees could hit him hard, and threw 112 pitches in only six innings of work.
Halladay's struggles against the Yankees last year -- limited though they may have been -- should have influenced some of the hype leading to last night's game. While it is true that Halladay has traditionally owned the Yankees for his career, that was not as much the case in 2009. Many of the Yankee hitters he was scheduled to face last night got hard hits against him last year. It wouldn't have taken much research for members of the mainstream baseball media to know this. Michael Kay, for example, repeatedly referenced Doc's career numbers versus the Yankees during the broadcast, but only mentioned that he'd struggled at times last season against the team after he gave up the homers, and probably because an aide handed him a note.
The baseball media frequently cites a player's career performance against a given team to provide insight into how that player should do right now against that same team. This makes no sense. Sticking with the current example, Roy Halladay has been logging time in the AL East since 1998. How, exactly, do his numbers against Scott Brosius or Jason Giambi help understand what he can be expected to do when he faces the Yankees in 2010? The answer, of course, is that they can't, but baseball struggles to grasp this.
* Photo source: NY Daily News
Ah, the baseball media - you know how much I love those guys from my guest post at The Fowl Balls. I wasn't expecting much out of Halladay last night; I didn't get a chance to check, but I doubt he's pitched against an AL team in an AL Park yet this year, so that customary break you get when facing an NL line up was absent for the first time this year. I'm sure he found the NL to be delicious - most of the hitters have limited at bats against him, he's a great pitcher, and he only needs to get 8 (pitcher is an easy out) outs at most against NL teams, and some times 7 (catcher can't hit either) and as few as 6 (somebody else also sucks) against the crappier NL offenses. I didn't get to see the entire game; was Halladay really missing his spots? Or did he just have to call the Yankees his daddy? Or both?
ReplyDeleteTwo points:
ReplyDelete1) This would have held a lot more water if it was written prior to them beating Halladay.
2) By "baseball media", I am assuming you are also throwing Larry under the bus:
"In tonight's contest, Roy Halladay (1.96 ERA; 2.26 FIP; 2.90 xFIP), also known as The Best Pitcher in Baseball and the Yankees' kryptonite...Halladay has also held the Yankees to a .239/.289/.367 line over 247.1 innings during his career and has 18 wins against New York, more than every other team in baseball except the Orioles...As the stats indicate, the Yankees almost never get to Halladay, and I'd be shocked if they were able to plate even two runs off the good doctor. Sabathia will have to pitch the best game of his season to beat the Phils, and even that might not be good enough. Expect the Phils to take this one."
Appreciate the comments, Jack. In fairness, Mike did mention to me that he was planning to write a piece like this before last night's game, but unfortunately didn't get to it until afterward.
ReplyDeleteAs for point 2, I'm obviously guilty of the "X pitcher has X career stats" crutch that Mike decries -- and that I often roll my eyes at as well when cited by YES -- but in this case I think 247.1 innings of work is a reasonable indicator of what a pitcher can do against a given team, even if a good number of those innings were racked up back when the team had different players.
As Mike points out, clearly the Yankees have gotten to Halladay from time to time in the past, although I do think it's telling that the last time the Yanks scored 6ER off Doc was more than 10 years ago -- given how many times he's faced them, that's a pretty crazy stat, and underscores how well he's held the Yankee offense down for the most part.
We are in total agreement, Doc is awesome. My point may not have been clear. While I have no particular love for what Mike called the "baseball media", what I was driving at is that using that term with a derogatory tint is off-putting and arrogant - particularly when your co-writer is guilty of exactly what he was accusing them of.
ReplyDeleteJack,
ReplyDeleteI'm asking this as an academic question, not an attack, so please bare with me:
Aren't Mike and Larry allowed to have different opinions, regardless of the fact that they both post at Yankeeist?
I'm guessing that's why Larry brought in Mike in the first place. I'm not sure how, when or why Larry asked Mike to be a regular contributor, but maybe it's because he feels Mike brings something different to the blog than he does. Larry seems to post daily, so I don't think he brought in Mike to fill in the gaps, because there aren't any.
Larry made a statement backed up my statistics. Mike doesn't think those numbers tell the entire story. It's a conversation, indirect though it may be; I certainly don't see anyone else having it. 2 bloggers are better than one.
What do you think?
~jamie
Like anything else, it is not cut and dry. There is nothing wrong with what you said. Yes, they are certainly allowed to say what they want, how they want. No one is putting a gun to my head and making me read this. My post was meant to be a simple observation about the irony in the writer's tone. You can say what you want without putting down other people, what they do, and their opinions, even if it is the much-maligned mainstream media. These guys have a tendency to come off as angry, arrogant, and off-putting, which is not in their best interest (or maybe it is?).
ReplyDeleteJack,
ReplyDeleteWhile we may occasionally poke fun at various things we find comical, our goal is not to be arrogant, and I apologize if you ever interpret anything we write in a negative manner.
We just try to have a little fun with it -- you can read a million dry Yankee recaps anywhere, so it's fun to try and inject a little humor in the proceedings -- and I'm sorry if that comes across as angry, egotistical or off-putting.
This is what I get for being late to my own post. I would have liked to add my comments a bit earlier.
ReplyDeleteLarry and I discussed this post before we ran it, and as I finished it, later than I'd intended, I alerted him to it's content. My intention certainly is never to throw Larry under the bus. He's great at what he does. I could not throw him under the bus.
More importantly, Larry captured my point. Halladay's career against the Yankees is relevant. Jeter, Jorge, A-Rod and Cano have all played for the team and faced him for some time. That is a viable track record worth mentioning. But it doesn't tell the whole story and Larry focused heavily on how dominant Doc has been this season to reinforce his argument. He didn't emphasize when the Yankees have gotten to Halladay, but he still didn't allow the career record to tell the entire story.
That's more than we get from a lot of baseball analysts, who mention things like how A-Rod has hit more homers against the Angels than any other player has against a single team, as if it has any bearing on how he should do against the team this year, and then end the analysis at that. My purpose was to use a recent example to attack that habit, which annoys me.
To the extent that I sound arrogant, I can't help that beyond saying that I don't intend to come off that way and I'm happy to have a dialogue with anyone who takes the time to read my writing and comment meaningfully. I would also point out that I try to sound persuasive in a post such as this, which can easily come across as arrogant in the hands of an amateur writer.
To the extent that I sound angry, well, I was. I was sitting on the post, but decided to begin writing it when Michael Kay changed his entire story line about Halladay versus the Yankees. Once the Yankees were clearly getting the better of Doc, Kay stopped discussing ad naseum how he's owned the team, and was suddenly overwhelmed with memories of how they hit him hard last season. I remember both those games vividly, so I found his sudden change of heart to be sloppy research. I did, therefore, write the post in anger.
On a final note, to answer Jamie's question, I solicited Larry to join the blog. Larry and I went to high school together, so I knew him from before. When I realized that the great analysis I was reading was his own I asked if I could play too. He obliged.
We don't actively try to have different roles in the blog, but I post less frequently than he does, so it comes together that way. There is an active responsibility to cover major events, games and such, that Larry is better at than I am. For my part, I try to throw something a little different up at least 3 times a week, and ease the burden when Larry can't get to a computer.
thanks, guys. keep blogging!
ReplyDelete~jamie
It is a pity that it didn't live up to the hype. I hope that the next game it can be better for all the fans.
ReplyDelete