What to expect from Phil Hughes

Beginning at 8pm tonight, Phil Hughes becomes the most important Yankee. He may not be the reason the Yankees win the game, but he can easily be the reason the Yankees lose the game. If he has another outing as bad as Game 2 then the Yankees are probably toast.

With that in mind, we wanted to take a closer look at Phil Hughes from a variety of angles. Our purpose is to understand what kind of pitcher Phil has been this year and in the past to help everyone understand what to look for from the Franchise tonight.

Pitch type and effectiveness

All data are taken from Fangraphs. The above tables show the pitches Phil uses, their average speeds and overall effectiveness. They also show that Hughes is tantalizingly close to being an excellent pitcher.

Hughes has a reputation for relying too much on his fastball. There may be truth to this. Between his fastball and cutter he throws a variation of the fastball 80% of the time. What gets lost in this story is that Hughes' current selection of pitches would be fine if he used them more effectively. His pitch selection is surprisingly similar to Cliff Lee's arsenal and Andy Pettitte's arsenal.

Of those two greats, Hughes is closest to Lee. Both pitchers are primarily fastball-cutter pitchers, relying on a plus-fastball and a better-than-average cutter. Of the two, Lee has the better fastball, ranking as the 4th-best in all of baseball, but Hughes' fastball is not that far behind, ranking as the 17th-best. Furthermore, Hughes' cutter is actually better than Lee's, according to Fangraphs. While Lee's cutter rates at 2.7 runs above average, Hughes' comes in at 5 runs above average. And, while it has been suggested that Hughes' reliance on these two pitches alone is a weakness, no one has said the same about Lee, who has similar offerings, and relies even more on those two pitches, throwing them 83.4% of the time. This confirms what many in the Yankee Universe have thought for a while: Hughes has the stuff, he just has to harness it.

To the extent that Phil's trouble is that he won't become Cliff Lee (I, for one, would forgive him) and will need to mix in his secondary pitches more, he can look to All Day Andy Pettitte for advice. Pettitte uses the exact same mix of pitches as Hughes. Furthermore, unlike Hughes, Andy doesn't have a plus-fastball. He has an average fastball and an average changeup (both of which rate as worse than Hughes') which he mixes in well with his cutter and curveball as his out pitches. Not only is Pettitte physically similar to Hughes (both stand 6'5" and are big dudes), but to the extent that Hughes can learn to keep his primary pitches sharp, while mixing in his offspeed pitches more effectively, he may already have all the ingredients of being a brilliant starter. He throws the exact same pitches as Pettitte, for example, but not as effectively -- yet.

Hughes' ineffectiveness manifests itself oddly. He overpowers batters with his fastball and cutter, but struggles to put them away. At two strikes he generates an incredible amount of foul balls. This is where better use of his offspeed pitches would become an asset, particularly the changeup, which would compliment his harder pitches brilliantly. Instead of being able to induce the ball in play, or get the batter to whiff on the out pitch, Hughes drives up his own pitch count while the batter fouls off ball after ball. This was not a problem when he was coming out of the 'pen (actually, it was pretty cool watching batters weakly try to catch up to that fastball) but it is a liability for a starter.

There's a second problem too. As Larry has already demonstrated brilliantly, the Rangers are excellent two-strike hitters. From Larry's research, Texas is batting .251/.298/.392 as a team with two strikes in the ALCS, compared to a 2010 AL average of .181/.251/.275. This is part of what played against Phil in Game 2. His natural pitching style (until he improves in a year or two, and he will) is to put the Rangers' hitters in a position to foul off pitches with two strikes, which is a position they're comfortable with right now. This is why Hughes gives up two strike hits when he's off, and why he struggled so badly to finish off hitters in Game 2.

In tonight's game his curveball will provide an indicator of how Phil is feeling. The numbers suggest that it is not as strong a secondary offering as his changeup, but it is also a pitch he feels more comfortable throwing. In Game Three against Minnesota Hughes was using the curveball to get that all-important third strike. He was breaking it past hitters brilliantly. If that pitch, or his changeup, to a lesser extent, is sharp, the Rangers may be in for a long night.

Pitching on extended rest

Hughes quickly developed a reputation for not pitching well on extended rest. This talking point first reared its head during the regular season on June 29, when Hughes had 10 days off between starts, and pitched terribly, allowing 10 hits, two walks and seven runs (six earned) in 5.2 innings of work (a line similar to Game 2). After that, the word was out. Hughes' struggles weren't due to anything he was doing, but because the Yankees were messing with his schedule. Phil reinforced this opinion when he pitched badly on July 20, after eleven days rest.

Although it is enticing to lean on this theory to explain away Hughes' bad outings, there is not a lot of data to support the idea. During the regular season, Hughes pitched on five or more days rest five times (four days rest is normal rest), once the season was fully underway and he was off the extended rest regimen the team started him on at the season's beginning. (As an aside, people forget that Hughes was on a six-day pitching rotation for the first month of the season, and seemed to like it just fine then.) He pitched well in only the last two of those long rest games, August 31 and September 21. Neither start was great, but in those two starts he pitched on five days' rest, averaging 5.2 innings per start, 6.5 hits per nine innings, 8.1 walks per nine innings, with a 4.86 ERA.

In the three starts he pitched before that on extended rest, he was much, much worse. Between his already mentioned June 29 and July 20 starts and his August 25 start, Hughes averaged 8.67 days rest, 4.2 innings per start, and an abysmal 16 hits per nine innings and 6.4 walks per nine innings, with an ERA of 10.93. Those are Chien-Ming Wang numbers, and his worst two starts in the sample were June 29 and July 20, when he had 10 and 11 days rest respectively.

These data beg the questions: Did Hughes struggle in Game 2 because of extended rest and, if so, will he bounce back well? The answer to the first question is probably not, as enticing as it is to find a quick explanation for why Phil was a different pitcher in Game 3 of the ALDS and Game 2 of the ALCS. In both games he had considerable time off, but in one he was brilliant and in the other he was execrable.

The silver lining, however, is that Hughes doesn't generally have consecutive bad outings. He only did it twice all season, once on June 29 and July 4, as mentioned already, and earlier in the year, on May 17 and May 22, when he pitched fewer than six innings, allowing at least four runs on consecutive nights. Other than those two instances of consecutive bad performances, Hughes followed a non-quality start with a quality start every time this past season. This means that extended rest can be damned. Odds are Hughes is due to bounce back tonight because that is what he did most of the time all season.

Pitching in postseason elimination games

Hughes has been here before. In Game 3 of the 2007 ALDS, one day after New Yorkers learned what a midge was for the first time in their lives, the Yankees looked to the then 21-year-old Hughes to pick up the pieces of an aborted Roger Clemens start. The Yankees trailed the Indians two games to none, and the Rocket gave up three runs in only 2.1 innings of work. With few options available to them, the Yankees turned to the young Hughes who stepped in and allowed only two hits and no runs over 3.2 innings of "season on the line" pressure.

None of this means that Phil will be brilliant tonight, but this serves as one more data point suggesting that Yankee fans should feel confident. Hughes has pitched well in the postseason before. He's pitched well in elimination games before. With any luck that experience will carry over.

Pitching splits

Normally splits are not terribly important for a starting pitcher. Starters may have stronger and weaker tendencies, but as starters they are expected to pitch well in a variety of situations, splits be damned. However, this isn't a typical start. The Rangers have the best lefty west of Robinson Cano in Josh Hamilton. If Hughes has a particular weakness, everyone needs to be aware of it.

The good news is that Hughes doesn't show much of a lefty-righty split. Lefties hit .235/.311/.417 against him while righties hit .253/.292/.381. There is a difference there, but not much of a difference. The real split Hughes has demonstrated this year is his home/road split. He has a 4.66 ERA at home, versus a 3.47 road ERA. That split is unusual, but it also may not be predictive. Hughes was brilliant this postseason at home, and awful recently on the road.

Conclusion

Although the odds are not heavy, I believe the Yankees are the favorites tonight. Phil Hughes may not yet be a starter you can set your watch to, but he has the ingredients, and has already proven he can pitch well in the most difficult environments. To the extent that extended rest has harmed him this season, that is no longer a problem. Hughes comes in to tonight's game on normal rest with a history of bouncing back well, and an arsenal of pitches that is similar to the arsenals of some of the game's best. Hughes may not end up being brilliant, but the numbers suggest he will keep the Yankees in the game, putting the pressure on the offense. Colby Lewis was good in Game 2, but the Yankee bats did their best to make him look better than he actually is. If the team truly wants to live to play another day, it should be able to do just that.

Other quality Friday afternoon reading:
The Yankee U: Keying in on Lewis' approach
River Ave. Blues: For Hughes, cutter could be the difference
The Pinstriped Bible: Can the Big Puma pick up the slack?