And now for something we all ought to be used to by now:
A discussion about whether veteran New York Yankees left-hander CC Sabathia is good at pitching baseballs again, which will inevitably skew toward an “I’m not so sure, man” conclusion.
But first, the basics. Sabathia made his 2015 spring training debut Tuesday evening against the Toronto Blue Jays at George M. Steinbrenner Field, and he was hit-and-miss. He struck out two without a walk in two innings but also surrendered two earned runs on four hits.
On the surface, that’s a rough way for Sabathia to start getting his pitching legs back after a prolonged recovery from a right knee surgery that ended a season in which he had a 5.28 ERA in eight starts. And once you get into the finer details, there are some concerning things to talk about.
But that can wait. There are also some positives to be pulled from the 34-year-old’s first start since May 10, 2015, including one that I doubt anybody saw coming.
Lo and behold, Sabathia’s velocity was pretty good.
That was apparent when the first fastball the YES Network gun clocked came in at 96 miles per hour, a speed that BaseballSavant.com says Sabathia has hit only twice since 2012. From there, the YES gun had him sitting comfortably in the 89-92 range.
How much we can believe these figures is unclear. On the one hand, here’s Wallace Matthews of ESPN New York saying not to trust the YES gun:
And on the other, here’s Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News citing a scout who also had Sabathia in the 89-92 range:
So yeah. But the good news is that, no matter which way you look at things, Sabathia’s velocity readings are very much encouraging.
Even if Sabathia only topped out at 92 miles per hour, that’s still good. He hit 92 only twice in 798 total pitches in 2014, so to see him hitting 92 already is a good sign.
If Sabathia was in fact sitting in the 89-92 range, that’s even better. FanGraphs put his average fastball velocity in 2014 at 88.8 miles per hour, and he was sitting in the 86-88 range early last spring. Relatively speaking, 89-92 mph is him coming a long way.
The difference between last year and this year? The easy answer is that Sabathia is a lot heavier, as he came into camp at 305 pounds after entering camp at 275 pounds last year.
And according to the man himself, this weight is good for something.
“I feel like this is a good weight,” the 6’7″ pitcher told Feinsand. “I feel a little stronger. I feel my legs under me, being a lot stronger, and being able to push off the mound.”
Good velocity isn’t the only positive to take away from Sabathia’s debut. He also showed that he still has a slider capable of missing bats, notably getting Josh Donaldson swinging at one in the dirt for the first of his two strikeouts. MLB GIFs has the moving picture:
With a hard(er) fastball and a good slider, there were thus some moments in which Sabathia looked more like the guy who pitched to a 3.22 ERA in his first four years with the Yankees. It’s only spring training, but the Yankees will surely take it.
So long as they’re also willing to take the bad with the good, of course. And there was also some of that on Tuesday.
Sabathia’s first inning was as clean as can be, as he retired Jose Reyes, Donaldson and Jose Bautista in order. But his second inning was significantly less clean, as he served up hits to Dioner Navarro, Dayan Viciedo, Devon Travis and Josh Thole.
It’s hard to call any of the four hits cheapies, and Sabathia has himself to blame for that.
Navarro’s hit was a sharp single to left field that came on a fastball that was up in the zone. Viciedo‘s was a double to right center that came on a slider that caught way too much of the plate. Travis’ hit was a sharp single to left that came on a heater right down the middle. Thole’s hit was a double to left field that came on a slider that also caught too much of the plate.
In short, the four hits Sabathia gave up all came on bad pitches.
He didn’t throw too many of those, mind you. I don’t have an exact count, but the majority of his pitches seemed to find Brian McCann’s glove precisely where he was putting it. It was on those pitches that Sabathia looked like the guy who had a very sharp 4.8 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 2014.
The other pitches, however, were the ones that made him look like the guy who got battered around the tune of a .301 average and .528 slugging percentage. Those figures overruled his strikeout-to-walk prowess, and the main force in creating them was his futility within the strike zone.
Hitters hit .405 with a .766 slugging percentage against Sabathia’s in-zone pitches last year, easily his worst marks of the PITCHf/x era:
That’s what it looks like when a pitcher has a margin for error roughly equivalent to zero.
And while you’d hope that Sabathia’s margin for error would increase with improved velocity, his second inning raises obvious doubts about that. It indicated that he still can’t beat hitters in the strike zone, which for a major league pitcher is a concern big enough to overrule any positives.
Of course, this is where we grant that Sabathia is far from categorically doomed based on one bad inning in one spring training start.
And there is indeed a bright side, as you’d much rather have a guy struggling with command during the spring than struggling with stuff. One of those things is a lot easier to fix than the other. With more reps, perhaps Sabathia will slowly reinvent himself into a Cliff Lee-type pitcher who simply doesn’t make mistakes within the strike zone.
Either way, the Yankees surely have their fingers crossed. Given how thin and volatile their starting pitching depth is, it’s hard to disagree with general manager Brian Cashman’s assessment, per ESPN New York‘s Wallace Matthews, that Sabathia is a “vitally important” part of the club’s rotation. If he’s ineffective and/or injured again, the Yankees will be faced with filling a hole that they don’t look prepared to fill.
For now, they wait and see. They can take heart in how Sabathia’s right knee didn’t buckle and how his arm produced some encouraging radar gun readings, but they should also be wary that the 2014 Sabathia doesn’t look like a thing of the past just yet.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.
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