TAMPA – Forget everything you know about how to run a pitching staff. Instead, think of what the Yankees have at their disposal and these two numbers:
1,450 and 90.
That would be 1,450 innings – roughly what each team must throw in a year – and 90 wins – about the high side of what the Yankees can hope for this year in their quest to make the playoffs.
So if you were not bound by tradition, and you had this Yankees staff, how would you deploy it to pitch those 1,450 innings to provide the best chance to win 90 times?
“I am open to anything,” Joe Girardi said.
He said he would love to do the traditional five-starter/standard bullpen thing, but would adapt to the realities of his personnel. Obviously, the more your good pitchers provide of the 1,450 innings, the better.
Last year, the Cubs had five starters qualify for the ERA title with ERAs that were league average or better with league and park factored in. No other team had more than three. The Yankees had two (CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka). That allowed the Cubs to avoid overtaxing any of their pitchers while lining up their bullpen how they preferred. And you might have heard they won a little thing called the World Series.
The Yankees are unlikely to have anything approaching that rotation stability. They have three veteran starters in Michael Pineda, Sabathia and Tanaka, who are physical concerns. Then there are five pitchers vying for the final two spots who have never worked a full major league season as starters: Luis Cessa, Chad Green, Bryan Mitchell, Luis Severino and Adam Warren.
Maybe the Yankees will be blessed: Pineda, Sabathia and Tanaka will be as healthy as last season, when they combined for 93 starts, while two neophytes emerge as competent-or-better starters. But the Yankees can’t prepare as if that is the likelihood. As even Girardi said: “The way our rotation is, we are not going to get 230 innings from anyone, so we will need to have multi-inning guys [in relief].”
That is why the Yankees should be thinking of having two 100-inning relievers this year. My best guess right now – health permitting – is Cessa and Severino will get the final two rotation spots. In that scenario, I would put Mitchell and Warren in the pen and Green at Triple-A to stay stretched out and further refine his off-speed stuff. And I would not break down Mitchell and Warren to standard 60-70-inning relievers. The Yankees should take advantage of their stretched-out arms and attack winnable games early when necessary.
Forget trying to push a starter through five innings so he qualifies for a win. It is not about pitchers’ individual wins. It is about maximizing the chances for 90 team wins.
Severino helped the Yankees’ late postseason push in 2016 by pitching so well out of the pen (0.39 ERA/.367 OPS against) over 23 1/3 innings and 11 relief appearances – in other words an average of more than two innings an outing. Mitchell, in particular, has the power stuff to play up in the pen. Deploying him in, say, 40-50 winnable games for 100-ish innings would be his best value.
There was a lot of talk out of the postseason last year about using the best closers and setup men more aggressively earlier in the game, particularly due to the success of Andrew Miller. But over 162 games rather than just the urgency of October, I suspect managers will revert to mainly one inning at a time for their best guys, wanting to use them frequently while preserving them over the long haul.
But the Yankees have struggled in the middle innings the last few years, hoping relievers such as Johnny Barbato, Nick Goody, Chris Martin, Nick Rumbelow and Anthony Swarzak could get pivotal outs one inning at a time. The Yankees will have Tyler Clippard, Dellin Betances and Aroldis Chapman generally to handle the final nine outs. Before that, they should be aggressive using Mitchell and Warren for as much as necessary. That there are two allows off-days for recovery.
“That [a 100-inning reliever] helps everyone,” Girardi said.
Girardi allowed that under the right circumstances, he could see letting someone such as Mitchell or Warren pitch three or four innings to finish a game if he is going well rather than using the standard setup men/closer as a way to rest that group. Pitching coach Larry Rothschild cautioned that for this to work, the team would need to get regular length “from at least two starters.”
There is no doubt the realities of the game – injuries, schedules, who is and isn’t doing well – will dictate usage. But the big issue comes down to this: If Mitchell and Warren, for example, are pitching 40-ish innings more than the standard reliever, those are innings the Rumbelow types are not getting. That is a better use of the 1,450 innings.
And in the quest for 90, the Yankees have to make the most out of the 1,450.