Hide Your Bullpen…

With Sidney on the mound, no lead is safe.

The Yankees were lucky to leave The D with a win and that’s sad considering the run support they received from their lineup. Hopefully the club will give Alfredo Aceves a shot, I mean, how bad could he be in comparison (he looked solid in his debut). I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rotation of Mussina, Pettitte, Giese, Aceves, Pavano (and then Joba for Giese or Aceves). Wow, we’ve come a long way from that Wang, Pettitte, Mussina, Hughes, IPK rotation, huh?

Just How “Clutch” Is A-Rod?

In light of Jeff Passan’s new column (Yahoo Sports) and A-Rod’s trials and tribulations with RISP, it seems like a legitimate question to ask (or should I be asking how “unclutch” he is, I don’t know). Here’s what Passan has to say regarding A-Rod’s “clutchness” on the year.

Never has it been as bad for Rodriguez as this season. Numbers back up the cries of Yankees fans, whose complaints about Rodriguez look, on the surface, like those of a scorned lover, what with his .306 batting average, 29 home runs, 81 RBIs and .968 OPS. They say he never hits when it counts – home run No. 29, a solo shot Sunday when the Yankees were down 4-0, is a prime example – and a deeper look, with a metric that analyzes clutch hitting, shows they are onto something.

Win Probability Added (WPA), as tracked by fangraphs.com, assigns a different value to every situation. For example, a run-scoring single to tie a game in the seventh inning is worth significantly more than a bases-empty single in the first inning. Over the entire season, it adds up the positives, subtracts the negatives and produces a number that shows how many wins a player contributed to his team – and, ostensibly, an indicator of how well a player fared in clutch situations.

This year, Rodriguez’s WPA ranks 93rd of 158 eligible players.

It gets truly ugly when compared to another metric that takes away the extra credit for coming through in a close game – the Leverage Index, it’s called – and treats every at-bat equally. Rodriguez’s WPA/LI is 18th in baseball.

In other words, the difference between how well Rodriguez produces in regular situations compared to how poorly in high-leverage ones is staggering. The resulting metric, called “Clutch,” ranks A-Rod last in the major leagues this season, 158th out of 158.

You can check out the rest of the article for more information regarding the measurements used. Now, what’s truly sad is that these findings probably don’t even surprise you (how could they?). To all the boo birds, you probably feel vindicated right now and to those who have defended A-Rod by touting his season totals (which, on the surface, are great), you’re probably feeling somewhat betrayed. But hey, this is the harsh reality that Yankee fans have to live with and for those of us who watch the games, we certainly didn’t need Jeff Passan to outline what has already become a dreadful normality. Even when one looks at the most basic situational statistics like AVG and OPS with RISP and then compares them to AVG and OPS with no one on base, one can easily see the point that Passan is trying to make.

So what do you think about A-Rod’s “clutch” factor? Is this a legit measurement of the man’s contributions to the team or do the final numbers speak for themselves? Do Yankee fans have the right to express their frustrations and boo the man when he doesn’t deliver in a tight spot or is that wrong, especially after last season’s MVP achievement? This is interesting stuff…

Robbie Responds

Here’s what Robinson Cano had to say about the big error he made in yesterday’s game against the Jays (from Bryan Hoch).

“I should have taken it, straightened up and then threw it,” Cano said. “People always watch the bad things. I don’t want to make an error. I would like to be perfect and be the best guy out there. But I’m human and I’m going to make mistakes.”

The 25-year-old Cano has drawn criticism for what has been perceived as a “nonchalant” style of play, a comment that both Cano and Girardi have disputed. Girardi said that he believes Cano’s fluid defensive style leads observers to make an incorrect assumption.

“It’s interesting — when he looks really smooth, people don’t consider him nonchalant,” Girardi said. “When he makes a play like that, all of a sudden he’s nonchalant. I look at Robbie Alomar. Robbie Alomar had a smoothness to him when he played. Some guys are gifted with that.”

Girardi said that he believed on the play in question, Cano did not have his feet in the proper position to make the type of feed he attempted.

“The key is making sure you get the one out,” Girardi said. “To me, he got his feet tangled up a little bit and that’s why he made a bad throw.”

Cano signed a four-year, $30 million extension with New York before the 2008 season and has experienced a down campaign. He entered Sunday’s series finale with the Blue Jays batting .271 with 13 home runs and 60 RBIs in 132 games, and said that he had no intention of changing the style he plays.

“That’s the same way that I played in the Minor Leagues,” Cano said. “It’s not that I want to be like that. You see I’m getting here early every day and I work hard. It’s not like I’m going to work hard and then be smooth. That’s the way I play.”

I’m glad Hoch wrote about this. Cano and Girardi were basically reiterating what I wrote yesterday, about Cano’s style of play (when he makes plays it seems easy and when he makes errors it looks like there was no effort). Cano is slowly learning about accountability (an aspect of his game that some have questioned) now that he has an actual longterm contract with the big club. In the past, he’s been able to fly under the radar, and has come off as a secondary sort of player. But now, with his multi-million dollar contract in hand, he’s starting to hear the everyday criticisms that come with the NY territory. It’s something that he’s going to have to learn how to deal with (he hasn’t done too well with it this year), especially in light of Dustin Pedroia’s success with our rival Red Sox.

You know, I’ve heard that Cano hangs out with Bobby Abreu, Melky Cabrera, Jose Molina and A-Rod (when they work out), quite a bit. Maybe Cano should stick with Derek Jeter and learn from the master himself?