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TO THE MATS WITH READER MAIL

1: TO CATCH THE BALL OR TO JUST LET IT SAIL BY IN PEACE
I had a question about "defensive efficiency." Isn't that really a measure of the pitching staff more than the defense? When you have bad pitching, don't you have a higher percentage of balls put into play not being turned into outs because they are hit hard — i.e they are "hits"? Yes, good defense will occasionally take away a hit, or get an extra out on the bases, but isn't that overshadowed by the quality of the pitching? - Glenn

That's a good question, Glenn, and thanks for asking it. The answer is "sometimes." Before I ever mention defensive efficiency, the first thing I do is check the line-drive rate of the team's pitchers. If you look at what kind of balls in play result in hits, the greater percentage of grounders are turned into outs. Ditto fly balls — if the ball is hit in the air and doesn't go over the fence, there's a great likelihood it's going to be caught. Pop-ups usually don't drop in. This is all pretty intuitive stuff; if you've watched a baseball game you know this. Line drives are a whole other matter. Forgive me for being lazy and not looking up the exact numbers, which vary from year to year anyway, but in general, if batters hit .300 on balls in play, they probably average something like .050 on pop-ups, .250 on grounders, .270 on fly balls, and .750 on line drives. As such, a pitcher who allows a high rate of liners is not going to give his defense a chance to do much to help him. So you're right — but there are exceptions.

Last year, about 28 percent of balls in play were flies, 45 percent were grounders and 19 percent were line drives. The American League pitchers with the lowest line-drive rates allowed — 125 or more innings pitched division — were Joe Saunders (15.4 percent), Shaun Marcum, Tim Wakefield, Garrett Olson and James Shields. The pitchers with the highest line-drive rates allowed were Kevin Millwood (25.9 percent), Brian Bannister, Brian Burres, Dana Eveland and Carlos Silva. Mike Mussina, with 22.2 percent, had the sixth-highest rate of line drives allowed. As you can see by Mussina's inclusion, or Olson's, the correlation between line drives allowed and getting smacked around isn't perfect. There are always outliers, and that's one of the reasons you have to look to the defense and other factors.

Now, let's look at some other Yankees. You could make an argument that Joba Chamberlain got jobbed by the Yankees' defense. He was below average in liners allowed (17.8), flies (25.6), and was above average in grounders (51.2) but still allowed a batting average on balls in play of .328, which strongly suggests that when a batter did get wood on the ball, the infielders tended to let them go by. Andy Pettitte's line-drive rate was a tick above average at 20.8 percent, and his groundball rate was close to Joba's at 52.1. His BABIP was .341. Unless every hit off of him was scorched through the infield, he should have done better. Now, Phil Hughes seems like the opposite case. His BABIP was .360, but his line-drive rate was a high 24.4, which would argue that he earned his post-rehab place in the Minors. Ian Kennedy: high fly-ball rate, very low line-drive rate (12.9 percent). Batting average on balls in play: .342. He didn't do himself any favors with crazy wildness, but the defense murdered him — and he'll likely be traded this winter in part because of factors external to his own performance.

There are various defense-independent pitching statistics out there which try to take the guesswork out of this for you. For example, the Hardball Times has Fielding Independent Pitching, gives you an ERA that is determined by the things that pitchers do, like allow walks and home runs, rather than the things the defense does. FIP largely correlates with our little back-of-the-envelope assessment here: it says that Chamberlain roughly broke even on defense, but Pettitte and Kennedy got mugged. Hughes too, and by a pretty large amount, which differs from my analysis, but I buy it. ESPN.com includes Defense Independent ERA (DIPS) in its sortable statistics, and though figured differently, the two of roughly the same mind. With an average defense in place, the Yankees would have looked like a very different team.

One of the reasons that a high strikeout rate is the best predictor of a pitcher's future success is because strikeouts remove all of the randomness from the pitcher's results. The ball stays in the catcher's glove, and nothing bad can happen. If Derek Jeter does his topiary imitation, no one even notices.

2: TONY'S BACK
Your defense of Brian Cashman might hold water if Hughes was his only screw-up evaluating pitchers rather than just the latest in a long, seemingly never-ending list. No need to rehash the "legendary" roster! Cashman is like the son of a wealthy, successful businessman who turns over the business himself, and within five years the hugely successful business is on a downward spiral because of the son's many bad decisions. Anyone who believes this team will compete for the league title next year is delusional. - Tony

Hiya, Tony. How are things down South? Cashman's history, for good or ill, doesn't change the problem of perception with Hughes, which we just touched on above. At this moment, everything else is water under the darn, as Jack Benny once joked about radio censorship. I still think Cashman is a very difficult general manager to evaluate fairly. First, every GM makes some mistakes, some good deals, some bad. If you're going to be objective about the fellow's performance, you can't grade him on a pass-fail basis because it's just unrealistic. Second, as I've said many times before, he's not a free agent, in the classic, non-baseball sense of the term. He has had to operate under some fairly Byzantine conditions — one with multiple competing power centers in New York and Tampa, some of which felt free to assume Cashman's prerogatives. Someday, perhaps, Cashman will write a book and take credit for some deals and disavow others, and assuming his memory is accurate and his telling fair, maybe we will have a better idea of who to blame for Raul Mondesi or choosing Scott Brosius over Mike Lowell or any the general neglect of the bench and the farm system. Until then, you have to give the guy credit for having more 95-100-win seasons — six of them since the last time the Yankees won a championship — than most GMs see in a professional lifetime.

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