Andy Pettitte: Working his way back to you, babe. (AP)

It seems like the wait has been both too long and not long enough, but it’s there in black and white on the schedule: Andy Pettitte will be back on Sunday. It’s Hiroki Kuroda tonight, Phil Hughes on Saturday, and then the Louisiana Lazarus on the day of rest. Pettitte will be pitching against the Mariners, one of the worst offenses in the league, so he has that going for him, but regardless of the opponent, will he still be able to pitch after a year away?

There has been a lot of good in Andy Pettitte’s four starts for Tampa, Trenton, and Scranton. He’s pitched 17 innings, allowed no home runs, and walked just three while striking out 13. Perhaps his velocity hasn’t been all that impressive, but two words: Jamie Moyer. The ageless lefty—why is it we say “ageless” when we really mean “old?”—has pitched effectively for the Colorado Rockies despite a fastball that covets 80 miles an hour, never mind 90.

Pettitte’s left-handedness and groundball tendencies are an argument in his favor. Think of pitchers like Moyer, Kenny Rogers, and Tommy John. They had extended career codas despite declining velocity because of their ability to pitch to spots and keep the ball in the park. Two of Rogers’ best seasons came at the ages of 40 and 41. Pettitte’s approach isn’t identical to that trio—he’s been an unusual specimen in many ways, with all of his performance markers bouncing around throughout his career, likely because he often pitched at less than 100 percent. Some years he’s been a high-strikeout pitcher, some years not; his command and has been excellent, but there are seasons with a few more walks than others; some years he posts a top-ten ERA, but mostly he hasn’t, and so on.

Pettitte’s comeback once seemed like a bit of a distraction this season given the team’s pitching depth, but that assumed advantage has evaporated and the club could really use his help. The average American League starter has an ERA of 4.28. Yankees starters are at 5.02, 11^th in the league. The next-worst team, the A’s, are almost a full run lower at 4.18. Remove Freddy Garcia from the equation, as the Yankees have wisely done, and that number drops to 4.39, better, but still 11^th in the rankings.

At 17-14, the Yankees are on pace for 89 wins, not enough to win even an AL East that appears to have been substantially degraded. With Kuroda looking more vulnerable in the DH league, Ivan Nova pitching erratically (albeit with a massive upgrade in strikeouts), and Phil Hughes being, well, Hughes, the club can use at least one more reliable cog in the rotation, and that’s without making reference to the solid but thus far inefficient David Phelps.

The jury is still out on that rookie. Dellin Betances and Manny Banuelos are just beginning to get their seasons in gear. Adam Warren has not been good. Still, these are options. The question is, if Pettitte looks old, if he looks finished, if he physically cannot do the job no matter how much he and the Yankees want him to do it, how much rope do you give a beloved elder statesman? How long until you admit that it’s not working?

It’s not so much that the Yankees don’t have other choices, but that they’re going to be reluctant to embrace them if it means the disappointment of admitting that the great lefty is through. I’m not saying that this is what will happen—I hope Pettitte has an encore in him—but only that the speed with which the Yankees adjust to changing circumstances if in fact things do not go as planned will go a long way towards determining their final place in the division standings. As the old saying goes, he who hesitates is lost… And he who hesitates because of sentimentality as he who hesitated for other reasons.

Pettitte could save the season, but he could also help kill it.

David Robertson: We will all get through this together. (AP)

I’ve spent the roughly 12 hours since David Robertson blew his first save following the storm of arguments in articles and tweets regarding his suitability to close, the real impact of the loss of Mariano Rivera, whether any pitcher can close or just some pitchers, and on and on and on. As long as we don’t overreact to one game, he said tongue firmly in cheek, we should be able to come to a dispassionate, reasoned answer on the subject.

Robertson has blown one save, and some have already decided that it’s because the ninth inning is so different from what he’s done before. It’s not, really, you can see that from the outside, but sometimes psychological factors create pressure that we think should be there and fulfill a prophecy that was based on reasoning that withers in the face of real logic. That makes the pressure unnecessary, but no less real.

Meanwhile, the guys who supposedly could close because they had established that they were equal to that ninth inning pressure have been dropping like they all picked up the same norovirus after sharing a dish of tainted oysters. Kevin Gregg, Francisco Cordero, Heath Bell, Javy Guerra, Jordan Walden, Frank Francisco, Carlos Marmol, John Axford, Matt Capps, Jose Valverde, and J.J. Putz have either struggled or been demoted. Simultaneously, Fernando Rodney, Brett Myers, Grant Balfour, and Jonathan Broxton number among the league leaders in saves. The Orioles’ Jim Johnson is 8-0 in save opportunities.

Sometimes, in fact quite often, the guy you think can close, who even has the track-record that seems to prove he can do it, can’t. Conversely, a pitcher who you never would have thought could succeed in the role often does. Dennis Eckerlsey was a sore-armed career starter in his thirties. Doug Jones threw changeups off of changeups off of changeups. Dan Quisenberry threw low sidearm. John Franco threw the screwball. Hoyt Wilhelm was a knuckleball pitcher. It is impossible to imagine any of today’s teams allowing a knuckleball pitcher to close. Heck, R.A. Dickey aside, it’s impossible to imagine any team allowing a knuckleball pitcher, period.

There is no definitive model of a closer, no birthmark that certifies a pitcher as able to pitch the eighth but not the ninth. Closers are made, not born. Yes, some pitchers aren’t suited for the job; not everyone is suited to do your job either, or mine. People who are squeamish about blood and viscera make lousy surgeons, and so on. Yet, there are a lot of surgeons out there, and there are, and have been, many closers. There have been 135 40-save seasons by 69 different pitchers, among them Billy Koch, Bobby Jenks, Danys Baez, Joe Borowski, and Jose Jimenez. All of them were proven closers, and then they weren’t.

It reasons that if you can be a defrocked closer, you can also be a pre-frocked closer. That’s David Robertson right now. He needs the benefit of the doubt for awhile, or we may never find out what he can do. Look, he was going to have days like this. As I wrote in this year’s Baseball Prospectus annual, “He held batters to just .053/.053/.105/ in 19 plate appearances with the bases loaded, and in 120 plate appearances in situations defined as high leverage, Robertson struck out 50 and allowed just 10 hits—all but four of them singles. No one can be that good, or that lucky, indefinitely.”

In that sense, fate chose a bad time for Rivera to yield to Robertson, right at the moment that the latter’s luck was due to change. But what will it change to? Put aside 2011 and Robertson had a 134-game record of pitching to a 3.99 ERA in the big leagues, 3.60 in the two seasons following his rookie year. He walked nearly five per nine innings, struck out nearly 12, and gave up a home run every now and again. You can be a closer pitching that way, not a great one perhaps, but acceptable. Think of the aforementioned Marmol, who has saved 97 games in his career with an even more extreme version of Robertson’s act. It’s not ideal, but it can work, at least for awhile.

And no, it’s not Mariano, but it was never going to be, regardless of if you deploy Robertson in the ninth or any other human being on the planet. That’s not a reason to panic—a great many teams have won World Series with closers other than Rivera. If Robertson does anything other than what he did last night—that is, avoid a total, career-altering meltdown—he and the Yankees will be fine.

Josh Hamilton hits one of his four (AP).

On Tuesday evening in Baltimore, the Rangers’ Josh Hamilton went 5-for-5 with a double and four home runs. Whenever a batter hits four in a game, I always flash back to a time when baseball was smarter and such rare feats were even rarer. Specifically, I think of June 3, 1932, a day on which the Yankees were visiting the Philadelphia Athletics in hitter-friendly Shibe Park. In that day’s game, Babe Ruth hit a home run, but that was just ho-hum, a typical day for the Bambino. Gehrig showed him up for once, going 4-for-6 with four home runs and six RBI.

The A’s starter that day was George “Moose” Earnshaw, a three-time 20-game winner whose style was generally summed up as, “Here’s my fastball, now hit it.” Gehrig hit it, as did Tony Lazzeri and Earle Combs, who also joined Ruth in hitting single round-trippers. The Yankees needed the runs—rookie starter Johnnie Allen had one of the few truly rough days of his prime (in his first seven seasons in the majors, Allen, a late bloomer found working as a bellboy by a scout, went 99-38), and the Yankees won the game 20-13.

I quite enjoy the New York Times description of Gehrig’s feat:

Henry Louis Gehrig’s name today took rank in baseball’s archives along with Bobby Lowe and Ed Delahanty, the only other sluggers who, in more than half a century of recorded diamond battles, ever hit four home runs in one major league game.

Okay, Ed Delahanty I know, everyone knows. He’s the turn-of-the-20^th century Hall of Fame outfielder who was put off a train, drunk and disorderly, near Niagara Falls, and wandered off a bridge, an act that, even today, will get you placed on the permanently ineligible list. But Bobby Lowe? Who the heck is Bobby Lowe?

The Iron Horse.

Well, Bobby Lowe was the first player to swat four home runs in a game… and that was pretty much it. He was a contemporary of Delahanty’s, mostly played for the Boston version of the team we know as the Atlanta Braves, did his home run hitting in 1894, a huge offensive year for the National League. Overall, though, he wasn’t much of a hitter. He was a longtime gloveman at second base who sometimes hit, kind of like Orlando Hudson. In his Historical Abstract, Bill James notes that it was only 250 feet to left field at Boston’s South End Grounds, and of Lowe’s 17 home runs that year, he hit 16 at home.

The famous kicker to the Lou Gehrig four-homer story is that he nearly hit a fifth, something no one has ever done. Back to the Times:

Gehrig in his first four times at bat hammered the ball outside the playing area. In the first and fifth innings he sailed balls into the stands in left center. In the fourth and seventh he fired over the right-field wall… The crowd of 5,000 seemed to concentrate on encouraging Gehrig to hit a fifth homer and thus surpass a brilliant record in baseball’s books.

Lou had two chances. He grounded out in the eighth, but in the ninth he pointed a terrific drive which [future Hall of Famer Al] Simmons captured only a few steps from the furthest corner of the park. A little variance to either side its actual line of flight would have sent the ball over the fence or into the stands.

In some tellings of the story, Simmons caught the ball at or over the wall, robbing Gehrig. This eyewitness description would suggest that some hyperbole has come into play over the years.

Sixteen players have now done the deed, including Hall of Famers Chuck Klein, Willie Mays, and Mike Schmidt. The name you will hear most often in association with Hamilton’s home runs is that of Joe Adcock of the Milwaukee Braves. Playing at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in 1950, the slugging first baseman did what Mickey Mantle only boasted of doing in that park (he said he would have hit a thousand home runs playing in Ebbets every day) setting a single-game record for total bases with four home runs and a double. Hamilton matched it tonight.

Hamilton is Still a Risk
The ironic aspect of Hamilton’s hitting—he’s now hitting .406/.458/.840 in a year in which pitching seems to be ascendant—is that it doesn’t change much about his impending free agent case: he’s still a bad idea given the lengthy contracts that top-tier free agents currently command.

Prior to the start of the season, I wrote a story on another site titled, “The Rangers shouldn’t sign Josh Hamilton—and Neither Should Anybody Else.” This was an exaggeration, but not by much if we’re talking five or more years for a slugger who is fragile in more ways than one:

Since finally making it, he has often played excellently, but as is to be expected, has struggled with his addictions and has sometimes suffered relapses, most recently this offseason. Addiction is a disease, and Hamilton should not be condemned for his struggles, but these issues do make re-signing him a riskier proposition than it would be for another player of the same age.

However, there is a greater issue in re-signing Hamilton than addiction. Hamilton has had five trips to the disabled list in five seasons and had eight interruptions of play lasting at least 15 days. He has fractured his arm and his ribs, suffered a sports hernia, injured his shoulder diving for a ball. He plays all out on defense, and the Rangers’ inability to find a regular center fielder has meant that they repeatedly put Hamilton at that stressful position. He may not be able to handle the additional mileage. We also have to consider his substance abuse problems in a different light: what if his body is fatigued in ways that we just can’t see? What is the physical toll of abusing your body with drink and drugs?

Consider the going contract length for a player of Hamilton’s abilities. A Prince Fielder-style contract would tie Hamilton up until he turned 40, but no one can say how much time he has left as an elite player, or how many more times he will play more than 120 games in a season. Forget nine years, five years might be a risk. Three years might be a risk. Yet, we know someone will gamble, someone will give in and spend so much over so long that even if Hamilton remains sober (fondly do we hope and fervently do we pray that he does), they will surely get burnt by his fragility.

…Hamilton’s hitting ability is not in doubt. The runs will be there on the scoreboard. As with Fielder and Albert Pujols, the short-term benefit is real and inarguable. Hamilton (and his agent) will drive a harder bargain than that, though, and so acquiring him entails real risk. The Rangers know better than anyone else what that means, and if they hesitate to prevent Hamilton from testing the free agent waters, possible buyers should take that as a clue that they should temper their enthusiasm and bet the under in terms of years.

Turns out I was wrong about Pujols, at least for the time being. Otherwise, I stand by the analysis, and will continue to do so even if Hamilton has another ten four-home run games this season. I hope he does, and I hope he proves me wrong, just as I hope Pujols proves me right about short-term value, or any value at this point.

Mariano Rivera, taking a bow upon having broken Trevor Hoffman's all-time saves record last season.

Like most Yankee fans, I spent a good deal of Thursday night traveling the Kübler-Ross five-stages-of-grief spectrum after hearing the news about Mariano Rivera, getting stuck somewhere in the rut between anger and single malt Scotch. Long ago, I joked to a friend that the Yankees could cope with season-ending injuries to many a star, even Derek Jeter, but if one happened to Rivera, that would be the season. “Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye,” was my break-glass-in-emergency advice.

That’s not particularly helpful at a time like this. Nor is it true, at least as far as the regular season goes. As Steve pointed out, the slice of innings which a closer pitches is a very narrow one, and any team should be able to replace a fallen one with another rather effective pitcher should the need arise. As remarkable as Rivera’s numbers were, his conversion rate on saves wasn’t a whole lot higher than the next guy’s.

It is worth noting that this comes with two important caveats. First, between Joe Torre and Joe Girardi, the Yankees were lucky enough to have a pair of managers overseeing Rivera who were willing to deviate from orthodoxy enough to differentiate themselves and their closer. In an age of one-inning closers who uniformly started the ninth inning with a clean slate, Torre and Girardi were unafraid to deploy Rivera in the eighth inning when the situation merited it. The number of times which he pitched more than one inning to net a save dwarfs that of any other closer during his tenure:

Rk  Player               Sv
1   Mariano Rivera      116
2   Keith Foulke         55
3   Danny Graves         49
4   Trevor Hoffman       46
5   Jason Isringhausen   44
6   Ugueth Urbina        41
    Armando Benitez      41
8   Billy Wagner         36
9   John Smoltz          35
10  Jonathan Papelbon    31

Those are saves of at least four outs, from 1996 through 2012. Not including the bookends there (his season setting up for John Wetteland or the limited sample of this year), Rivera averaged 7.5 of these per year, and when he did, he kept things tidy, with a remarkable 0.78 ERA and just two homers allowed in 173.2 innings in those games.

Those numbers look very similar to the ones that constitute the second caveat: the postseason. With the real money on the table, against the best competition the game had to offer — other playoff teams, including seven World Series opponents — Rivera posted an 0.70 ERA in 141 innings, the equivalent of two seasons worth of his annual labor. Again he allowed just two homers in that span, along with 86 hits (5.5 per nine) and 21 walks (1.3 per nine) against 110 strikeouts, with a K/BB ratio of 5.24 — a ratio better than the career-best regular season marks of every other pitcher, including Rivera’s own 4.04, which ranks fifth.

Rivera was the last man standing on the mound for four world championships (1998, 1999, 2000, and 2009). During that last run, he was the only one of the postseason tournament’s eight closers who did not blow a save, who did not falter at least once. As I wrote upon the occasion of that last championship, he is arguably both the greatest reliever of all time and the greatest postseason performer. Again, his managers’ willingness to use him for longer than an inning in such contexts was crucial; no less than 31 of Rivera’s 42 postseason saves were of four outs or more. A very distant number two on that list is Goose Gossage with seven long saves, followed by Rollie Fingers and Dennis Eckersley with six; all three of those relievers are in the Hall of Fame, and all of a time when the game had only two rounds of postseason play. Of the five players tied for fifth at four, the only ones from the modern era of the one-inning closer are Brad Lidge and Jonathan Papelbon. Much of Rivera’s lead owes to the perennial opportunities he’s had to add to it, but again he’s been remarkable under such circumstances, with an 0.34 ERA in 52.2 innings, a 41/3 K/BB ratio, and no homers allowed.

However, what I’ll take from having watched and rooted for Rivera for the past two decades goes beyond those numbers and superlatives. As dominant as his postseason performance was, he did fail notably on a few occasions. In 1997, his first year as closer, he surrendered an eighth-inning solo homer to the Indians’ Sandy Alomar Jr. in Game Four of the AL Division Series. Had he gotten five more outs, the Yankees would have closed out the series and advanced; instead, his failure forced a Game Five, which the Yankees narrowly lost. Smarting from that defeat, both Rivera and the team came back stronger than ever the next year, and reeled off a streak of three straight world championships.

They would have had a fourth in a row had Rivera not faltered again. In 2001, once attentions turned back to baseball in the wake of the September 11 tragedy, national sentiment for once favored the pinstripes, and after a topsy-turvy World Series that featured dramatic home runs in New York and cringeworthy blowouts in Arizona, Rivera found himself on the mound for the ninth inning of Game Seven with a one-run lead to protect. Thanks to a misfire here and a bad break there, the game slipped away, and the Yankees went down in defeat to the Diamondbacks.

It was a stunning upset, and in the context of the bigger picture — a smoldering hole in the ground, a city dotted with desperate missing persons flyers — a heartbreaking reminder that our collective desire for the world to be whole again, for it to make sense in the face of senselessness, was not enough to make it so. Yet even in the wake of disappointment, Rivera found the strength and resiliency to rebound and resume his greatness, and for the rest of us, life went on as well. It wasn’t easy, but we survived and we healed, recovering the strength to find love and joy and meaning, both as we looked to baseball and to the world beyond.

Faced with the possibility that we may never see that incomparably graceful number 42 on the mound again, it is that knowledge in which we must take comfort. As sad as the circumstances may be given his injury, we will survive the departure of Mariano Rivera, the end of his fantastic career, and so will he. We will again find strength in his example of resiliency.

And one day, we will celebrate again.

The 2009 clincher. (AP)

Mariano Rivera: A sad day, but a survivable one.

Asked tonight how the possible loss of Mariano Rivera altered his bullpen, Joe Girardi replied, “You lose a Hall of Famer.” Emotionally, it’s a devastating blow in terms of confidence, gravitas, pride, and most of all, sentiment: one of the greatest pitchers of all time has possibly been lost, not just for today and tomorrow, but possibly forever. This is one of those times when the usual dichotomy between fan reaction and team reaction ceases to exist: Rivera is one of the most admired figures in baseball, both on his team and off, and for both teammates and those of us who have admired him throughout his career, this moment is truly one of sadness. However, “sad” does not equal “important” in pure baseball terms.

Let’s add a short phrase to the descriptions given above: Yes, Rivera is a Hall of Famer and one of the greatest pitchers of all time, but both of those phrases require this qualifier: “in his niche.” He is one of the greatest pitchers of all time in his niche. That niche, closing, has been given a lot of exaggerated importance because of the saves rule and the persistence of the idea that losing a game in the ninth inning is somehow worse than losing it in the first inning, or the third, or the fifth.

Rivera has, of course, been exceedingly valuable to the Yankees, not because he was saving games, but because he was pitching scoreless innings, and doing so more consistently and reliably than any other reliever in history, be it setting up or closing, regular season or postseason. We can and should give him credit for pitching in pressure-filled situations, but even then, the value is in the scoreless inning, not in the save—the difference between Rivera’s saves conversion rate and that of the typical closer is unremarkable.

Let me pause to boil that down: Rivera is a Hall of Famer because he gets outs, because most relievers, including closers, have very short career peaks and are not reliable from year to year; he has been the most reliable pitcher of all time. The saves, the ninth-inning stuff, it’s the smallest part of his value.

As Rivera has aged, even the value of what he does has been somewhat diminished by the Yankees’ reluctance to deploy him unless the situation met a very narrow definition of acceptable use. Look at Rivera’s innings over the last five seasons (2007-2011):

Rivera’s participation has been dropping steadily. Even if you think the ninth inning is SUPEREXTRAVALUABLE compared to the rest of the game, Rivera gets a tiny portion of the Yankees’ outs each year, leaving the rest of the staff to retire more than 1350 innings’-worth of batters. Ask yourself this question: shouldn’t an organization, especially a good organization, be able to replace four percent of their total innings for a season? CC Sabathia goes down, you’re talking more than 15 percent. That’s a tall order. But four? And if the literal replacement won’t be pitching the ninth inning but in other spots theoretically less SUPEREXTRAVALUABLE?

We can take things a step further: Over the last five seasons, Rivera has made 322 appearances and pitched 329.2 innings, so basically, you’ve got a ratio of 1:1 there—one inning a shot. According to Baseball-Reference, 202 of those appearances, or 63 percent, have been of the high-leverage variety, which is to say that the game was truly at risk. They required a pitcher of Rivera’s talents. That means that 37 percent of his remaining appearances were of medium- or low-leverage. Less was at stake, and we could have expected most pitchers to perform adequately in those situations, getting three outs before three runs scored, or whatever the game required.

Parenthetically, that breakdown is not on Rivera, but on his manager. Using a pitcher to the saves rule means wasting the pitcher a good portion of the time. Think of that breakdown in terms of innings.  Rivera has been averaging 66 innings a season. Of those, 42 were worthy of his skills and 24 were not. With that in mind, let’s look at the innings percentage table again:

That’s it. That’s Rivera’s total contribution that actually mattered—roughly three percent of the team’s total innings. Now, a lot of things could sink the Yankees this year. It could be lack of depth among the position players is exposed by injuries, or the starting rotation being less effective than anticipated. It could be that an offense in which the average player is 33 years old proves to be not only fragile but disappointing. Someone could confuse Eduardo Nunez with an everyday player. Any or all of those defects might do the trick. But:

No matter how beloved Mariano Rivera is (not least by me), no matter how great he has been at what he does, if a team can’t find a way to reassign 39 innings out of 1450, it wasn’t going to win anyway. This is a sad day for the Yankees and for baseball, but it’s impact on the winning effort should be minimal.

Even if Michael Pineda is seriously injured, it's too early to judge the blockbuster deal. (AP)

While we await word on the second opinion regarding Michael Pineda’s shoulder, certain corners of the baseball world are already rushing to judgment. Today, Fox Sports’ Jon Morosi declared the Mariners the “early winner” of the January deal that sent Jesus Montero and Hector Noesi to Seattle in exchange for Pineda and Jose Campos. Earlier today, I exchanged barbed tweets with Morosi, who reasoned. “This is one early snapshot of the trade. It’s like the top of the second inning. The score, while not final, still matters.”

Montero is hitting all of .254/.270/.336 for the Mariners in 63 plate appearances. He has two homers, but also just two walks against 11 strikeouts. That stellar line has been worth −0.1 WARP — worse than replacement level, in other words. Noesi, meanwhile, has been tagged for a 9.49 ERA in 12.3 innings over three starts, worth −0.2 WARP. Neither Pineda nor Campos, who’s 19 years old and still in A-ball has yet to appear in a regular season game. If the Mariners are winning this deal on that front, they’re doing so via a very counterintuitive means, because being below replacement level (and they are according to other WAR-based systems as well) is definitively going backwards.

Let’s do some quick math. Coming into the season, the Yankees had five years of remaining club control over Pineda, and six years of such control over Campos, six years on which the clock won’t even start until he reaches the majors (if he ever does). For purposes of simplicity, we’ll forget the latter for the moment. The Yankees have played 17 out of 162 games this season, 10.5 percent of their schedule, and 2.1 percent of their schedule over the next five years, the span during which they have control over Pineda.

The average major league game in 2011 lasted 291 pitches between the two teams. If we’re mapping Pineda’s tenure to a major league game, we’re at 2.1 percent of 291, or 6.1 pitches. Six pitches into a game, folks. Even if you’re the Phillies, last in the majors at 3.66 pitches per plate appearances, that’s closer to two batters into the game than the top of the second inning. Sure, it’s possible to declare a team “winning” by that point in a game; a home run or back-to-back base hits, with one for extra bases, would do the trick. But nobody’s breaking out the champagne under such circumstances.

In fact, not only are the Mariners not winning the trade, one can even argue that they’re losing — apart from their performances to date — merely by squandering Montero’s service time. Coming into the year, nobody expected that the Mariners would contend for the AL West flag or even a wild card spot; they’re 8-10 right now, with a −9 run differential (-0.5 runs per game, at this stage, which ain’t hay), a PECOTA forecast for a 71-91 season and a 0.6 percent chance of making the playoffs. Therefore, using Montero’s service time on such a team is arguably something of a waste. At the very least, keeping him down in the minors during April would have prevented him from gaining a full year of service time in 2012, thus extending the Mariners’ club control by a full season, through 2018. Keeping him in the minors until sometime in June or July could prevent him from reaching arbitration eligibility after the 2014 season, granting them Mariners one more year before they have to pay him big money (if he indeed pans out).

Given all of that, it’s difficult to conclude that the Mariners are winning the trade. Which doesn’t mean that the Yankees are, mind you, not with Pineda possibly looking down the barrel of shoulder surgery. The point is that the jury is going to remain out for a long, long time on this deal; it might be 10 years before Campos completes his club control stint with the Yankees. Any rush to judgment to declare a winner is ludicrously premature at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. There’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the four players’ performances, but there’s no reason to slap a label on the proceedings, either.

Derek Jeter's getting the ball off the ground with a bit more frequency than in the recent past, but will it be enough to sustain his resurgence? (AP)

In a season where the Yankees’ offense has gotten off to a sluggish start, the one hitter who has been tearing up the pea patch has been Derek Jeter. On Sunday night, the Captain broke open what was already a 5-1 game against the Angels, crushing a Hisanori Takahashi drive to right field for a three-run homer. At a time when there’s more focus on the things he can’t do than the ones he can, Jeter now leads the team in batting average (.366), on-base percentage (.395) and slugging percentage (.610), and it’s even been breathlessly suggested that he could win his first batting title in his age 38 season.

That’s extremely unlikely to happen, but the remade swing that Jeter emerged with last July upon returning from his calf strain is still generating positive results:

Period           PA  HR   AVG/OBP/SLG    SO%   BABIP  ISO
Thru June 13    293   2  .260/.324/.324  10.6  .283  .074
Since           358   6  .335/.385/.468  14.8  .386  .133
Career        11999 242  .313/.383/.450  14.8  .355  .136

Thanks to a higher batting average on balls in play, Jeter has put up numbers in line with his career rates over about half a season’s worth of plate appearances. That .386 mark is actually in a league with his best BABIPs — .396 (1999, swoon), .391 (2006), .386 (2000), .379 (2003), and .375 (1998) — but even this season’s .361 mark, while closer to his career rate, is probably unsustainable for a player his age. In all of baseball history, just nine players in their age-38 seasons have managed a .350 BABIP while qualifying for a batting title, and only four have exceeded Jete’s current mark:

Rk Player            BABIP Year Age  Tm
1  Ty Cobb           .371  1925  38  DET
2  Paul Molitor      .367  1996  39  MIN
3  Ted Williams      .367  1957  38  BOS
4  Rickey Henderson  .363  1999  40  NYM
   Derek Jeter       .361  2012  38  NYY
5  Ty Cobb           .359  1927  40  PHA
6  Sam Rice          .356  1930  40  WSH
7  Andres Galarraga  .355  2000  39  ATL
8  Eddie Collins     .350  1926  39  CHW
9  Julio Franco      .350  1997  38  2TM

That’s some pretty fair company; with the exception of Galarraga and Franco, those are all Hall of Famers. Then again, Jeter’s career .355 mark is fourth since 1901, behind only Cobb (.383), Rogers Hornsby (.365), and Rod Carew (.359). Getting hits on balls in play is the area at which he has most excelled during his 18-year career, and it’s why he’s likely to wind up in the all-time top 10 in hits once it’s all said and done. He’s at 3,103 now, and if you conservatively figure another 150 per year as he ages (he had 179 in 2010, 162 last year even missing three weeks), he’ll get into the 3,400-3,500 range easily. He’s even got a chance to reach Stan Musial’s 3,630, which ranks fourth all-time, and which stands as a record for hits accumulated with one team.

Back to Jeter’s current performance, one important aspect of his resurgence is a reduction of his groundball rate. Jeter led the majors last year at 63.9 percent, according to MLB Advanced Media data; he also led in 2010 and 2008, and has been in the top 10 in every year since 2005, and the top five in all of those years save for 2007. Even so, his rate is down since returning from the injury; he was at 66.8 percent before going on the DL, at 60.8 percent since returning — still a top 5-caliber rate in most of the years in question — and at 59.0 percent for 2012 alone. Admittedly, the latter is a small sample size, but it’s important to recognize that groundball rate stabilizes at around the 109 plate appearance mark, according to work by Baseball Prospectus colleague Derek Carty. By comparison, BABIP takes over 1,100 plate appearances to stabilize — ten times as long. That doesn’t mean Jeter’s groundball rate won’t change, but it does mean that his 2012 rate can soon be taken at least somewhat seriously. That Jeter’s still above 60 percent over the course of half a season’s worth of plate appearances since returning from his injury is thus significant.

Can a hitter be productive with a 60 percent groundball rate? Yes, but within limits. Since 2000, 60 players have done so over the course of a full season while qualifying for a batting title (502 plate appearances). Those players combined for a .326 BABIP, and a .290 batting average, but just a .401 slugging percentage. Their combined True Average (think OPS, except expressed on a scale of batting average, with park and league adjustments thrown in, and on-base percentage properly weighted to be more important than slugging percentage) was just .264, with only six of them — Jeter and fellow BABIP expert Ichiro Suzuki twice, and Bernie Williams, and Shawn Green once — producing TAvs above .300. The problem, basically, is that groundballs don’t tend to produce extra-base hits, and extra-base hits do much more for a hitter’s TAv than singles do. Oddly enough, a .264 TAv is what PECOTA projects for Jeter this season.

Now, a .264 TAv is still slightly above the MLB average of .260, but there’s a selection bias in play, namely that the players who get that much playing time are generally above average anyway. In fact, the pool of players with 502 PA in that timespan combined for a .280 TAv, 16 points higher than our slappy bunch, with their less impressive .307 BABIP and .282 AVG offset by a robust .462 SLG. That 16 points of TAv translates to about two-thirds of a run per game of difference over the course of a full game’s worth of plate appearances for a team — in other words, not insignificant. Meanwhile, only 12 of the 60 seasons with 60 percent groundball rates featured TAvs above .280, with Jeter owning four of them (2001, 2002, 2005, 2006).

If anyone can succeed while killing worms that often, it’s probably Derek Jeter. While the deck is still stacked against that happening, he hasn’t put together a Hall of Fame career simply by bowing to the odds. If he can return from the 2010-early 2011 doldrums, that would be a significant plus for the Yankees’ offense.

The Yankees finally put one in the win column on Monday night, beating the Orioles 6-2 behind a dogged effort from Ivan Nova (seven innings of two-run ball despite yielding 10 hits) after being swept by the Rays in their season-opening series. In doing so, they managed to avoid an 0-4 start for the first time since 1973 and just the third time in franchise history.

The Yankees have never won a World Series in the years they’ve started 0-4 (1912 and 1930 being the others), but they have rallied to win no less than six of them when starting 1-3 (which they’ve done 25 times): 1936, 1938, 1952, 1977, 1978, and most famously 1998, when they preceded their 24th world championship by winning a franchise-record 114 games. That’s just one less than they’ve won while starting 2-2, and two more than they’ve won while starting 4-0 (which they’ve done only 11 times). Even with a sluggish first week, rumors of their demise are greatly exaggerated.

Given the caliber of the current team, there’s a slim likelihood they’ll be anything less than a contender for a playoff spot, but still, it’s fair to wonder about the Yankees’ slowest starts and the fates of those teams, in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-Derek-Jeter sort of way. What follows is a look at some of the worst-case starts, and how things turned out for those teams.

5 games: 0-5 (1912, 1930): In 110 years of existence (including this one), the Yankees have only started 0-5 twice, fewer than any other franchise that’s been in existence since 1901 save for the White Sox, who have had it happen just once. The 1912 club, still known as the Highlanders, went on to post a franchise-worst 50-102 record. The most notable player on that team was probably first baseman Hal Chase, who had managed the club in late 1910 and all of 1911, when they finished 76-76; he had gotten the job in 1910 after manager George Stallings became the first person to accuse him of “laying down” in games. After a season and change as manager, Chase stepped down in favor of Harry Wolverton, who lasted just one season as the Yankees finished a whopping 55 games out of first. Given that successor Frank Chance also accused Chase of throwing games in 1913, and that Chase would eventually be suspended for doing so with the Reds in 1917, it’s fair to wonder if foul play tainted that miserable 1912 record. Less dramatically, the 1930 team — which featured Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Earle Combs, Tony Lazzeri, Bill Dickey, Red Ruffing, Herb Pennock and briefly Waite Hoyt, recovered to go 86-68, but finished a distant third in the AL race, 16 games behind Connie Mack’s A’s.

10 games: 1-9 (1966): After losing the 1964 World Series to the Cardinals, the Yankees fired Yogi Berra and hired St. Louis manager Johnny Keane, but slipped to 77-85, their first sub-.500 season since 1925, the year of Babe Ruth’s “bellyache heard ’round the world.” With an aging Mickey Mantle only intermittently available, and Roger Maris a shell of his former self, the 1966 club stumbled out of the gate, scoring just 21 runs in its first 10 games. They would finish 70-89, last in the league for the first time since 1912.

15 games: 2-13 (1913): Frank Chance had been part of four pennant winners and two world champions as a Cub from 1898-1912, playing first base as part of the most famous double play combination of all time (along with shortstop Joe Tinker and second baseman Johnny Evers). The “Peerless Leader” had severed connections with the Cubs following the 1912 season, when he was 35, and intended to retire, but the Yankees offered him a three-year deal in the neighborhood of $40,000 deal to manage. Alas, he inherited a team coming off its worst season, and would be saddled with the scourge of Chase until “Prince Hal” was traded to the White Sox on June 1. The Yankees would finish 57-94, barely ahead of the last place St. Louis Browns (57-96), but not before popping up elsewhere on this list.

20 games: 4-16 (1913, 1966): The 1966 squad’s sluggish start would cost Keane his job; he was made the scapegoat for an aging roster and a depleted farm system, fired after 20 games in favor of Ralph Houk. Houk, of course, had managed the Yankees from 1961-1963 before moving upstairs to become the general manager; he would give up the latter post to move back down to the dugout. Sadly, Keane would die of a heart attack in January 1967, at just 55 years old. Houk would go on to hold the managerial job through 1973, but he would never take the Yankees back to the postseason.

25 games: 7-17-1 (1913), 8-17 (1912, 1966, 1984): Every other franchise record for bad starts at the 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 game intervals belongs to Chance’s team, which was amid a 14-game winless streak (with one tie) when they traded Chase to the White Sox. The team came out of that at 9-34-2, but would put up a better fight once the skid was over, going a still-lousy 48-60 the rest of the way. Meanwhile, three other Yankees teams would start 8-17, two of the aforementioned plus the 1984 edition under Berra. That squad scored just 70 runs over their first 25 games, on .232/.294/.325 hitting with just nine home runs. Four regulars — Butch Wynegar, Toby Harrah, Steve Kemp and Omar Moreno — were still under the Mendoza Line at that point, while Dave Winfield was hitting just .250/.291/.385 with a pair of homers. The team caught fire, and went 79-58 (.577) the rest of the way, but it wasn’t nearly enough to catch the Tigers, who had started the year 21-4, would peak at 35-5, and finish 104-58.

30 games 10-19-1 (1925): Just two games better than Chance’s club (8-21-1) at this juncture, the 1925 team wouldn’t see Ruth until June 1, by which time they were 15-25-1. Spotting in the outfield a small handful of times in his absence, and pinch-hitting on that June 1 day was a 22-year-old kid named Lou Gehrig. He would take over first base duties from a malingerer named Pipp the following day, and go on to rack up a record 2,130 consecutive games.

So you see, kids, even a stroll through some of the slowest starts and the darkest Yankee seasons in memory can produce a notable high point in Yankee history. And now back to your regularly scheduled winning…

Will Mark Teixeira cut down on the pull-hitting tendency that has eroded his productivity? (AP)

Hola amigos, it’s been awhile since I rapped at ya. A whole offseason has gone by, and I kept busy with a winter’s worth of projects — JAWS, Baseball Prospectus 2012, Extra Innings, Fantasy Baseball Index, my usual Prospectus Hit and Run column, and ranting like a lunatic about the Dodgers on Twitter — that prevented me from weighing in here. As Steve hinted last week, I’m back in circulation now, and I’ll be weighing in at least once a week going forward.

Over the past week at BP, I’ve explored one nagging question that I have about each team as the season dawns, one loose thread that I haven’t been able to resist tugging upon — a question that keeps getting asked of me during season previews, or that I keep asking myself, one that we can’t answer right now. I’ve got more than one for the Yankees, of course. What follows are five that I’m particularly interested in at the moment.

Will Mark Teixeira use the whole field?

Though he clubbed 39 homers, last year Teixeira hit .248/.341/.494, setting a career low in batting average and posting his lowest on-base percentage since his 2003 rookie season. Both of those marks owed something to a career-worst .239 batting average on balls in play, the fourth-lowest among batting title qualifiers, and  something that can’t entirely be chalked up to luck. Teixeira has developed a pronounced tendency to pull the ball; as Matthew Leach writes at MLB.com:

In both 2011 and 2010, more than half the balls that Teixeira put in play as a left-handed hitter went to right field, according to STATS Inc. His rate was 56 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2011. Before then, he’d only had one season in his career where he was that pull-dominated as a left-hander — 2004, his second year in the Major Leagues.

Teixeira’s tendency to pull the ball as a lefty, of course, leads managers to shift their infield defense against him, often putting three fielders to the right of second base, the so-called “Ted Williams shift.” Baseball Info Solutions tracks such shifts, and according to their data in the new book, The Fielding Bible III, only seven hitters — David Ortiz, Ryan Howard, Carlos Pena, Adam Dunn, Prince Fielder and Jim Thome — have been shifted against more over the past two years than Teixeira; his ranking is lower than it might otherwise be because he’s a switch-hitter who bats righty sometimes, and managers don’t shift nearly as often against righties.

According to the BIS data, Teixiera hit .168 on grounders and short liners against the shift, 40 points lower than the weighted average of the top 10 shiftees, and .182 on grounders and short liners otherwise, 56 points lower than the weighted average of those 10. So the shift suppressed his batting average somewhat, but he was also lacking in luck.

Teixeira has been working with hitting coach Kevin Long on hitting to the opposite field this spring. He has no intention of becoming a Punch-and-Judy, and says he’ll pick his spots when he tries to go the other way. Not that he’s an unproductive hitter without doing so; his .296 True Average last year was still plenty respectable, but he’s ranked only 10th among major league first basemen in TAv in each of the past two seasons, down from seventh in 2009 (.322), second in 2008 (.332), and fourth in 2007 (.316). It will certainly be interesting to see the extent to which he changes his approach, and the dividends it pays.

Will Alex Rodriguez return to being a 30-homer threat?

Last year was a disappointing one for Rodriguez, who at the age of 35 set career lows in games played (99) and home runs (16), with the latter total ending his record-tying 13-year streak of at least 30 homers in a season; he shares that with Barry Bonds. Injuries had everything to do with that, of course; Rodriguez missed six weeks due to surgery to repair a torn meniscus, and lost another two weeks’ worth of games to a sprained thumb. In and around those injuries, he hit just .191/.345/.353 with three homers in just 84 plate appearances in the second half.

Over the winter, Rodriguez went to Germany to undergo the experimental Orthokine blood-spinning therapy, and other than taking a fastball in the ribs, he has been healthy this spring, swinging the bat well. We don’t know how he’ll hold up over the course of the upcoming season, but his track record suggests he’ll regain his power. Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA projection system forecasts him to hit 30 homers in 585 PA. The ZiPS system isn’t so sanguine, forecasting 21 homers in 456 PA, but if you scale that up to the same amount of playing time, that’s 27 homers. The CAIRO system, which I was exposed to for the first time while doing my winter work for Fantasy Baseball Index, forecasts 19 in 451 PA, which is about 25 homers in the same amount of playing time. Rodriguez can still be a productive hitter, but he’ll have his work cut out to put up the power numbers to which we’ve become accustomed.

Will Curtis Granderson’s defense continue to confound measurements?

Speaking of becoming accustomed to power numbers, I’m not going to wonder if Granderson can bop 41 again — the aforementioned projection systems average out to 32 — but I do wonder about his defense. Of the four major systems, both Total Zone and Fielding Runs Above Average put him at 13 runs below average, while Defensive Runs Saved places him at −6, and Ultimate Zone Rating at −5, with an average of −9 across the four, almost a full win below average. Granderson doesn’t look like a bad center fielder at all, but — hazy anecdotal evidence alert — he did seem to be playing a bit more shallow last season than the year before, with the cost of the balls he didn’t get to behind him much higher than if he’d played a few steps deeper and let more singles drop. John Dewan at the Fielding Bible, which uses multiple stringers to review videos in compiling Defensive Runs Saved, had this to say about Grandy’s defense in his book:

Curtis Granderson had a down year in the field in 2011 after establishing himself as an above-average fielder in previous years. For some reason, despite elite speed and athleticism, Granderson struggled to make good reads on balls in 2011. He took an abnormally high number of bad routes on flyballs in addition to breaking in the wrong direciton on numerous occasions, costing himself several opportunities to convert outs. On the plus side, Granderson, who has never had a very strong arm, tends to make good decisions with his throws. He was very accurate and kept runners at bay at an above-average rate. Look for Granderson to bounce back in 2012 because he still has the physical skill set to perform at a high level.

I recall seeing Granderson struggle with his routes back with the Tigers towards the end of the 2009 season, when they blew a three-game lead with four games to go and wound up losing a Game 163 play-in to the Twins. It seemed to be one of those “it just happens when I’m watching” things that I know enough not to take too seriously if it doesn’t jibe with the numbers from a full season (he averaged around +2.5 across the four aforementioned systems last year). I put more stock in what the FB3 folks have to say given the intensive nature of their review, so I wonder if Grandeson has a vision problem or concentration issues out there or something.

Will the Yankees re-sign Russell Martin?

In his first year in pinstripes, Martin was better than expected, considering he signed after being nontendered by the Dodgers over concerns about his health. Though his .237/.324/.408 line doesn’t look like much thanks to an uncharacteristically low .252 BABIP (50 points below his .302 as a Dodger), he hit 18 homers, his most since 2007, and continued to walk at a healthy rate. Behind the plate, he threw out a solid 31 percent of would-be base thieves, and the work of fellow Baseball Prospectus propellerheads Mike Fast and Max Marchi showed that he had a considerable amount of value when it came to pitch framing and pitcher handling, value that isn’t captured in more basic WAR/WARP metrics; in fact, he ranks among the game’s best.

Martin is making $7.5 million plus incentives (as much as another $100,000) this year, and the Yankees are interested in signing him to a multi-year deal; they apparently offered three years and $20 million this winter, while Brian Cashman was quoted as saying “I would love to have Russell Martin stay.” That was before the Cardinals’ Yadier Molina signed a five-year, $75 million extension, one that is going to raise Martin’s cost considerably. Even aside from the trade of Jesus Montero and the injury woes of Austin Romine, it’s clear the team desires an experienced two-way catcher, but it remains to be seen not only whether Martin and the Yanks can find common contractual ground, but whether the 29-year-old backstop can stay healthy and productive for another season given his recent track record.

Will Phil Hughes get his career as a starting pitcher back on track?

With Andy Pettitte working on a comeback — one that provided me with the loose thread that inspired this series over at BP — and Michael Pineda cooling his heels on the disabled list with shoulder tendonitis, the Yankees have intriguing alternatives to the five starting pitchers they’ll leave the gate with. The one who has me most intrigued at the moment is Hughes, who after showing up out of shape last spring and suffering through shoulder fatigue and lost velocity, turned in an abbreviated major league season, with a 5.79 ERA in 74.2 innings. The 26-year-old righty came to camp leaner and meaner, and pitched exceptionally well this spring, paying no mind to the circus around him and recovering some of that lost velocity — and perhaps some of his lost promise as well. A skeptic will point out that Hughes’ troubles actually date back to mid-2010; since that year’s All-Star break, his ERA is 5.34 over 150 innings, with 1.4 homers, 3.4 walks and 6.1 strikeouts per nine. Still, there’s plenty of reason to think he’s learned from his mistakes, and that better conditioning and self-understanding will help him unlock some of his vast potential. I want to believe.

We don’t have the answers to any of these questions right now. We’ll just have to wait for the season to unfold. Rest assured that I’ll be tracking these as it does. Happy Opening Day, everyone!

Oh, and if you’re in the New York City area, I urge you to come out and hear Steve and me read from Extra Innings at the monthly Varsity Letters series, which takes place tonight (Thursday, April 4) at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan. Further details are here.

When he managed the Toledo Mud Hens, Casey Stengel was once trying to interest the New York Giants in buying one of his pitching prospects. During a showcase performance, the pitcher was shelled. On a visit to the mound, Stengel told the hurler to grab his arm.  “Make out like you’re hurt,” he said. “I want to get you out of here with dignity.”

I’m not so cynical as to suggest that Michael Pineda’s shoulder tendinitis is the equivalent of Stengel’s attempt to preserve the value of Roy Parmelee, but it certainly has the same benefit. The ongoing saga of Pineda’s diminished velocity now has, at least in theory, a beginning, middle, and end: injury, loss of speed, and recovery. We can’t assume any of that, of course, but if you would like to put to rest, at least in your own mind, the thought that the Yankees were somehow badly burnt in trading Jesus Montero, that’s the way to go.

That determination is itself an act of faith. Chad Jennings framed the questions well: Did the injury cause the velocity dip, or is that just a coincidence? Did it come from Pineda trying to make up lost velocity, and once he heals, will the velocity come back? Mushrooms on pizza, why is that so divisive ,even among people who normally get along?

So, now the mystery: when does Pineda come back, and is this a Phil Hughes thing that lasts all season? I would vote for “No,” except for Pineda’s second half last year, when he dove down to a 5.00 ERA. That ERA wasn’t completely consistent with his peripherals, and he was wrapping up a season in which he jumped about 32 innings, so maybe it was just simple fatigue at work… or perhaps what is happening now was already happening then.

Underlying that question is another: does every decline in pitcher velocity manifest in a detectable physical problem, or can a drop in velocity be an innocent, transient problem, and does it even matter? Pineda was performing well this spring until his final start, so perhaps the last velocity wouldn’t even have been an issue. Velocity is not an end in and of itself: many pitchers have thrown hard and been ineffective. Meanwhile, Jamie Moyer rolls on, at least through spring training.

For more on the Yankees and Pineda by yours truly, see my new crib at Bleacher Report.

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
If you feel like talking some baseball with me and the great Jay Jaffe and are in the New York City area on Thursday evening, here’s your chance:

Thursday is Opening Day, and while the occasion doesn’t need any additional embellishments, we have one for New York City-area Baseball Prospectus readers: at 7:30 PM, Steven Goldman and I will be reading from our latest tome, Extra Innings, which officially hits the streets this week. We’ll be doing so as part of the Gelf Magazine monthly Varsity Letters series, which played host to Steve and Jonah Keri back in 2007, when Extra Innings’ prequel, the popular Baseball Between the Numbers, was the newest game in town.

The event will take place at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge at 158 Bleecker Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village (between Thompson and Sullivan Streets; see the map here), so of course Steve will be modeling his collection of berets while playing the upright bass to accompany my readings of jazz poetry (OKAY, OKAY, we promise none of that if you actually show up). We’ll have books for sale, and are hoping to arrange a means of giving away a free copy or two. I should also point out that Le Poisson Rouge is a bar, so you’ll be able to quench your thirst while we read, though please note that I will be grading you on the brand of beer you drink, using the traditional 20-80 scouting scale.

Been awhile since I’ve been able to check in, as I’ve been getting started at my new home away from the PB, Bleacher Report, where I cover the American League and have been known to say the odd thing about the Yankees. Now that I’m getting comfortable, I’ll be back here more often. I am also pleased to announce the return of the great Jay Jaffe to these pages starting next week.

Since I last checked in, a lot has happened to the Yankees. Let’s go down the list:

1. Curtis Granderson got nicked up, and so did Nick Swisher. Neither injury seems to be much to be worried about, but they did raise questions as to what the heck the Yankees would do to patch for a serious injury in the outfield. There isn’t any real depth, and stretching Raul Ibanez or Andruw Jones into daily usage isn’t really a solution since it asks them to do things they can’t do, while opening up a hole at DH.

2. Pursuant to the foregoing, Raul Ibanez hasn’t hit at all this spring. He didn’t hit well last year either. Sometimes a 39-year-old who looks done proves to be a 40-year-old who is done. Often, in fact. The Yankees picked up Jack Cust yesterday. In his fleeting glory days with the A’s, Cust was often a valuable hitter, and would be more valuable than Ibanez right now if he had anything left, but that too seems a stretch.

3. Michael Pineda’s velocity has been improved—or it regressed, depending on who you read. It’s like the pitching version of Rashomon. At this point, we’re not going to know anything until we see him get some real starts in the regular season. Then let the real panic begin!

4. Phil Hughes has been rumored to have won the fifth starter’s job over Freddy Garcia. No disrespect to Garcia, but this is the right call—and also likely Hughes’ last chance to establish himself with the Yankees. As for Garcia, he was helpful last year, but was almost certain to regress this year.

5. Joba Chamberlain… Well, you know.

6. Cesar Cabral or Clay Rapada? They’ve both been very good, but Rapada is a known quantity, a southpaw who dominated lefties but turns every righty he sees into Babe Ruth. Cabral has the real upside since he throws hard, and as a Rule 5 pick, the Yankees are in a position where they have to use him or lose him. Bet the upside, lads.

7. Justin Maxwell: Out of options. Yes, and? He’s a useful part, but there’s no room, not if you’re carrying two lefties and 12 total pitchers, including Mr. Garcia. Maxwell is needed, but alas, he’s playing for a spot on another team.

Here is where I traditionally salt in a reference or two to old Batman comics, Warren Gamaliel Harding, or the Battle of Seven Pines. That obligation finished, I will be back shortly with more.

It’s a fact of life that baseball players will get hurt. The season is too long, too grueling for them to remain healthy—teams can’t even make it through spring training without seeing players head for the casualty lists; for various reasons, David Robertson, Freddy Garcia, and Nick Swisher have all numbered among the Yankees’ injured this March.

Perhaps, then, this is why Joba Chamberlain’s trampoline-induced limb-threatening, dislocated-ankle injury rankles so much. Recovering from Tommy John surgery, Chamberlain wasn’t supposed to rejoin the Yankees until mid-season, but his rehab had been progressing, a baseball player working his way back from a baseball injury. No, no one can guarantee that Chamberlain would not have gotten hurt during his rehab, but there’s a difference between getting hurt because of a baseball-related activity and a non-baseball one that, perhaps, could be avoided.

Then again, there is a question: where does the line get drawn between avoiding unnecessary risks and crushing a baseball player in bubble wrap? I’ve maintained that as a baseball player, Chamberlain is  held to a higher standard when it comes to taking risks, but such a viewpoint has been met with criticism, much of it arguing that if we can’t let a baseball player have fun with his kid (indeed, the story of a player being a good father is often too heartwarming to pass up) on a trampoline, what’s to say we don’t ban them from bike riding or playing catch?  Where does common sense end and overprotectiveness begin?

This is not an easy question to answer and to be clear, the degree of injury Chamberlain suffered in relation to the activity pursued is sort of the equivalent of slicing your carotid while shaving. Even those (like myself) who would argue that a trampoline is dangerous for a 240 lb. baseball player, would, in all likelihood, have predicted a sprain or jammed appendage, but not an ankle dislocation that rivals the injuries we’ve seen in recent seasons to Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales. Even if you are to agree that a trampoline or any form of gymnastics is too risky for a professional athlete, it’s unlikely that you would immediately think of a career-threatening injury.

Still, Yankees fans will remember what happened to Aar0n Boone. The (arguably) most famous basketball injury to happen to a non-basketball player ended up netting the Yankees Alex Rodriguez. Basketball is not usually thought of as an activity with a risk level on par with bungee jumping (it’s not; you don’t need to sign a liability waiver to do the former), but baseball contracts have been known in the past to include provisions against playing hoops. While not a contact sport, basketball remains hard on the knees and ankles, and while a torn ACL might not end your life, it will clearly affect your ability to pitch on a mound.

One can make the argument that trampolining can be dangerous because of the force put on the knees and ankles when a grown, physically fit man, jumps up and down, but it’s not so common an activity that you would expect it to be named as a forbidden activity in a player contract. Indeed, are we to argue that Chamberlain’s duty to his team comes before his attempts to be a good father to his kid? There may be some who would put a career before family, but (in an ideal world) not many. We castigate celebrities and professional athletes all the time for poor parenting, then when one tries to be a decent one there’s a temptation to castigate again for the choice of activity.

There is no one-size-fits-all line when it comes to off-field activities. Why, after all, should we have considered Mike Mussina’s tractors any safer than a basketball game? (Mad Men devotees will understand the reference). Almost all of us engage in some sort of regular physical activity that might be considered dangerous; any athletic activity done improperly can cause injury. Isn’t this, after all, why we’re always taught to warm up and stretch before running a mile or going full-bore in any sort of game? Had Chamberlain been injured in a skydiving or bungee jumping incident the line between responsible and not would probably seem a little less blurry, but this isn’t what Chamberlain (or indeed most any baseball player who injures himself off of the field) did.

Freak injuries will happen. There have been stories told about baseball players throwing their backs out or straining an oblique from a sneeze, or even Joel Zumaya’s Guitar Hero escapade. You can’t ban baseball players from sneezing or from playing video games, and if you were to ban baseball players from ever spending time with their kids during the season, the talent pool would rival the Atacama Desert. Can a team advise players of off-field activities that might involve unnecessary risks? Sure, but depending on one’s definition, the list can get too long, too fast. At any rate, baseball players are not children (okay, so some are technically still adolescents, but there’s a giant gap between the maturity level at nine and then at 19), and treating them as such would seem counter-productive.

The line, then, would seem to be drawn at common sense. It’s common knowledge that skydiving is risky and video games generally are not; it would likewise seem logical that a baseball player’s obligation to do his best to remain healthy and uninjured would keep him from playing football, though not golf. Most people who jump on a trampoline, whether an at-home one or at a gym, don’t get hurt, and if they do it’s not serious. The risk that someone might get seriously hurt is not unknown, but whether it was a risk that should have been foreseen will vary on who is asked.

So in this case, as in others, the picture might remain blurry. Off the field other players have done worse to their bodies, sometimes in ways that are not legal, let alone ill-advised, and suffered fewer consequences. This is, of course, an inherent unfairness, but as long as humans remain fallible, the unfairness will probably remain. No person, let alone a baseball player, deserves a catastrophic injury when attempting to be a good parent to one’s child. Even if you take the viewpoint that Chamberlain committed a baseball crime, the punishment does not fit.