PeteAbe has an update on Chien-Ming Wang’s day down in Extended Spring Training. He threw 91 pitches (scheduled for 100), 70 for strikes (76.9%), striking out eleven and walking just one. Apparently he was sitting around 91 with his sinker. The numbers are nice, but we have no idea how his stuff actually looked. Updates to come as they roll in.
Wang to start in Extended Spring Training
Via Pete Caldera, Chien-Ming Wang will make his next start down in Tampa in Extended Spring Training. Assuming he starts on regular rest, he’ll make his EST appearance on Thursday, and that will be used to determine if he’ll make his next scheduled start for the big league team. That start would come next Tuesday in Detroit, and Phil Hughes lines up perfectly should Wang not be able to go.
Update (5:34pm): Kat O’Brien has more. Wang will throw 100 pitches in front of pitching coordinator Nardi Contreras and farm director Mark Newman on Thursday. Wang has totalled 73, 61 and 52 pitches in his three starts this year, so stretching him out to 100 is important.
Whither Chien-Ming Wang
From 2005-2008, Chien-Ming Wang, the Yanks’ Taiwanese right-handed sinker-ball specialist, was among the best pitchers in baseball. His 54 wins ranked him tied for 15th among all pitchers over that span, and his 3.79 ERA was good for 20th among pitchers with more than 500 IP since the start of 2005.
As the Yankees and their fans have come to learn, that success can all fall apart very, very quickly. Three starts and just six — six! — innings later, Wang finds himself atop another list, this one far more dubious. Of the 18 pitchers since 1954, to give up seven or more earned runs in three consecutive starts, Chien-Ming Wang’s totals are by far the worst of the lot.
Of the hurlers on that list, only Hayden Penn’s 27.00 ERA approaches Wang’s 34.50 mark, and none of the pitchers had managed to put together a WHIP of 4.83. We don’t however need those numbers to know that Wang has been bad. We can see it with our own eyes.
While we’ve used pitch f/x numbers to show that his pitches aren’t sinking and his release point is off, we don’t need these illuminating features to know what’s wrong with Chien-Ming Wang. He has raised his career ERA by over a quarter of a run to 4.08, and in a nutshell, his mechanics are completely out of whack. He’s not breaking his hands at the right point; he’s not lifting his leg enough; he’s not driving forward; and he’s not generating sink or speed because of it. Maybe he’s subconsciously afraid of putting too much pressure on his injured foot; maybe something else is wrong.
Those problems though are for the Yankees to fix. Unfortunately, they have only a few ways of doing so. Because the Yankees added Chien-Ming Wang to the 40-man roster in 2003 to protect him from the Rule V draft, he is out of options. While Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, two other top-flight starters who struggled, were sent down to hammer out their kinks, that option is closed to the Yanks and Wang.
The team could look to disable Wang for a little while. Maybe he’s actually injured or maybe he’s just “injured.” Either way, a 15-day rehab stint in Tampa could help the team isolate the problems.
For his part, Wang wants to keep working through games. Joe Girardi, however, hasn’t committed to starting Wang in Fenway Park on Friday. With an off-day on Thursday, the team could skip Wang in the rotation while working on the side to end his slump. Right now, my money is on that move.
Whatever the outcome, the Yankees have almost been expecting this day. They haven’t locked Wang up to a long-term deal. Instead, the team has opted for arbitration and a year-to-year approach with the 29-year-old. It’s almost as though they expected the sinker to stop sinking and the lack of out-pitch to haunt them.
While possible, the Yankees need Chien-Ming Wang to rediscover his groove. Of all the possible problems heading into 2009, this one was so remote and so unexpected. The Yankees expected their worm-killer to pick where he left off last year. That he hasn’t is cause for concern.
The Wang Elevation
(click graph for a larger view)
We’ve already taken in-depth looks at how much different Chien-Ming Wang’s stuff and release points are this year compared to last year, but I wanted to take a look something Wang usually excels at: keeping the ball down. The above graph shows what percentage of Wang’s sinkers (sinkers only since that’s his break and butter) ended up in five different sections of the strike zone (data from Pitch f/x). Pitches marked “High” and “Low” are out of the zone, while the actual strike zone is cut up into equal thirds dubbed “Up,” “Middle,” and “Down.” The thick black lines denote the top and bottom of the strike zone, if it wasn’t obvious enough.
It’s easy to see what made Wang so effective last year; 41.4% of his pitches were in the bottom third of the strike zone or lower, and 68.9% of his pitches were in the middle third or lower. This year though, it’s a much different story. Just 32.3% of his pitches are in the bottom third or lower, and only 57.5% were at or below the middle third of the strike zone. Even more troubling is that 28.4% of Wang’s pitches this year are in the upper third of the zone, and that means that those pitches are belt high based on how umpires call the game these days.
When you’ve lost movement and velocity from your sinker over the winter and groove more than a quarter of your pitchers into the hitter’s happy zone, you’re going to get pounded like Wang has. He’s allowed 29 base runners and 23 earned runs in just six (!!!) innings pitched this season. The dude’s rocking a 34.50 ERA and a 4.83 WHIP for chrissakes. It would take five consecutive complete game shutouts for the Wanger to lower his ERA to a respectable 4.06, and two consecutive perfect games to get his WHIP back around to his career average.
As Ben mentioned earlier, the Yanks have the option of skipping Wang’s next start on Thursday thanks to the off day, and letting him work on whatever he needs to during the ten day break. In fact, I’ll say that it’s more than likely that the Yanks will go that route. If Wang doesn’t get himself sorted out in that time, then they need to start looking for other solutions, especially since everyone claims he’s not hurt. It won’t stay April forever.
Instant Analysis: No release for Wang
Chien-Ming Wang just wrapped up his third start of the year, and for the second time this season, the Yanks’ erstwhile ace failed to make it to the third inning. Joe Girardi yanked him with one out in the second inning, and I would be surprised to see Wang make his next start.
On the season, Wang has now gone six innings and has allowed 23 earned runs. He has given up 23 hits and has just two strike outs on the season. His sinker is flat; his slider isn’t doing much; and his velocity is down to the low 90s.
For the Yankees, this turn of events is fairly shocking. Wang won 19 games in both 2006 and 2007 and had eight victories in 2008 before going down with a foot injury. The Yankees now look prescient in not locking Wang up to the a long-deal, but the fact remains that the team needs Wang to right his sinking ship this year.
We ask again then what is wrong with Chien-Ming Wang? We again turn to Wang’s release point.
This table highlights two of Wang’s better games and two of his worst games. The July 30, 2007 appearance was a one-hitter in Boston; the June 10, 2008 series was a ground ball fiesta in Oakland shortly before Wang went down last year; the two April starts are the two most recent debacles.
Basically, Wang’s arm slot is all over the place this year. In 2007, Wang was throwing from a lower slot, and he had far more sink and velocity on his pitches. Last year, something of a down year for Wang prior to the injury, he was throwing from a consistently higher slot than in 2007. This year, he’s throwing over his body. He’s coming up and out when he shouldn’t be.
The bigger question though — and the one I can’t really answer — is the why of it. Is his arm hurt? Is he putting pressure on his shoulder to compensate for another aching body part? Is he just struggling mightily to find his release point? Those are questions that Dave Eiland and the Yanks’ pitching staff have to answer.
For now, I’m not quite sure what to make of this. The Yankees cannot really in good conscience send Wang out there to face the Red Sox in Fenway next Friday, but can they risk tossing Phil Hughes into the fire for his first start of 2009? With an off-day on Thursday, the team could also just skip Wang’s start, keep Hughes at AAA and hope that a few weeks of work can solve the sinker-ball specialist’s problems. We’ll find out soon how the Yankees are going to proceed, but right now, things are not looking up for Chien-Ming Wang.
What’s wrong with Chien-Ming Wang?
The Yanks are buried 2.5 games back of the first place Blue Jays with only 155 games left to play (/hyperbole), but perhaps the biggest problem facing them right now is Chien-Ming Wang. The incumbent ace has been absolutely brutal in his two starts this year, allowing (gulp) 21 baserunners and 15 earned runs in just four and two-third innings pitched. That makes Sidney Ponson look like Roy frickin’ Halladay. The more troubling part is how Wang just doesn’t look like himself at all; his pitches are all up in the zone, his velocity is down, and his sinker isn’t sinking.
This might not be something that just started last week either. Wang had a 1.56 WHIP and a 6.00 ERA in his previous six starts before lisfrancing his foot last summer, suggesting that something might have been wrong going back as far as last year. Of course that ten month layoff doesn’t help any, but we can still look at the data to see if we can find anything. Wang did have a good but not great Spring Training (21.2 IP, 25 H, 16 R, 10 ER, 4 BB, 10 K, 3 HR), however no one in their right mind would use Spring Training stats to evaluate anything, especially for a player with a signficant track record.
Let’s compare three versions of Chien-Ming Wang using Pitch f/x:
- Pre-May 18th, 2008: This was the light’s out CMW last year, when he had a 2.90 ERA and a 1.17 WHIP through his first nine starts and 59 IP.
- Post-May 18th, 2008: Wang had his first of a series of clunkers on May 18th last year, which marks the point of that 6.00 ERA/1.56 WHIP era I mentioned earlier. I fail at labeling, but this version includes his May 18th start.
- 2009: This year’s pair of starts, i.e. the really, really crappy version of CMW.
I’m going to focus on Wang’s two main pitches in this analysis: his sinking fastball and slider. He’s also been known to throw changeups, splitters, and even the occasional curveball, but because he throws them so rarely it’s not worth the time and effort to take a deeper look at them. I’m going to start with the pitch trajectories as always, and to make life easier I gave fastballs and sliders their own individual graphs. Make sure you remember to click each graph for a larger, squinting at a computer screen has to be bad for your eyes.
Fun starts after the jump.
Breaking down Wang with Pitch f/x
Well, two games, two stinkers by the Yanks’ starting pitchers. It wasn’t what we all expected when the season started, but it is what it is. When I took a look at CC Sabathia’s start using Pitch f/x, we found that his velocity was fine but he struggled to find a consistent release point, likely causing his command issues. The data shows something much more interesting for Chien-Ming Wang, who threw 73 pitches on the night. Just three of those pitches were sliders, seven were changeups, and the remaining 63 were some form of fastball (either sinker or four-seamer).
Let’s start with the flight paths of the fastballs, his two main weapons on the night, to get them out of the way. I was too stupid to realized that not everyone had seen a Pitch f/x graph before Tuesday’s post, so I labeled these a bit more clearly. First up, bird’s eye view, and as always you click any graph for a larger view.
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