When More Is Less On The Mound
Posted by Steve Lombardi on September 3, 2007
Using Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index Team Pitching Gamelog Finder, and setting it for "For 2007, Playing in the AL, (requiring pitchers>=4), sorted by greatest number of games matching selected criteria in a game" tells us how many times each team in the A.L., to date, has used 4+ pitchers in a game this season. Here's the list:
Tm Year Games Link to Individual Games
+---+----+-----+-------------------------+
NYY 2007 91 Ind. Games
BAL 2007 90 Ind. Games
TBD 2007 88 Ind. Games
TEX 2007 81 Ind. Games
CHW 2007 80 Ind. Games
BOS 2007 80 Ind. Games
SEA 2007 77 Ind. Games
MIN 2007 77 Ind. Games
OAK 2007 76 Ind. Games
DET 2007 73 Ind. Games
TOR 2007 70 Ind. Games
KCR 2007 69 Ind. Games
CLE 2007 66 Ind. Games
LAA 2007 62 Ind. Games
It's interesting to see the Yankees as the "worst" in the league here - just ahead of the Orioles and the Devil Rays. It's probably a few things that leads to high numbers in this list: Ineffective starters and relievers and/or a manager with a quick hook.
To date, the Yankees have gone 46-45 in those 91 games where they used 4 pitchers or more. New York's overall ERA in those 91 games is 5.48. But, it's 3.57 in the games that they've won and it's 7.51 in the games that they've lost.
Just for the heck of it, I used Play Index to run this Pitching Game Finder query: "For 2007, Playing for NYY, Team Lost, (requiring ER>=5 and pitchers>=4), sorted by greatest number of games matching selected criteria in a game" and it gave me 38 games where the Yankees lost, used 4 pitchers or more, and allowed 5 ER or more.
The results show that this happened 12 times in April, 7 times in May, 5 times in June, 5 times in July, and 9 times in August. Those 19 times before June 1st tell the story as to why the Yankees got off to a 22-29 start this season: Too many games where the pitching staff did not get the job done.