Yanks Didn't Maximize Aceves or Hughes

Remember way back in June?  The air was getting warm, the Yankees were getting a bit warmer, and suddenly the bullpen seemed to right itself. Part of the reason the bullpen began to solidify was the emergence of Phil Hughes. There was a second part to that equation: Alfredo Aceves. Aceves stormed through June with a 1.32 ERA, striking out 10 and walking 4 over 13.2 innings.  It was a good month for Ace. Suddenly, the Yankees had their ironclad bullpen.  Hughes and Aceves in the 7th and 8th, Rivera in the 9th, ballgame over. Except it didn't really work out that way.  The Yankees never carried a long reliever, even though Wang was combustible the first month and Joba was supposed to be on a short leash.  Aceves began the season in Scranton as a starter, so naturally he could eat up some of those long relief innings.  Right? It hasn't been that consistent.  Aceves has pitched in 38 games for a total of 75 innings.  A little short division will tell you that's an average of 2 innings per appearance, not quite the average of a long reliever. Broken down even further, here is Aceves number of appearances for four different innings totals:

Innings Pitched	# of Appearances
0 - .2	5
1 - 1.2	11
2 - 2.2	13
3 - 4.1	9

Does that look like the breakdown of a long reliever?  Not particularly.  It doesn't look like the breakdown of a short reliever, either.  Ace has 16 appearances of less than 2 innings.  He has 22 appearances of 2 innings or more. This doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me.  As I said earlier, Aceves started the season in AAA, where he started four games and essentially averaged 6 innings a game (23.2 IP).  Upon arriving at the big club, Aceves made his first appearance on May 4th, pitching 4.1 innings.  His usage in May:

Date	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA
4-May	4.1	4	2	2	2	7	4.15
13-May	2	1	0	0	0	1	2.84
16-May	1	0	0	0	0	0	2.45
17-May	1	0	0	0	0	1	2.16
20-May	2	2	0	0	0	2	1.74
21-May	3.1	3	0	0	1	1	1.32
25-May	1	1	1	1	0	1	1.84
26-May	2	4	3	3	0	2	3.24
29-May	3	1	0	0	1	3	2.75

Maybe I'm a little too sensitive to the notion that a pitcher's arm needs to be handled in a different manner than you would use a position player.  Looking at that breakdown of Aceves first month alone, I think the back and forth of long outings versus short outings has to, at the very least, diminish Aceves ability to handle a longer relief role.  I don't think one can equate the number of innings thrown over a five day period to what a starter would throw per appearance. Remove May from our previous chart and the spread of Ace's innings from June until now gets a little narrower:

Innings Pitched	# of Appearances
0 - .2	5
1 - 1.2	8
2 - 2.2	10
3 - 4.1	6

From the beginning of June, Ace has 13 appearances of less than 2 innings.  He has 16 appearances of 2 innings or more. Let's look at August through now:

Date	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA
5-Aug	2	1	1	1	0	3	3.58
7-Aug	3	1	0	0	1	3	3.38
10-Aug	4	2	0	0	0	1	3.14
16-Aug	1.2	4	4	4	0	2	3.66
19-Aug	2.1	4	2	2	0	2	3.82
22-Aug	2	3	3	3	0	2	4.12
27-Aug	1	0	0	0	0	1	4.06
30-Aug	3	2	0	0	0	1	3.88
3-Sep	2.1	2	2	1	0	3	3.88
9-Sep	3	0	0	0	1	3	3.72
14-Sep	2.1	2	1	1	2	2	3.72

Aceves has been Joba's caddy for a bit, which has raised his innings per appearance significantly.  While he has averaged just under 2 IP per appearance for the season, from August through September, he's been averaging somewhere between 2.1 and 2.2 innings. Looking at our first chart on last time, now that we've removed May, September and August, we see what Aceves threw in the middle months of June and July:

Innings Pitched	# of Appearances
0 - .2	5
1 - 1.2	6
2 - 2.2	5
3 - 4.1	3

Now he

definitely

doesn't look like a long reliever as his shorter outings clearly outnumber his longer outings 11 - 8. So the majority of Aceves' workload has been May and August/September:

	Games	Innings	Pitches	IP/G	P/G
May	9	19.2	275	2.18	30.56
June	9	13.2	220	1.47	24.44
July	9	15	238	1.66	26.44
August	8	19	261	2	32.63
September	3	7.2	130	2.4	43.33

It's interesting how his appearances per month have been basically the same, yet for such small samples, his averages have ranged a bit.  While these differences in numbers from month to month may not seem like much, it's important to keep in mind that these are averages.  For instance, in the month of May, Aceves had an appearance where he threw 70 pitches.  Eight days later, he threw 10 pitches.  Then 11 the day after that.  If you sit down and look at his game log for 2009, his usage has fluctuated wildly at times, never mind the up and down change in roles he has had from month to month.*

* The other item of note is that Aceves' last appearance in September was on September 14th.  The last game as of this writing was September 21st, meaning Aceves hasn't pitched in a week.

What's the point of all this? Aceves has been a starting pitcher for most of his short professional career.  The Yankees moved him to the bullpen this year for much of the same reasons they moved Hughes: he was a strong arm in AAA that had value for them on the major league level. In a few outings last fall, Aceves showed good promise as a starting pitcher in the majors, going 1-0 over four starts with a 2.47 ERA.  This season, despite being bounced around, he's posted a 1.027 WHIP (walks + hits per inning). Aceves has had success as a starter and the Yankees have made little attempt to prepare him for that role.  With both Aceves and Hughes in the bullpen, the Yankees have trotted out Chad Gaudin and Sergio Mitre for the last two months, hoping that one of them would stick as a fifth starter. The problem is, five starters are never enough.  Before the season, the Yankees broke camp with very good starter depth.  The major league rotation had Sabathia, Burnett, Pettitte, Wang, and Joba.  In the minors, the Yankees had Aceves, Hughes, and Ian Kennedy to fall back on, plus Mitre rehabbing until the summer. Things changed quickly.  In the midst of the Wang meltdown, Aceves was converted to a reliever.  Toward the end of the Wang meltdown, Hughes was converted to a reliever.  And on May 9th, Ian Kennedy discovered he had an aneurysm and was lost for most of the season. Within a two month span, the Yankees had either re-purposed or lost to injury four of the nine starters on their depth chart, all the while knowing that Joba Chamberlain needed to be handled with kid gloves.  The Yankees had whittled their starters down from 9 to 5, with the only late addition being Chad Gaudin. Fast forward to September, where Joba Chamberlain appears to have hit a wall and possibly should be shutdown for the season.  Andy Pettitte had to push back a start due to shoulder fatigue and the Yankees can't hit squat.  What looked like an easy walk into October is slowing giving Yankee fans the Fear as a big series with the Red Sox approaches this weekend.  Sergio Mitre and Chad Gaudin continue to get starts and innings despite mediocre results while the Yankees try to figure out whether Joba can be a fourth starter in the playoffs. If not Joba, then who? Would you rather see Phil Hughes or Sergio Mitre?  Would you rather see Chad Gaudin or Alfredo Aceves? I think the answer to both of those questions is obvious. It is one thing for a team to lose their starter depth due to injuries.  In the case of Chien-Ming Wang and Ian Kennedy, that is certainly what happened.  The problem is, while Kennedy went down and Wang proved to be ineffective, the Yankees knowingly dismantled the rest of their depth.  Brian Cashman must have known in May and June that come the trading deadline, he wouldn't give up any major pieces of his farm system to create more starter depth or, at the very least, pickup a fifth starter who could handle some innings.  The Yankees were 62-41 at the deadline, only 1.5 games up on the Red Sox.  They needed

something.

Brian Cashman and Joe Girardi have had a few weeks to prepare someone like Alfredo Aceves to step into the rotation if needed come late September.  The rosters expanded to 40 on September 1st and the bullpen has been a bit more populated, relieving some of the overall workload. Instead, they've let Aceves go for a week without pitching. Now, if the Yankees need a fourth starter in the playoffs, regardless of whether Joba is pitching well or not, he's going to make that start because there is no one else available.  It could have been Phil Hughes.  It could have been Alfredo Aceves. Apparently, the Yankees don't believe in starting pitching depth anymore.