Pitching Woes in Bronx Are Not What They Seem

Here is a scenario: A group dedicated to the restoration of Napoleonic rule in France has decided that the best way to advance its goals is to study pitcher injuries, and so its members abduct Chien-Ming Wang, Mike Mussina, and Carl Pavano — the Yankees pitchers whose injuries have occasioned such grief in the city this month. Because the kidnappers are intelligent and stealthy, the Yankees are unable to find them and have to go with whichever hurlers they can scare up — but because the kidnappers are cruel, they threaten never to return the pitchers to New York unless the Yankees go through the whole season only with pitchers already in their system. Do the Yanks make the playoffs?

It's impossible to say, but it's not all that unlikely. Wang and Mussina are fine pitchers whom the Yankees are counting on this year, but they're not Johan Santana and Roy Halladay, and the team has some assets other than its pitchers. A little math will tell the tale.

I don't know what you were expecting from the three injured right-handers this year, but I had Wang down for 190 innings and a 4.25 ERA, Mussina for 175 innings and a 4.25 ERA, and Pavano for an epithelium strain and losing his job to Phil Hughes after a month or two, which we can call 100 innings with a 5.00 ERA for our purposes. These seem like reasonable estimates. One can certainly imagine all of them doing better, but also one can imagine all three doing worse. Certainly, counting on them to be much better would have been foolish, and there's no reason to think the Yankees were doing so.

Collectively, then, the three were, before Wang was injured, expected to pitch something close to 465 innings with a 4.43 ERA. This is perfectly fine and the sort of pitching that would help the Yankees win yet another division title.

It isn't, though, irreplaceable. Let's return to our hypothetical and say that the Yankees buckle to the Napoleonic threat. They give over those 465 innings to Hughes, Chase Wright, Darrell Rasner, and whatever other green kids and fringe minor league veterans are hanging around, and they all spit the bit. They run up a collective 5.50 ERA, which is about what a cannon fodder pitcher will do in the major leagues, 10% worse than what Randy Johnson did in a highly unimpressive 2006. The difference between this performance and what we could have reasonably expected from the abducted troika comes to 55 runs, or about six wins.

Given a fully healthy team in which everyone performs up to modest, reasonable expectations, the Yankees have a 100-win team. Bill Clinton was president the last time they won fewer than 95 games in a season. They can stand to lose six extra games without being knocked out of the pennant race. Let the Napoleonic fanatics do their worst and the Yankees are still close to the Red Sox. That, again, involves none of these pitchers coming back this year to contribute anything, and horrible injury replacements. In the real world, since we're talking about tweaked hamstrings and not transnational kidnappings, the first assumption is pretty silly, and since if they were to lose 60% of their rotation, the Yankees would actually be able to make trades or sign Roger Clemens, the second is at least as absurd.

Looked at this way, the problem with the injuries isn't that they're inherently insurmountable. In fact, assuming the Yankees are capable of rousting up starting pitchers at the level of the worst who hold major league jobs, all three pitchers could miss the whole season and it wouldn't have much more of an impact than Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter having off years. The problem, rather, is that they erase a bit of the margin of error the Yankees looked to enjoy in February. This sort of thing happens. Josh Beckett looks as if he may be enjoying the long-awaited season in which he emerges as a serious Cy Young candidate; that removes a bit of the margin of error, as does Hideki Matsui's injury. This is why they bother to play the season out.

The Yankees, though, retain overwhelming strengths, among them an incredible offense, some very strong relief pitching, an underrated defense, the resources to make a competitive offer for any pitcher who comes on the market, and some good pitching prospects. Wang, Mussina, and even Pavano, should they stay healthy, will be the best options the Yankees have, but they're not the only ones, and these three aren't the engine driving the train. The Yankees naturally want them back. But they can more than get on without them.

tmarchman@nysun.com