Congratulations to the New York Yankees – the World Champions of the 2009 season.

They earned it. They were the best team in baseball, and it wasn’t particularly close. The Phillies are a good team that ran into a great team. The better team won.

Some Game Six thoughts:

1. Obviously, the big topic of discussion will be Charlie Manuel’s decision to stick with Pedro Martinez in the third inning. He was obviously pitching without his best stuff early in the game, though his velocity had picked up a little bit in the third. However, at best, he’s an average pitcher, and was already halfway through the line-up for the second time. He wasn’t going to last very long, regardless of the outcome of that inning.

However, with the bases loaded, a LH hitter coming up, and an LHP ready in the bullpen, Manuel stuck with Pedro. JA Happ isn’t an all-star or anything, but he’s clearly the better option to get Matsui out in that situation and keep the game within a single run. That was absolutely a critical, game-turning at-bat (the LI was 2.56), and Manuel chose to go with an inferior match-up in order to get an extra inning out of Martinez.

That’s just bad managing, but it continued the trend that Manuel established early. He over-trusted Pedro’s personality, choosing to give him two starts in a six game series when he was the Phillies’ fourth or fifth best starting pitcher. You could argue that he over-trusted Brad Lidge as well. Manuel went with two guys who had been great previously but were currently less than their former selves, and he got burned.

2. Perhaps the more head scratching move, however, was to go to Chad Durbin in the 5th inning. Chad Durbin is terrible. He’s essentially a replacement level reliever, and he had no business on the mound in a lose-and-your-season-is-over ballgame. Worse, he was sent to the mound to face the top of the Yankee order. In the middle of July, it wouldn’t be a good idea to send Chad Durbin to the mound to face Jeter, Rodriguez, and Teixeira. In the World Series, it’s malpractice.

3. If that was Hideki Matsui’s final game as a Yankee, that’s going down as one of the best finishes to a career in the history of the game. Hats off, Godzilla – you’ll be telling your grandkids about this one a few hundred times.

4. Mariano Rivera is incredible. I know he’s 40, but he’s better now than he’s ever been. When we talk about how fungible relief pitchers are, we mean all of them except for him. He’s amazing.

According to Mark Topkin, the Rays are close to completing a trade of Akinori Iwamura to an unnamed team. A more recent report from Dejan Kovacevic pegs the Pittsburgh Pirates as the potential partner. This post isn’t an analysis of that trade, because the details aren’t yet known and the topic is low-hanging fruit for RJ anyway.

I wanted to use the rumor to discuss a popular reaction to that kind of trade, however. The Pirates aren’t contenders in 2010, and will readily admit that they’re still in full on rebuilding mode. In general, whenever a team in that situation makes a move for an older player to fill a big league roster spot, there’s a swath of fans who claim that the team is wasting resources. This argument actually was used in favor of the Pirates decision to deal Nyjer Morgan and Nate McLouth this summer – they downgraded the roster but got younger in the process, and the wins that were lost by subtracting McLouth and Morgan were written off as unimportant.

I think this argument takes a kernel of truth – the varying marginal value of a win – to an extreme that doesn’t reflect reality. There is certainly less value in a win that takes you from a 69 to 70 win team than an 89 to 90 win team, but the value of the 70th win is not zero. It may have no real value from the perspective of playoff odds in the next season, but for the long term health of the franchise, those wins that take you from laughingstock to mediocre are still important, especially as they relate to revenue.

While rebuilding teams have to look towards the future, they also have to avoid the death spiral that can occur when a small revenue team fails to put a good product on the field, drives away the fan base, and in the process lowers future revenues. There is a financial cost to losing that is magnified when teams are uniformly awful, and that cost can inhibit a team’s growth potential in the long run. Developing a fan base is in many ways like developing a farm system – it requires a present term investment that theoretically returns greater future value.

Aki Iwamura is not going to lead the Pirates to the playoffs, but he’s also a potentially useful player who will improve the 2009 club without harming the development of any significant pieces and likely came at a low cost to the organization. There is value in these kinds of transactions, even for teams that aren’t going to be winners next year. Just because a team won’t be contending in 2010 doesn’t mean they should avoid investing in the 2010 product.

The key is to be smart about what kinds of investments you make. Russ Branyan’s signing by the Mariners last year is a perfect example of the kind of short-term, low-cost, quality acquisition that rebuilding teams should be looking to make. What the Royals did in throwing money at Kyle Farnsworth, Mike Jacobs, and Willie Bloomquist is an example of this kind of thinking gone badly wrong. The Pirates, and teams in a similar situation, should exploit the opportunities to find value in order to put a decent team on the field and develop revenue streams that will support a future winner. Sometimes, that value will come in the form of a thirty-something nearing the end of his career, but the value they can add in the short term can make that kind of player a better choice for a rebuilding team than giving an inferior young player playing time in the name of rebuilding.

Last night, A.J. Burnett was a mess. He couldn’t command his fastball or his curve, continually getting himself into counts where he had to throw a strike, and the Phillies took advantage. He gave up six runs in two innings and dug the Yankees a hole that they couldn’t climb out of. He was also pitching on three days rest for the first time all season.

For many people, those two facts represent a causal relationship. Burnett struggled badly while going on short rest, so therefore, short rest caused the bad pitching. Unfortunately, life is never that simple.

The usual critique against bringing a pitcher back on short rest is that his stuff won’t be as crisp as it usually is. Burnett, however, was throwing his regular gas last night. His fastball averaged 94.2 MPH this season, and he sat at 93.8 MPH in his brilliant game two outing. Last night, his fastball averaged 94.5 MPH. Same deal with his curveball – 82.0 MPH on the season, 82.3 MPH last night.

In terms of velocity, Burnett had his usual arsenal. His fastball still had sink, and his curveball still had bite. The problem was that he couldn’t throw them for strikes. Here’s the strikezone plot, courtesy of Brooks Baseball:

There are 16 magenta colored squares on that plot representing Burnett’s curveball. Eight of them aren’t even close, and only four of them were in the strike zone. It doesn’t matter how much movement you have when you miss the plate by that much. Hitters aren’t going to swing, you’re going to fall behind in the count, and all that’s left to do is groove a fastball. Command, not a lack of stuff, was Burnett’s undoing.

Of course, there’s the possibility that Burnett’s inability to throw strikes was due in part to his altered schedule. However, that’s something we simply can’t know. Burnett is not exactly the model of consistency. In five different starts during the regular season, he gave up six or more runs. On April 19th, he walked seven batters, and he issued six free passes on two other occasions. And, of course, he got torched in the first inning by the Angels in the ALCS less than two weeks ago. He did all of that on regular four day rest. Consistent command of his pitches is never something Burnett has had, and he probably never will. He’s a guy with great stuff who doesn’t always pitch up to the level of his natural abilities.

How much did the loss of one rest day affect Burnett? We don’t have any idea. Historically, he’s performed well on three days of rest, and his stuff was as good as ever last night. While Burnett did pitch poorly last night, and he was pitching on short rest, we simply cannot conclude that the latter was the cause of the former. It may have been, and probably was, some kind of factor. How much of an effect it had, we simply cannot know.

Several things stood out to me about last night’s game, so I’ll touch on them each briefly with the patented notes post.

1. I’ll give Charlie Manuel this – the man has cojones the size of the Liberty Bell. No matter how many times he had to watch Brad Lidge melt down on the mound this year, he remained convinced of his abilities to get critical outs in a high leverage situation. It doesn’t get much higher leverage than last night’s ninth inning, and Manuel put his trust in Lidge again. Lidge was one strike away from justifying Manuel’s confidence before it all fell apart. As bad as he’s been this year, I’m not sure the Phillies had a better option for that spot, which is one reason why the Yankees are planning a parade right now.

2. If there was one glaring lesson from last night’s game, it was how quickly a dominating pitcher can get humbled. Joba Chamberlain looked like he was at the top of his game, blowing away Jayson Werth and Raul Ibanez with 97 MPH fastballs. After getting ahead of Pedro Feliz with two swinging strikes, Phillies hitters had missed on the six of seven swings they had taken against Chamberlain that inning. And then Feliz hit one out of the park to tie the game.

Fast forward to the ninth inning, and Lidge had no problems dispatching Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter. All three strikes to The Captain were of the swing-and-miss variety, as Lidge showed the stuff that caused Manuel to still believe in his closer. And then, after getting to within one pitch of ending the inning, he allowed the next four guys to reach base and lost the game.

Forget hindsight – at the moment of their failure, both Chamberlain and Lidge looked great. There was nothing to suggest that a problem was lurking. They were throwing the hell out of the ball, and then they got hit. Trying to predict the future is really hard.

3. Joe Girardi has made a lot of small mistakes in the playoffs, but he got one thing right that dwarfed all of those – the decision to use a three man rotation has given the Yankees a huge advantage. Just like in the ALCS, 84 percent of the innings thrown by Yankee pitchers have been handled by CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera. Eighty-four percent. Expect the trend to continue tonight – Girardi knows who his horses are and he’s planning on riding them to a World Series title.

This afternoon, I talked about the reasons why Derek Jeter laying down a bunt in the seventh inning was a good idea (until there were two strikes, anyway). One of the common responses to the support of the bunt in that situation is that Jeter should have been swinging away because, to paraphrase the argument, Chan Ho Park was pitching and Chan Ho Park stinks.

I’m sorry, but this is one of those cases where I just have to scratch my head and wonder how reputations can gain such traction when they are so remarkably wrong. The idea that Park is a bad pitcher, especially out of the bullpen, is downright crazy.

Over the last two years, Park has thrown 179 innings with a FIP of 3.90, good for a value of +1.8 wins. He’s done it by racking up 152 strikeouts while also posting an above average groundball rate, which is a classic recipe for success. Just based on that performance, we’d have to conclude that he’s something like a league average pitcher.

However, those numbers don’t reflect the actual level of Park’s effectiveness as a reliever. They also include his failures in the rotation, where he was unable to sustain his velocity and got pounded as a result. When moved back to the bullpen, his stuff improved by leaps and bounds, as you can see in his velocity chart below.

Park’s FIP as a relief pitcher this year? 2.10.

Now, a good chunk of that absurdly low mark is a 0.0% HR/FB rate that isn’t his actual talent level, but even when you adjust for that, he was still a lights out reliever this year, running a 3.25 K/BB rate and holding opposing hitters to a .231/.296/.280 line.

Additionally, Park is a right-handed pitcher with a significant platoon differential established over his entire career. RHBs have hit him at a .227/.311/.355 mark over his career, compared to .271/.368/.447 for LHBs. Jeter, being a right-handed hitter, was up against a right-handed relief pitcher who performs significantly better against same handed batters.

The idea that Jeter should have been swinging away because Chan Ho park was on the mound and a big rally was likely is the opposite of the truth. In reality, he’s a very good relief pitcher with the platoon advantage, and the match-up wasn’t likely to end well for Jeter.

Over the last 10 years or so, one of the truisms that has been associated with statistical analysis is that bunting is bad. And it’s mostly true – a lot of sacrifice bunting is unproductive and wasteful, and teams would be be better off letting their hitters swing away rather than giving up outs to try to increase their odds of scoring one run. However, as MGL noted in War And Peace his post the other day, laying one down is a correct play more often than a lot of us will admit.

So, with that said, let’s talk about Derek Jeter‘s decision to try to move the runners over in the 8th inning last night. The Yankees had just taken a two run lead on Jorge Posada’s single to center, which put runners at first and second with nobody out. At that point, the average win expectancy for a major league club is 92.0 percent. For the Yankees, with Mariano Rivera ready to pitch the 8th and 9th inning, it was almost certainly higher than that.

Rivera, as everyone knows, is not an average closer. He’s probably the best relief pitcher of all time, and he’s in the conversation for greatest postseason pitcher in the history of the game as well. In 85 playoff games, he’s thrown 130 innings and has an ERA of 0.76. He’s given up more than one run in exactly two of those appearances, and in one of them, the Yankees had a four run lead and won anyway.

Every other appearance he’s ever made in the postseason, it’s been zero or one run allowed. So, with a two run lead and Rivera ready, the Yankees were already sitting pretty. Getting one more run would have pushed the average win expectancy to 96 percent, and again, the Yankees real odds would have been even higher than that, thanks to their robo-closer.

Jeter successfully laying down a bunt in the 8th inning would have increased the Yankees odds of scoring one more run from 61.8 percent to 68.9 percent. Moving the runners over would have added seven percent to the odds of Melky Cabrera scoring – that’s a real benefit. The cost of the sacrifice bunt is in the reduced chance of a multi-run inning, but in that situation, there really wasn’t a tangible difference between a three run lead and a 10 run lead. Those additional runs that could have scored in a big rally would have been essentially worthless.

The first two Jeter bunt attempts will be criticized by members of the statistical community as part of the reflexive don’t-bunt-ever strategy that has gained too much popularity, but they were the right play. The two-strike bunt attempt really was a bad idea (the additional cost of a foul turning into an out reduces the odds enough to make swinging away more likely to produce a single run, which was the original goal), but the first two stabs at it, Jeter was making the right play.

Playing for one run can be the right move, especially when you have Mariano Rivera ready to come into the game.

By the way, since I’ve been so hard on Girardi in the playoffs, let me just say that using Rivera for the six out save was absolutely the right call, and an important one to get right. Kudos to him for not letting an inferior reliever start the inning.

Someone warn PETA – a dead horse is about to get kicked again. That horse, of course, is Joe Girardi and his never ending ability to put a less than ideal Yankee team on the field in critical situations.

If you haven’t heard, tonight’s Yankee line-up features both Jerry Hairston Jr playing right field in lieu of Nick Swisher and Jose Molina catching instead of Jorge Posada. Now, ordinarily, this would just be a bad move, an overreaction to last night’s poor offensive showing against a great pitcher. But, given the match-ups, this is borderline malpractice.

The Phillies are sending Pedro Martinez to the hill tonight. Pedro, as you probably know, is right-handed. Also right-handed? Hairston and Molina. You know who has the ability to hit from the left hand side? Posada and Swisher. If you’re going to put Hairston in for Swisher, you essentially have to do it against an LHP, where the disparity in talent is minimized. If only a LHP like Cole Hamels was starting game three on Saturday. Oh, wait, he is.

Against a lefty, at least the two sub-par reserves have the platoon advantage. Putting Hairston in for Swisher against a right-hander is just nutty.

The Molina thing perhaps shouldn’t be as surprising, since A.J. Burnett takes the hill for New York tonight. Girardi has tied those two together due to an irresponsible reliance on catcher ERA – if ever there was a stat that showed the misdiagnoses of correlation and causation, this is it – even as Burnett got bombed with Molina behind the plate in the first inning of his last start. However, Joe thinks that the comfort of his starting pitcher is more important than having a good hitter in the line-up.

The problem, however, is that the Yankees took Francisco Cervelli off the playoff roster before the World Series began. Now, New York is only carrying two catchers, taking away the safety net that allowed Girardi to pinch hit Posada early in previous games that Molina began. If he does that again tonight, he’s essentially gambling that Posada will not get hurt after he enters the game, because with Molina already out of the game, there’s no viable replacement for Posada at that point.

Regradless of whether he takes that risk or not, the cost of starting Molina is higher without Cervelli on the roster. Girardi had to know he was going to do this in game two, so then swapping out Cervelli for Brian Bruney doesn’t really make much sense. Of course, that just makes this fit in with the rest of Girardi’s postseason maneuvers.

The Yankees are still likely to win tonight. But man, their manager seems intent on tying their hands behind their back. You don’t get points for degree of difficulty, Joe – just put your best team on the field and get out of the way.

Regardless of your rooting interests last night, you had to be impressed by the complete domination of Cliff Lee. The Yankees have a great offense, but he made them look foolish all night, keeping all-star hitters off-balance with a mix of pitches that don’t look like they should be that hard to hit. He set the tone from the first hitter of the game, striking Derek Jeter out with this three pitch sequence:

Fastball, 91 MPH, foul
Curveball, 75 MPH, foul
Cutter, 85 MPH, strikeout

This was just a clinic on how to pitch. He changed speeds, eye level, and movement, finally putting Jeter away on a pitch up in the zone that, on it’s own, is pretty hittable. You generally don’t want to throw 85 MPH at the top of the strike zone, but Lee had set that pitch up perfectly with his first two offerings, and got a good contact hitter to swing right through it.

He had everything working last night, including a nasty curveball that Fox never tired of talking about. But for me, it was Lee’s change-up that was his true out pitch last night, and the reason he was able to shut down a line-up with some really good right-handed hitters. He threw 21 of them on the evening, 18 of which went for strikes, including five swinging strikes where the opposing hitter was just badly fooled. Actually, let’s just look at all of those change-ups.

1st inning, Mark Teixeira, ball.
2nd inning, Jorge Posada, foul.
2nd inning, Hideki Matsui, swing and a miss.
2nd inning, Robinson Cano, flyout.
3rd inning, Nick Swisher, swing and a miss.
3rd inning, Melky Cabrera, called strike
3rd inning, Johnny Damon, called strike.
4th inning, Mark Teixeira, called strike.
4th inning, Alex Rodriguez, swing and a miss.
4th inning, Alex Rodriguez, swing and a miss.
5th inning, Nick Swisher, ball.
5th inning, Nick Swisher, flyout.
6th inning, Melky Cabrera, flyout.
6th inning, Derek Jeter, ball.
7th inning, Jorge Posada, groundout.
8th inning, Nick Swisher, called strike.
8th inning, Nick Swisher, called strike.
9th inning, Mark Teixeira, groundout.
9th inning, Alex Rodriguez, swing and a miss.
9th inning, Jorge Posada, called strike
9th inning, Jorge Posada, foul.

The final total: three balls, five swinging strikes, six called strikes, two foul, five in play outs. Lee’s change-up was almost perfect. He used it against the power hitting Yankee right-handers, but also mixed it in to lefties effectively as well.

The “spike” curveball might have been the more interesting story for Fox to focus on, but the change-up was what led Lee to pitch one of the best games in World Series history.

For fans of the Phillies and Yankees, this is an exciting week. For fans of the game in general, this could be a lot of fun. But for a pretty significant group of fans, they really only care about their team, and anything that does not involve their team isn’t particularly interesting. For those people, the playoffs can’t end soon enough, so that their team can go about making trades and free agent signings and the like. Right now, they’ve got nothing.

So, I have a proposal. Since Fox wants to drag out the playoffs with interminable off-days that serve no purpose to the fans, let’s create something for the fans of the other 28 teams to enjoy during the end of October. And what do fans enjoy more than hot stove roster mongering? Thinking up ways to get rid of the one guy on the roster they hate more than anyone else.

The solution is obvious – the 28 teams that don’t qualify for the World Series send their General Manager to a large conference room, not unlike what the NFL uses for the draft. Each GM brings one contract, places it in a pile, and prepares for Bad Contract White Elephant.

You’ve all participated in some kind of White Elephant Christmas exchange, I’d imagine. This would be just like that, only the “gifts” would be albatross contracts. Alex Anthropolous would bring Vernon Wells‘ commitment. Brian Sabean would bring Barry Zito’s deal. Jim Hendry would show up with the Alfonso Soriano contract. You get the idea.

Can you imagine how much fun it would be watching Billy Beane reach into a stack of contracts praying to come away with one of the more innocuous deals (Pat Burrell?), only to end up pulling a budget buster like Todd Helton, and then spending the next several hours trying to convince Josh Byrnes to steal Helton in order to not risk getting stuck with Wells, Soriano, or Zito?

Watching the strategy play out would be amazing. Does Dave Dombrowski dump the $10 million he owes Dontrelle Willis that will return him no value or the $18 million he owes Magglio Ordonez that will return him some value? If you have the opportunity to swap Jose Guillen for Carlos Lee, do you take on the extra money in order to get a player who can actually help your team, or do you reach into the stack and hope to come away with something better than either? What GM actually puts a good player in the pot just because he’s not particularly good at judging player value? (Okay, this would probably be Dayton Moore).

Seriously, who wouldn’t watch this? Bad Contract White Elephant would be a ratings bonanza. They could even set it up where all the ad revenue generated through the television rights would be applied directly to the bad contracts themselves, giving baseball a way to get revenue from guys who are generally despised by their fan base.

Make it happen, Bud – this could be the single greatest innovation of your reign as commissioner.

It’s finally here. Baseball takes the stage with two worthy contenders for the title, as the defending champs match up with the best team in baseball. The Phillies and Yankees both deserve to be here, and hopefully, we’ll get our first really good series of the playoffs.

That said, there’s an ugly possibility lurking for those hoping for a seven game, knock-down, drag-out fight to the finish – this Yankees team is capable of making this a very quick knockout.

The Phillies are a good offensive team, with some terrific hitters and a deep lineup. But the disparity in run production is still significant. The Phillies posted a .340 wOBA as a team, good for fifth best in baseball. That translates to +62 runs above average as a team, the best mark of any club in the National League. They are a good group of hitters.

The Yankees posted a .366 wOBA, which translates into a staggering +198 runs above average. The Red Sox were the only team within 100 runs of the Yankees in wRAA, checking in at +122. New York was 110 runs ahead of the third best offense in baseball, by linear weights. The 26 point gap between the Yankees and Phillies in wOBA is essentially equal to the gap between the Phillies and the Astros.

The disparity won’t be quite that dramatic in the head to head match-up due to the same rules being applied to both teams in regards to the DH, but that just diminishes the difference from ridiculous to huge. As good as the Phillies lineup is, the Yankees are just better.

Philly will have to make up that gap with their run prevention, but that’s easier said than done. The biggest flaw on the Yankee team is the back end of their rotation, which is the part of the roster most marginalized in a playoff series. The Yankees managed to hand 83 percent of their ALCS innings to CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera, while leaving just 17 percent for everyone else. They probably won’t be able to repeat that mark in the World Series, but Philadelphia hitters should still expect to see that quartet 75 percent of the time.

The one real area where the Phillies have a distinct advantage is on defense. Their defenders will bail their pitchers out of jams, while Yankee hurlers are left to do that on their own. But that alone won’t be enough to overcome the advantages New York has – the Phillies are just going to have to get some guys to play over their heads.

In a short series, anything can happen. Even with the talent advantage on the Yankee side of things, the Phillies still have something like a 40 percent chance to win the series. But as much as I’m hoping for a classic series with seven close games, there remains a distinct possibility that the Yankees could just blow the Phillies out of the water. They’re that good.