In just a few hours, Luis Severino is going to throw the first pitch of the American League wild-card game. Some relatively short amount of time after that, Liam Hendriks will take the mound. Severino is one of the better starting pitchers in either league. Hendriks is a reliever who, in the middle of this very season, was designated for assignment. As far as the first inning goes, it’s…not an equal matchup. Or it doesn’t feel like one, at least. Of course, there’s more to it than that.

As Jay Jaffe has already written today, the Yankees are using a starter, while the A’s are planning on bullpenning. Hendriks has gotten used to being an opener, but this is going to be a little different, because he won’t be followed by a “bulk guy.” It’s likely to be Oakland relievers all the way down. This is the concept someone always advocates every year around this time, for a winner-take-all, one-game playoff. It’s no way to manage a pitching staff every day of every week of every month. The A’s don’t have to worry about that tonight. All that matters is what’s right before them.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — David Cone, J.A. Happ, and Jake Petricka — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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David Cone, Former Cy Young Winner and Five-Time All Star

“I grew up gripping the baseball the same way. Right along the seams, on top of the baseball, was a two-seam fastball. I threw my slider the same way. All I would do was bring both fingers inside the seams a little bit, just to get some friction. I basically threw a two-seam slider my whole career. I’ve seen a few other pitchers who do it that way. Not many.

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This year’s AL Wild Card Game will be a battle of competing philosophies, at least when it comes to the choice of starting pitchers. On Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, the opposing managers announced their picks for Wednesday night’s game. The Yankees have decided to remain old-school, with manager Aaron Boone tabbing 24-year-old righty Luis Severino, an All-Star who despite second-half struggles finished fourth in the league in WAR (5.7) and in a virtual tie for fifth in FIP (2.95) — and one whose early exit in last year’s Wild Card Game pushed the Yankees into a bullpen-oriented approach anyway. As for the A’s, a club whose rotation has has lost staff ace Sean Manaea and five other starters to season-ending surgeries, manager Bob Melvin is going the new-school route, with 29-year-old righty Liam Hendriks as his opener — a first of sorts. In eight September starts, Hendriks threw a combined 8.2 innings.

Together, the choices offer something of a callback to a year ago. Heading into the AL Wild Card game, then-manager Joe Girardi was ambivalent about the possibility of saving Severino for a potential Division Series Game One and relying upon his wealth of dominant relievers to face the Twins. “You could do that but that’s not something you’ve done during the course of the season,” Girardi told reporters. “And we have some starters who are pretty qualified to make that start… If you start doing crazy things, things guys aren’t used to, then I’m just not comfortable doing it. You want to keep it as normal as possible.”

Despite Girardi’s reservations, it was clear that the Yankees were built for such a scenario thanks to general manager Brian Cashman’s July 19 (re)acquisition of David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle to add to a bullpen that already included Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances. “A veritable clown car of effective righties who can miss bats and take over before Twins batters get too familiar with Severino,” is how one wag put it.

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To date, Josh Bard’s managerial experience consists of a single game. In early September, he assumed that role while Aaron Boone was serving a one-game suspension. Don’t expect it to represent the end of his time in that capacity for a big-league team.

Currently in his first season as Boone’s bench coach with the New York Yankees, Bard is viewed by many as a future MLB manager. And for good reason. The 40-year-old former journeyman catcher has long been lauded for his interpersonal skills, and he’s been honing his analytics chops for years. Prior to joining the Yankees, the Texas Tech product spent five seasons in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, initially as a special assistant to the general manager. More recently, he served as the forward-thinking NL West club’s bullpen coach in 2016 and 2017.

Where will Bard be employed in the years to come and in what capacity? Multiple teams will be interviewing managerial candidates this offseason, and Bard’s name is certainly being bandied about in front offices. While he’s happy in New York, other opportunities surely await.

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Josh Bard: “My biggest role as bench coach is being a translator from the analytics group down to the dugout. I’m making sure that all the information we have is distilled down to the simplest way to understand it, not only for the staff, but also the players. My role is more pregame. It’s postgame review. What can we do better?

“Zac Fieroh is one of our analytics guys, and he’s with us every day. I give Brian Cashman and Michael Fishman, and that whole group, a lot of credit. They really pushed for him to be in there, and he’s done an awesome, awesome job.

“It’s funny. When you look at Oakland, or at L.A., or at Tampa, you think they’re these analytics juggernauts. That’s the perception. They are very good at it — don’t get me wrong — but when you look at us, that’s not really the perception. Well, when I came here from L.A., the information here is as good, if not better, than anywhere I’ve been.

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In addition to forestalling the Red Sox’ attempt to clinch an AL East title on the Yankees’ turf, Neil Walker’s three-run shot off the Boston’s Ryan Brasier on Tuesday night gave New York a share of one major-league record. Wednesday night’s pair of homers from Luke Voit and another from Miguel Andujar gave the club a share of a franchise record and inched them closer to two more major-league ones. In these homer-happy times, nobody loves the long ball as much as the Bronx Bombers.

Walker’s homer, a towering, second-deck blast to right field, was his 10th of the season.

That gave the Yankees 11 players in double digits, tying a mark that has been matched in each of the past four years, a period that admittedly has produced three of the four highest per-game home run rates in history (1.26 per team per game in 2017, 1.16 in 2016, and 1.15 this year).

This year’s Blue Jays could join the above 11×10 list if rookie Lourdes Gurriel Jr. hits two more homers over the remainder of the season, while the Yankees similarly have a shot at separating themselves from this pack if Voit, who didn’t even debut with the team until August 2, adds one more. Voit’s homers on Wednesday night, which were less majestic than Walker’s, represented his eighth and ninth since joining the team.

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When the Yankees put Masahiro Tanaka on the disabled list back on June 9, it didn’t appear to represent a massive blow to the club. The team was 42-19, in a virtual tie for first place with the Red Sox. Luis Severino was pitching like a Cy Young frontrunner. Tanaka, for his part, was having an inconsistent season. When he went down with hamstring injuries, he’d recorded a 4.96 FIP and 4.58 ERA for the season and had given up 10 homers in his previous six starts. The intriguing Jonathan Loaisiga was about to take Tanaka’s spot in the rotation — and would perform well in his absence — further limiting the potential damage of Tanaka’s loss.

Fast-forward three months and circumstances have changed pretty considerably. Severino has cooled considerably, while other rotation pieces like Loasigia and Domingo German have fallen off the radar, having been replaced by solid additions in J.A. Happ and Lance Lynn. Without Severino fronting the rotation, however, the team lacks a pitcher with potentially dominant stuff to start the Wild Card game, leaving the possibility of a second straight involuntary bullpen game for New York in a winner-take-all matchup. Now Tanaka might be the best candidate for that role.

The Yankees right-hander has always been very reliant on breaking stuff out of the zone to get batters out. His fastball sits in the low 90s and isn’t notable for a lot of rise (the four-seamer has a career 5.2% whiff rate) or a ton of sink (his two-seamer has a ground-ball rate below 50%), so he needs batters to swing at his offspeed pitches to be successful. That plan has worked over the course of his career. The graph below shows how often pitchers throw in the zone and how often batters swing at offerings out of the zone.

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The American League Cy Young race is pretty messed up this season. The current WAR leader, while apparently healthy, might throw so few innings in September that he fails to qualify for the ERA title as a result. The pitcher currently ranked second by WAR in the league hasn’t pitched in a month. A third pitcher who, as of July 1, had authored a sub-2.00 ERA and fantastic peripherals — and was probably the favorite for the award — is now an afterthought.

Overall, there are probably eight candidates who deserve to appear on a ballot — and that’s without even considering the credentials of dominant relievers like Edwin Diaz and Blake Treinen. Voters, however, can only choose five names — and, as a result, it is possible that totally defensible ballots will omit the eventual winner (or that a pitcher who would have otherwise won will be omitted from a totally defensible ballot).

As I noted yesterday with regard to the NL’s Cy Young field, this award invites multiple questions about how best to evaluate pitching performance. Unavoidably, one’s choice for Cy Young will depend on how one weighs what a pitcher can and cannot control — and how best to quantify those effects. In this post, I’ll look at various metrics and consider the implications of each regarding luck, defense, and pitcher skill.

Before we get to how contact and defense might be playing a role in voters’ minds, though, let’s look at some fairly standard statistics at FanGraphs.

Jay Jaffe made the case for Chris Sale’s candidacy last week, and that case certainly looks quite strong — or would, if the season ended today. Problem is, Sale might not get too many more opportunities to build said case. The left-hander is scheduled to throw two innings for Boston today and then another three innings on the 16th. If he records those five innings and then, say, another 10 over his final two starters, he won’t qualify for the ERA title and will potentially allow other pitchers the opportunity to catch up in value.

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When the Yankees acquired Luke Voit from the Cardinals on July 29 in exchange for pitchers Giovanny Gallegos and Chasen Shreve, the deal seemed like little more than a footnote, an incremental upgrade of a contender’s organizational depth, sweetened by the inclusion of international bonus-pool money. Nonetheless, the deal has yielded the hottest hitter of any who changed teams in the weeks leading up to the July 31 trade deadline — albeit in a limited sample size — and, for the moment, a solution to the Yankees’ ongoing first-base woes.

At the time of the trade, the Yankees appeared committed to Greg Bird, an oft-injured 25-year-old lefty who had started 47 of the team’s 56 games at first base since returning from surgery to remove a bone spur in his right ankle. Bird extended that stretch to 66 starts in 78 games into late August, but by that point he had slipped into an 0-for-21 slump. With a banged-up offense feeling the absences of Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, and Didi Gregorius, manager Aaron Boone suddenly turned to Voit (toined to Voit to avoid Boid and fill da void, if you’re speaking Brooklynese), who has started 11 of the team’s past 14 games. The decision has paid off.

Entering Wednesday night’s game against the A’s, Voit — a beefy, amiable lug (6-foot-3, 225 pounds, seemingly with an ever-present smile) — had homered seven times in 65 plate appearances for the Yankees, batting .322/.385/.678 for a 185 wRC+ since the trade. Five of those homers either tied the game or gave the Yankees the lead, including this eighth-inning go-ahead shot against the A’s on September 4, which marked Voit’s third straight game with a dinger:

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When the New York Yankees grew concerned about their rotation for the rest of the season, they made a pretty big move to get J.A. Happ from the Blue Jays. In Brandon Drury, they traded a young player with success at the major-league level. Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked Drury the fifth-best minor leaguer traded at the deadline. The club also gave up Billy McKinney, who ended up 19th on the same list. It wasn’t an inconsequential deal.

Happ has been everything the team could’ve hoped for. He’s recorded a 3.95 FIP and 2.37 ERA since joining the Yankees. He’s been worthy roughly half a win. He looks like he’ll be an asset for a team that’s bound for some kind of postseason play. He’s also not even the top-performing pitcher his own club acquired at the deadline.

Rather it’s Lance Lynn who has put up the best park-adjusted FIP of any pitcher acquired at the trade deadline — including Cole Hamels — as the following table indicates.

Cole Hamels has been fantastic, but when you factor in both Yankee Stadium and the American League, he’s produced the better fielding-independent numbers. (With his edge in innings, Hamels’ has recorded a higher WAR.) Nor is it just against trade acquisitions that Lynn fares well. Here are the top pitchers by WAR this month.

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When Aaron Judge went down with a wrist injury at the end of July, the Yankees didn’t appear to be a club in dire straits. While there would be no replacing the American League’s 2017 WAR leader, the team would still be in decent shape, having entered the season with three talented outfielders beyond Judge in Brett Gardner, Aaron Hicks, and Giancarlo Stanton.

Things haven’t quite worked out as expected, though. Stanton has played mostly designated hitter, while Gardner has struggled offensively. The result: a possible weakness in the lineup where one wasn’t anticipated. With the Yankees’ acquisition of Andrew McCutchen, however — a deal first reported by Buster Olney — the lineup should benefit considerably.

Joel Sherman has reported that two prospects would go back to the Giants if and when the deal is confirmed, including infielder Abiatal Avelino. The 23-year-old reached Double-A in 2016, spent some time in three levels last year, and moved back and forth between the two highest minor-league levels while destroying Double-A pitching and struggling in Triple-A.

Update: Jim Bowden is reporting the other player in the deal Juan De Paula, currently a starter in Low-A, and Jon Heyman reports that the Giants and Yankees are splitting the roughly $2.5 million remaining on McCutchen’s deal. 

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