Tale of the long ball - Yankee Starters at Home

Written by Sean P | 21 August 2010

After watching Vazquez pitch terribly at home again, I got curious and took a look at the starting pitching home/away splits for this year. It’s pretty illuminating:

There’s definitely some interesting stuff in here.

-First off, Sabathia has been great everywhere and has actually pitched better at home. He does have a home BABIP of .252 but has also struck out more and walked less in the Bronx.

-Similarly, Burnett has been bad everywhere. He’s been victimized by the HR more so at home then on the road, but also has more strikeouts and less walks at home.

Pettitte, Hughes and Vazquez though have all struggled pitching in Yankee Stadium.

-Pettitte has been plagued by the HR at home which is somewhat surprising since he neutralizes lefties so well (2.27 FIP against LH vs 4.72 against RH) and Yankee Stadium is a good park for lefties to go deep in.

-Hughes has been helped out by an extremely low HR/9 on the road which is definitely a little fluky. xFIP, which treats HR/FB rate as a part of luck, reflects this in his 3.92 road xFIP. His K/9 and BB/9 splits are not as dramatic- the difference is less than a batter per 9 for strike outs as well as walks.

Finally, we come to the mess that is Vazquez. The number that unavoidably jumps out is the 2.20 HR/9 rate at home- a number that doesn’t even include today’s fiasco. Some of that number is surely fluky- however he’s been nearly as bad on the road, allowing 1.78 HR/9. Now Vazquez has always been an interesting statistical study, mainly because he has a higher than normal career HR/FB rate then one would expect. Stats that normalize HR/FB rate such as xFIP and tERA have accordingly always rated him better (3.72 career xFIP and 4.20 tERA compared to a career 3.89 FIP and 4.22 ERA). Because of that, I’m not sure how much faith you can have in his 4.73 home xFIP compared to his 6.03 home FIP. The answer is probably somewhere in between.

What makes analyzing Vazquez this year so hard is his deteriorating stuff. It seems like he’s fallen off a cliff and it’s hard to draw conclusions about what ultimately is the cause of that. I’m not sure the whole answer lies in the statistics.

What is clear though is the Yankees have an interesting problem. Vazquez, Hughes and Pettitte have all pitched markedly worse at home then on the road. Hughes has probably gotten a bit lucky on the road and that may account for some of the difference. Some of these numbers could be the product of a small sample size as well. However Pettitte has almost identical homerun home/road splits last year -1.27 at home, 0.57 on the road.

Honestly, I’m not sure what the full answer is. What is clear though is that outside of Sabathia, the Yankees starters have had a troubling propensity to give up the long ball in the Bronx.