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Monday, October 19, 2009
What was Joe Girardi thinking?
Would you rather have Mariano Rivera batting (of a tie game, with TWO outs) and then pitching the next inning, or would you rather send in a PH, and then bring in your third best reliever?
Let me show you a quick way to figure that out using Leverage Index. If you go here, you will see the LI is 0.4. Remember that. Now, the average pitcher-as-a-batter is roughly -.15 runs per PA. We have to figure Mo is a little bit worse. Let’s make him -.20 runs per PA. UPDATE (I forgot to do this part, but I was putting my kid to bed. You have to take the -.20 and multiply by 0.4, to make it -.08 runs).
As a pitcher, Mo is fantastic, say somewhere between 1.5 and 2 runs per 9IP better than the next best option on the Yanks. That’s roughly .20 runs per IP. The LI to start the bottom of a tied inning is 2.3. That makes his impact the equivalent of .46 runs.
As you can see, a huge difference here. So, you let Mo bat, for sure. (Otherwise, in a typical inning, it’s a breakeven play.)
I didn’t know Rivera was due up, and I assumed they’d take him out. Rivera threw a lot of pitches in his last outing, spanning 2.1 innings. He could have been too tired for all we know.
I thought the bigger mistake was taking out Robertson with two outs in the 11th. He had just gotten two outs and wasn’t in any kind of trouble. Everyone I was watching with at the time was wondering the same thing.