More On Pavano

4 Year Miscreant?

I know the easy thing is to kick Pavano for his non-contribution. After all, its a 4 year $39.95million contract he signed to pitch for the Yankees. Anyway, here's an article in the NYT that explores his side of the story.

In hindsight, Pavano said, he could have had Tommy John surgery that summer, but the Yankees did not recommend it to Andrews.

“I think I could have, but we’ll never know,” Pavano said. “He was told not to. He was told to take the bone chips out and rehab it.”

Two starts into the 2007 season, the elbow pain returned, and Pavano insisted on major surgery as the only way to heal everything. It took four doctors — Hershon, Andrews, Lewis Yocum and David Altchek — to find one who agreed definitively. That was Altchek, the Mets’ team doctor.

“They had to go through all that red tape; that’s why I had to go get all these opinions,” Pavano said. “It was crazy. And I had to walk around with my heart in my throat: ‘Are you serious? You’re messing with my career here.’ You think I wanted to have Tommy John surgery? But I knew I needed it and I knew I could come back from it. That’s why I was all for it.”

Altchek told Pavano he had done everything he could to come back from the 2006 operation. His only choice was Tommy John surgery, in which a tendon from Pavano’s knee was used to replace an elbow ligament.
It took place June 5, 2007, nearly two months after he had last pitched in a game. Pavano said he wished he had the operation sooner.

“I would have been back seven weeks earlier this year,” Pavano said. “That would have been a considerable amount of time to help the team.”

General Manager Brian Cashman said the fact that Pavano had bone chips in 2006 did not necessarily mean he should have had reconstructive surgery.

“That doesn’t mean the ligament was gone yet,” Cashman said. “Bone chips usually mean there’s an unstable ligament, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pitch another 10 years without having Tommy John.”

In any case, Cashman said, he does not blame Pavano for wondering what different steps he might have taken. If anybody can relate to Pavano’s frustration, it is Cashman, who championed his signing.

“At the end of the day, he was hurt,” Cashman said. “People always say, ‘Why do you stick up for him? Is it because you signed him?’ I’m just being objective. The guy, I know, can pitch when he’s healthy. He just hasn’t been healthy. It’s not because he mentally wanted it that way. It just happened.”

I'm sure it was really frustrating for Pavano to live through all that... and get paid $39.95m. I guess that's the point. The sympathy runs out when the money runs out, and the money has been running out the door with Carl 'American Idle' Pavano. Maybe it could have been handled better, but there seems to be a point at which Pavano should have spoken up sooner about his back pain and then subsequent elbow pain.

Teammates recognize that his pitches are not as sharp as they will be, and they respect his approach. Pavano is challenging the hitters, and himself, with a fastball that has command but little pop.

“Obviously, his stuff now is not that good, but he’s going out there and competing, he’s going after guys,” reliever Brian Bruney said.

“There are guys with way better stuff than he has that don’t go after people like that. The guy’s got heart and he wants to win. I’ll take that any day.”

Pavano will be a free agent after the season, and he could turn a decent September into a new contract with another team. He may succeed the way the Yankees hoped, just not for them. His time on the mound with the Yankees has been brief: he has made 22 starts, pitched 126 1/3 innings and compiled a 7-6 record.

If all this were true, then Pavano sort of owes it to come back for a cut-price rate for 1 year and show what he's really got. I hate it when the Yanks rehab a pitcher like Lieber and Dotel and they end up pitching for other teams. Pavano owes a year of his best effort under normal conitions. It would be a serious drag to see him pitch somewhere else and do alright.

Yankees Update

Jeter Hits 2500th Hit

It's been a lackluster season in some ways for both the Yankees and Jeter, but Jeter did manage to make milestone by hitting his 2500th hit of his career. As usual, he gave his patented vanilla-flavoured-athlete-comment:

BALTIMORE (AP)—Derek Jeter is honored to be part of an exclusive club with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. For now, however, the New York Yankees shortstop is more interested in keeping his team in the playoff hunt.

Jeter got his 2,500th hit Friday night, joining Gehrig (2,721) and Ruth (2,518) as the only players to reach the mark with the Yankees.

“Anytime your name is with someone like Gehrig and Ruth, it’s pretty special,” Jeter said. “To be quite honest with you, I don’t even think about it much because we’re trying to win games here. That’s something you reflect on maybe when your career’s over.”

New York entered Saturday trailing Boston by six games in the AL wild-card race. Jeter is doing his best to keep the Yankees’ hopes alive—he was batting .486 over his last eight games to raise his average 15 points to .296.

Jeter is the 88th player in baseball history to have 2,500 hits. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, in the last 65 years only two players were younger than Jeter (34 years, 57 days) when they reached the 2,500-hit plateau—Hank Aaron and Robin Yount.

“When you think about Derek Jeter, he’s been consistent through his whole career,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “He stayed healthy, plays everyday, works very hard at what he does. There aren’t a lot of people who have 2,500 hits. Shows you what kind of player he is. Been a very good player for a long time and he’s got a ways to go, still.”

God, the boringness of the comments from Jeter have been just as relentless over the years. It's like he took the 'Bull Durham' dictum of "give boring interviews" to heart at some point in his infancy and stuck to it for 30+years. Just like clockwork, he knocks out a milestone hit and says essentially the same thing he did when he knocked out his 2000th.
Well, we still love you Jetes.

Carl Pavano Sighting

Amazingly, the season has come to this: the rotation consists of Moose, Pettite, Sir Sidney Ponson, Darrell Rasner, and now Carl Pavano. Wang, and Joba are sidelined with injuries, Phil Hughes too, but he was effectively demoted, just as IPK was; and Dan Giese who did so well is out with injury as well.

So, Carl Pavano it is is.

BALTIMORE (TICKER) —With the New York Yankees in desperate need of starting pitching, the team is turning to an unlikely source - Carl Pavano.

Pavano, who has not pitched in the major leagues since April 2007, was activated from the 60-day disabled list and returned to the Yankees’ injury-riddled rotation Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles.

New York’s Opening Day starter last season, Pavano underwent “Tommy John” surgery two starts into 2007. It was supposed to be a comeback season for Pavano, who missed the entire 2006 campaign with a variety of ailments, including two broken ribs suffered in an automobile accident.

But that comeback was put on hold indefinitely, as the 6-5 starter needed more than a year of rehab and recovery. In five rehab starts at Class A Charleston and Class AA Trenton since July, Pavano went 1-1 with a 3.31 ERA in 19 innings. In his most recent tune-up, he struck out six over six innings for Trenton, giving up a one run.

That was good enough for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who is hurting for depth on his pitching staff. Ace Chien-Ming Wang has been out since mid-June with a torn tendon in his right foot, and second-year phenom Joba Chamberlain is sidelined with tendinitis in his rotator cuff.

Top prospect Phil Hughes, who has been nursing a fractured rib, was a candidate to start, but his recent rehab outings have not been promising.

That leaves it up to Pavano, who is 5-6 in 19 starts over the last three seasons.

Pavano signed his lucrative four-year, $39.95 million deal with the Yankees after a breakout 2004 season in which he went 18-8 for the Florida Marlins and finished sixth in the National League Cy Young Award voting.

He began his Yankees career in stellar fashion, throwing 6 1/3 strong innings to defeat the division-rival Boston Red Sox - who also had coveted him during the offseason but lost out in the bidding war for his services - in the second game of the 2005 season.

Since, it’s been all downhill for Pavano, who went 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA in 17 starts in 2005 and missed the last two months of the season with an injured right shoulder.

Thus in the 4 years, he's made half a season's worth of starts in which he's been just under league average. Had he done so for the other 3 and a half seasons worth of starts that got given to the assorted combo of Shawn Chacon, Aaron Small (who both did okay by the Yanks), Darrell Rasner, and whoever else that the waiver-wire scouring threw up, this might have been a sort of all right contract.

I know that earlier in the year I said if the Yankees ever needed to go so deep as to require Pavano to pitch at any point in the season, this season would be a disaster. Well, it is that disaster now.

Melky Cabrera
I jinxed the guy at the beginning of May. He did look very good at that point in time.
Since then, he's been nothing short of a disaster, so he finds himself in AAA Scranton Wilkes-Barre. In his place is Brett Gardner but it remains to be seen if he can do significantly better than Melky.

I think I pointed out the last time I delved into it, but his BABIP has been disappointing for this season - .264 is 36 points lower than his norm of about .300. If you put those 36 points back on to his line it would amount to an Ave of .278 and an OBP of .363; which is sort of what the Yankees were looking at on paper as the season started. His ISO is around .110 so his SLG would have been about .470, so he should've been about a .830 OPS player. Instead he turned in .633.

I'm not really willing to write the guy's future off, but this year sure was an unmitigated disaster for young Melky. Wouldn't you know it, he's killing the ball in AAA.

Play Off Odds
The erstwhile fellas at RLYW have a beautiful pie chart showing the Yankee's chances of making the playoffs. It's not encouraging:

You'd have to say they're toast.
I don't think I've felt this toasty in a long, long, long time. I'm kind of resigned to it in as much as there hasn't been a Yankee team with enough pitching since 2003. This year was going to be transitional, and a lot of things did go wrong.