MAKIN’ THEIR PITCH
Garcia, Monty give Yanks depth for hectic playoffs
It’s almost a luxury to even speculate on who should throw the Yankees’ fourth game of the 2020 postseason. Not team has five Gerrit Coles. Most lack one. Despite a 5-15 stretch across 20 games, one-third of the shortened season, the Yankees are still pretty good at baseball, and better at pitching than you might expect. After that rocky stretch, highlighted by three bad starts from Cole, the top three slots in the Yankees’ rotation have solidified.
Cole’s rough patch was magnified by the short season. (He went 0-3, 5.63 ERA during his cold streak, which in 2020, prorates to 0-327 with a 41.99 ERA over a typical 162 game season. Don’t look that up, just trust me.). However, he’s got a 3.00 ERA heading into Tuesday’s start and is second in the AL in strikeouts, a distant second behind Cleveland’s Shane Bieber.
Masahiro Tanaka’s skull, possibly encrusted in adamantium, vibranium, or whatever magical metal Marvel imagines next, appears to have recovered impeccably from a Giancarlo Stanton liner during the Yankees’ second spring. He’s running his best ERA (3.27) since 2016.
Then, J.A. Happ has reversed course, going from the kind of player an organization could skip a start here and there and plausibly deny they’re avoiding his vesting option to a crucial cog in the rotation. He has a 1.93 ERA over his last six starts.
Then there’s a significant dropoff after that. If you watched Mike King and Jonathan Loaisiga get thrashed in Buffalo on Monday night, you know it. Even in those spots, though, there is some hope.
Jordan Montgomery’s 5.12 ERA is well below average. Fangraphs’s ERAtool, which adjusts ERA for a pitcher’s ballpark and overall offense throughout the league, has him at a 116 (100 is the baseline) meaning he’s been 16% worse than league average. However, Montgomery, never a standout at avoiding hard contact, has been one of the best in the league this year. His average exit velocity allowed is 83.7 mph compared to the 87 he averaged during his healthy 2017-18 run. That places him 98th percentile among big leaguers.
There’s some hope that there’s a better pitcher in there than the surface results, like the one we saw when he struck out nine Orioles on September 12.
Deivi Garcia (4.88 ERA) has the opposite problem: Opposing batters have, on average, hit the ball harder in each of his five starts, per Statcast. However, two notes:
1) It’s only five big league starts. Five. Even trends are noisy.
2) At 21, he’s shown the ability to work through the lineup multiple times, pitching into the sixth or seventh inning three times during his brief career.
Garcia’s overall command (tiny 4.3% walk rate) and eelite movement on his curveball watch Jays batter Jonathan Davis flail at tthis rainbow — are bigleague caliber, and all the more impressive for a rookie.
With zero rest days during the first three postseason rrounds, every team is gooing to be reaching into theiir depth, assuming they havee any. At least there is more uupside to Montgomery and Gaarcia than you would expect ffrom the typical fourth and fifthh options. he Yankees don’t have perfect profiles in their back end. But hey, it’s a start.
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