Phil Hughes Still Plays A Vital Role In the New York Yankees’ Success
Following the (unofficial) moves that paired starting pitchers Michael Pineda and Hiroki Kuroda with the New York Yankees, a glaring weakness has been turned into a glowing strength. With the first four spots in their rotation accounted for the New York Yankees will now choose between Phil Hughes, A.J. Burnett and Freddy Garcia for the fifth and final spot. At this point, a lot of fans seem ready to kick Phil Hughes to the curb – or at least banish him to the bullpen. One way or another though, the former top prospect can still have a significant impact on the New York Yankees’ success…as a starting pitcher.
The first and most obvious way for Hughes to impact the Yankees positively is to perform at a higher level. While many aforementioned fans have already written him off, I’m not quite ready to do so. Is he going to develop into the No. 1 starter that the industry projected? I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it, but the list of starting pitchers who took a few years to figure things out is certainly a lot longer than the list of starting pitchers who came out of the gate shredding the opposition. Nevermind Hughes becoming an ace though. If he becomes a reliable No. 3 type starter, you’re already talking about a guy who could be overqualified for the back of a rotation – a development that would allow the Yankees to save money as they address the other weaknesses that will arise in the near future.
Perhaps 2013 rolls around and the next wave of Yankee pitching is vying for a role in the starting rotation. It isn’t 100% out of the question that Manny Banuelos, Dellin Betances, Adam Warren and David Phelps find themselves in a position to compete for a role in the starting rotation. Hell, maybe even Joba Chamberlain gets back in the mix. Who knows? What I’m getting at is the idea that Hughes could provide the Yankees with a solid piece of trade bait. Obviously he needs to significantly raise his value, but to do that he needs to continue to start. Look at some of the deals that bad starting pitchers have received over the past few years. I’m not going to go through a long list of them, but you have probably come up with one by now anyway. Imagine the interest a Phil Hughes, fresh off of a rock solid 2012 campaign and still not that expensive, would garner on the trade market. Short of a massive breakthrough, Hughes isn’t going to bring back a Carlos Gonzalez-like talent, but he could still be a key piece in a package deal. Besides, if he had that sort of season, the Yankees wouldn’t be looking to trade him anyway.
I understand the discouragement among Yankees fans in relation to Phil Hughes. Maybe he is destined for the bullpen or maybe he’s simply an addition to the long list of can’t misses that whiffed. Both of those may appear to be more likely scenarios than Hughes taking a significant step forward this season. I’m still willing to ride the bandwagon for one more season though. The upside of allowing Hughes to continue to start – either in the Major Leagues or in Triple-A – is too great in my eyes for the New York Yankees to take the same short-sighted view as much of fan base.
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Craigwilliams you left out his value as a reliever.There could be a team that have good starters but need a reliever.Hughes seems to be great fist time around the lineup.It’s the second and third time that he gets in trouble,it’s because he has no third pitch,witch makes him better cut out to be a reliever.
He’s got value as a reliever if it comes to that, but the Yankees won’t get as much value as they can out of him if he’s able to cut it as a starter. I’m not yet convinced that moving Hughes to the bullpen should be the last case scenario for the Yanks. They can find just about anybody to make a decent 7th inning reliever.
Well what makes Hughes such a valuable trade piece is that he’s already been seen as a starter and a reliever.Sure it would be much higher if he were able to pitch a few games to show that he’s 100%,but teams already know what Hughes to the table.His upside is greater then a lot of the pitchers available inthe trade market or free agency,and with AJ standing in his way it would be better if he started fresh some where and for the Yankees to use him to get the lefty DH,or outfielder that they need.
Well, if the Yanks can get a bat – lefty or righty, I don’t really care – that upgrades the offense and fits into the team’s future plans, then sure, I’ll hop on board. I just don’t see any team willing to surrender the type of talent to make giving up on Hughes worth it. Maybe the Pittsburgh Pirates have grown impatient with Pedro Alvarez, but I doubt it. I’d jump at that sort of deal, but again, I just don’t see any teams making that right now.
I wouldn’t mind being wrong here by the way.
I keep hearing about this upside Hughes has, but no one seems to be realistic about the actual amount of up his upside has. Hughes has never shown himself to have Ace potential, and quite frankly I’ve only ever seen glimpses of any kind of real number 2 upside. He seems like the type of starting pitcher who will forever be linked to the upside he could have, while always performing at best like a number 3 starter and a lot of the times worse. He’s a two pitch pitcher, with average velocity, less than average fastball movement, average command, and no third pitch worth mentioning. Yes he’s “only 25″ but at this point in baseball a pitcher entering his age 26 season with as many opportunities as Hughes has had should be further along in his development than Phil. I mean how many other pitchers perform like Hughes did last year and Yankee fans are talking about how great his last 14 innings of the year were? There is a reason most pitchers do their best work in the first and last month of the season, where Hughes always seems to be his strongest. At the beginning of the year hitters don’t have their timing down and pitchers take advantage of this, at the end of the year hitters are tired and their mechanics at the plate get sloppy and pitchers take advantage of this. Pitchers make their money being good in the middle of the year when hitters are, for the most part, still physically strong and locked in mechanically. In these spots Hughes is average or worse.
At a certain point we have to stop talking about what Hughes could be and start talking about what he is.
I’ll buy the theory that pitchers are ahead of hitters at the beginning of the season, but I’m not buying the fatigue bit. The pitchers are just as fatigued as the hitters are by the time September rolls around. I’d have to check back to see exactly what I said, but I’m not sure I expressed hope that Hughes would achieve top-of-the-rotation status. If he can manage to settle in as a No. 3 though – a realistic best-case scenario in my eyes – he will give the Yankees several options. I agree that it is not worth expecting Hughes to all-of-a-sudden start performing like an ace, but I don’t think he should be written off quite yet. Another thing that I don’t really like hearing is when people cite “all the chances” that Phil has had. Much of it is due to injury, but he has only had one full season of uninterrupted starting experience. It just feels like he’s had a lot of chances because we’ve been following him closely for the past five years.
From everything I’ve read on the subject offense gets suppressed the most at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, while offenses remain the strongest in the middle. Part of it may also be teams who are out of it calling up young hitters to get their feet wet, and thus lineups aren’t as strong as they could be.
He may not have been starting 32 games a year but I would say someone who has had 71 career starts and 443 innings pitched in his career has had a good deal of chances to show what he can do at the big league level. Obviously over 5 seasons that isn’t a ton of starts per year, but it’s a pretty big sample size none the less. I’m not at the point of completely writing him off, I just feel like most Yankee fans have given way more chances, and create way more excuses for Phil than any other pitcher I can remember. It’s understandable, he was the first prospect most fans in the blogosphere followed from beginning to end but he gets way more rope than any other. He’s in a real put up or shut up situation here.
It’s not like as a starter he’s put up numbers that would lead people to say he’s right around the corner either. In 71 career starts he has a 4.90 ERA, 4.45 FIP, 4.49 xFIP, 6.97 K/9, 3.25 BB/9. Which in all honestly is pretty average no matter how you slice it. Part of it is he is absolutely the worst fit for Yankee stadium imaginable, but to be a starter he’s going to have to deal with that more often than not.
See, I don’t think 71 career starts is really that substantial of a sample size. That’s only two seasons worth of starts. Things are accelerated in New York so I agree that this is a do-or-die season for Hughes, but the fact that we’ve all followed him for so long serves as an illusion that he’s had such a large span of starts to grow into himself as a starting pitcher. As I said before, a lot of it has been the injuries – perhaps the issue that we should all be focused on more than anything else. Let’s see what he can do when he actually has some time to make the adjustments that he needs to make over extended periods.
Part of it is also that he lost his starting job in 2009 when he was given the chance to be a starter and run with it. You could argue he would’ve been given the chance to struggle through 09 with another team, but before being sent to the pen he looked lost.Then when he was given all of 2010 to be a starter he made very little adjustments over the course of that year. In fact you could argue that after the first 56 innings of 2010 he was basically mediocre to worse for the final 119 innings. But then he comes into 2011 fat and out of shape and has his worst year of his career as a starter, marred by an unknown injury no one ever actually got the name of.
He’s been given chances, he just never did what he was suppose to do with the chance he was given. Yet excuses keep being made for him, and people run back to 18 wins like that really means something. Mainly because that’s the only thing he’s ever done that has shown enough to impress anyone.
He only had 21 starts under his belt heading into 2009 so his inconsistencies in 2009 are not a surprise at all. He actually had a handful of solid performances in his one month as a starting pitcher. If I remember correctly, I think Hughes was given the option of going back to Triple-A or working out of the bullpen in 2009. That just has more to do with him being behind Chein-Ming Wang on the pecking order than him being demoted due to poor performance. I agree that when you play for the Yankees you have to take advantage of the early and sometimes few chances that you get, but I still say he deserves another full season (hopefully he can make it through another one) before his fate is sealed as a bullpen arm or as trade bait. 71 career starts really isn’t much at all – especially when they’re spread out as sporadically as Hughes’ have been.
Let’s not re-write history here, he was demoted to the pen because he was god awful outside of like one impressive start. He posted a 5.45 ERA, 5.29 FIP, 4.93 xFIP in 35 IP as a starter before being asked if he wanted to go back to Scranton or the pen. That has nothing to do with Wang and everything to do with poor performance.
Well it definitely has something to due with Wang’s presence. Wang went into the season as the team’s No. 3 starter and…forgive me for going here…had two recent 19 win seasons under his belt. The wins are not as important as the fact that the Yankees were committed to him after he delivering solid production for them. He was worth 4.7 and 4.4 fWAR in 2006 and 2007, respectively. I realize WAR is a flawed stat in its own ways, but the point is that Wang certainly had plenty to do with Hughes being removed from the rotation.
Hughes didn’t light world on fire and as we have agreed, sometimes a players’ chances with the Yankees are shorter and fewer than they would be with other teams. To be fair though, much of Hughes’ ugly stat line as a starter had to do with that god awful start against the Baltimore O’s on May 9th.