April 24, 2007
Panic or Process?
One of the nice things about writing for Baseball Prospectus is that I'm now on the their chatter e-mail list. Both there and in comments on this blog I've seen the Yankees accused of panicking. Another thought is that Hughes should be up already, and the process of saying he's not ready one week but ready the next is poor. However, I think it's just bad spin. In their way, the Yankees are going through a process. Here's what I wrote on the BP thread:
One of the things I've heard is that clubs want to see what happens when a pitcher faces adversity. I think it's baloney, but in his second start, Hughes gave up five runs. He came back from that and pitched six shutout innings. See? He can handle adversity. Now they can bring him up.
The Daily News had this story in March, talking to Hughes' dad:
On Joe Torre's assertion that Hughes will benefit from adversity: "I think it's part of his development. No matter what you do, whether you're in business, working behind a desk or playing baseball, I think you're better off if you have a little adversity."
"There's no doubt in my mind he can handle it, because he's handled it before. He just hasn't had to as a professional. He's just going to have to experience it eventually."
More important to me is that at the AAA level he struck batters out, didn't walk many and gave up zero home runs. I'll take my chances with that.
Posted by David Pinto at
12:09 PM
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Always good to have the Pinto antidote to some of the superheated silliness in the press and in other blogs.
My own (Yankee fan) hope is that, good or bad, Hughes won't pitch some huge number of innings in the Bronx. Maybe that's also a bit of superstition, but I do fear that say 180 innings of MLB might harm his future. (If that's demonstrably wrong I would appreciate being corrected!)
Calling up Hughes isn't necessarily a sign of panic per se (imagine Brian Cashman running around the front office, screaming and pulling the fire alarm), but given the state of the Yankee pitching staff, the team has to take advantage of any possible option.
The bigger concern, as James says, is not whether Hughes is mentally ready; it's the temptation to overwork him. Pitchers who reach the majors in their early 20s are highly prone to injury. Since the Yankee braintrust are smart people, I assume they will take precautions and try to limit his workload. But if he does well enough to earn a rotation slot and the Yanks are in a pennant race, it'll be awfully hard to keep his pitch counts and total innings down to a reasonable level.
Reminds me of Cole Hamels last year. They wanted to see how he would handle adversity, but the problem was, he kept mowing down AAA-ers. It wasn't until they brought him up in May that he got hit around, and then in the second half bounced back and did pretty darn well.
Calling up Hughes after babying him at every turn, bringing Petite in from the bullpen, Mariano in the 8th...
I don't know about fans, but Yankee management is in full blown panic, and that's a fact.