2011 ALDS Preview, Part 3 | Game 1 Starters: CC Sabathia vs. Justin Verlander

For previous installments of TYA’s 2011 ALDS Preview, please see the following:

Part 1: The 2011 Yankee Offense, Top to Bottom
Part 2: Head-to-Head Overall Team Numbers

The Yankees will send to the hill for his 6th career Game One start with the Bombers. Sabathia has a 3.41 ERA over 31.2 innings across his five previous Yankee Game 1 starts, although that figure drops to 1.67 if you take out his uncharacteristic 4 IP, 5 ER performance against Texas in last year’s ALCS.

Here’s Sabathia’s season line, along with some selected splits:

It’s no secret that CC put up arguably his best season in pinstripes this year, though he did appear to be somewhat out of sync during the season’s final month and a half as the Yankees expanded their rotation to six men. Following his August 1 start against Chicago, Sabathia’s ERA sat at 2.55 and batters had hit .233/.285/.309 against him. Since then, he finished the season throwing to a 4.30 ERA over his final nine starts, with a batting line against of .314/.358/.502. While I wouldn’t read too much into that, it’s still worth noting that the irregular rotation turn probably had a slight negative effect on Sabathia. Given that Sabathia received all that extra time off in between starts, I’d expect he’ll be ready to throw on three days’ rest throughout the postseason as often as the Yankees need him to.

Sabathia continued to be murder on lefties this season, and was 11% better than the league average against righties. Sabathia — unlike every other member of the Yankee rotation — saved his best work for Yankee Stadium, making it that much more important that the Yankees were able to secure home field advantage through the first two rounds.

Not that it matters much, but CC saw the Tigers twice this year, beating them on Opening Day but losing a month later in Detroit. The Tigers hit him pretty well this season, and they were one of only four AL teams that he performed below-league-average against.

Here are breakdowns of CC’s stuff and results, courtesy of TexasLeaguers.com and JoeLefkowitz.com:

Sabathia throws a mid-90s four-seamer, low-80s slider that sometimes looks like a curveball, mid-90s sinker sinker and mid-80s changeup. While his heater is a solidly above-average pitch, Sabathia makes his living with the slider, which induced a whiff 18.1% of the time, compared to the 13.0% league-average rate. His changeup is his other big swing-and-miss offering, with an 18.2% whiff rate against 12.1% for the league. The hard sinker enables him to get an above-average number of groundouts, and that combination of elite strikeout stuff with a near-50% GB% is a big part of the reason why Sabathia’s one of the best pitchers in the game.

When he’s ahead in the count, Sabathia will try to get righties to either chase a heater or a slider, while lefties will see the slider even more frequently, especially on 0-2 (70% of the time). If he’s behind he’ll still rely primarily on the fastball-slider combo, though he’ll sneak a sinker in there as well. CC pretty much scraps the changeup entirely against lefties regardless of count, as one would expect.

Sabathia will be opposed by presumptive American League Cy Young . Verlander has four career postseason starts, all of which came during the Tigers’ American League pennant-winning 2006 campaign. While Verlander was very good that season, five years later he’s become one of the top five pitchers in all of baseball.

Here are Verlander’s 2011 splits:

Verlander crushed his opponents this year, finishing with the lowest ERA in the AL (2.40), 4th-lowest FIP (2.99), second-lowest xFIP (3.12, behind only Sabathia) and third-best K/9 (8.96). Verlander also had for all intents and purposes the fastest fastball in the league (average speed of 95mph, second only to ‘s 95.1mph), a fastball that was also the most valuable in the AL per Fangraphs’ pitch type linear weights (30.5 wFB). Interestingly, his rotationmate ranked 2nd, at 25.5, which could make the first two games of the DS quite frustrating for the Yankee offense.

Here’s how Verlander’s stuff and results break down, courtesy of TexasLeaguers.com and JoeLefkowitz.com:

With arguably the best four-seamer in the game, you better believe Verlander’s going to be throwing it a ton, although it’s almost surprising he doesn’t utilize it even more frequently. But that’s part of what makes Verlander so good — when you’re being fed a diet of 97-98mph fastballs, it’s quite difficult to then time a 79mph curveball, 87mph changeup or 86mph slider. Of those secondary offerings the changeup is his best swing-and-miss pitch, though the slider is also above-average in that department as well.

If there’s a downside to his game, Verlander’s more of a flyball pitcher than Sabathia, only getting a groundball 40% of the time. As such, he can occasionally be a bit homer-prone. Verlander will throw any one of five pitches against righties, going in for the kill with the curve and slider; while the fastball-changeup-curveball combo is primarily how he sits lefties down. If he falls behind in the count, the odds are pretty good that the hitter will see a heater regardless of which side of the plate they stand on.

How the two pitchers compare

You certainly didn’t need a string of tables to tell you that these are two of the top pitchers in all of MLB, but it’s pretty remarkable how close their numbers actually are. In all reality, the only real difference between CC’s and Verlander’s years was that Verlander experienced exceptionally good fortune on balls in play, with a career-low .236 BABIP and career-high 80.3% strand rate helping drive that AL-leading ERA. Aside from those numbers, the two pitchers’ peripherals are nearly identical and in fact, CC and Verlander both accumulated matching league-leading 7.0 fWARs despite Verlander throwing nearly 14 more innings.

None of this is to take away from the exemplary season Verlander has turned in, but his bottom line certainly benefited from a bit of luck, considering his .285 career BABIP. Sabathia, on the other hand, turned in a season ostensibly every bit as good as Verlander’s despite a BABIP almost .030 points higher than his career mark of .291!

Now it’s possible CC’s BABIP was the result of him posting the second-highest LD% of his career this season — 23.1%, up from a career-low 15.1% last year — at the expense of some of the ground balls he got last year. In which case, “unlucky” may not be entirely fair. However, on the flip side, a jump in LD% of nearly 10% from one season to the next — especially when Sabathia had only eclipsed a LD% of 20% one other time in the previous seven seasons — still seems fluky to me.

Conclusion

While past performance is of course no way indicative of future results, it’s worth noting that for as great as Verlander is, anecdotally it doesn’t seem like the Yanks have ever really been straight-up shut down and/or Cliff Lee-style by the big righty. The numbers appear to back this up, as Verlander has a 3.97 career ERA against the Yankees across 56.2 innings of work. The Yankees won both games Verlander started against them this season, scratching out three runs over six innings both times, and that’s pretty much exactly what I’d expect from a locked-in Yankee lineup facing Verlander.

Sabathia’s also had some difficulty with Detroit here and there, having thrown 41 innings of 3.95 ERA ball against the Tigers since joining the Yankees. He also threw six-innings of three-run ball (though only two earned) in that aforementioned Opening Day matchup against Verlander, and gave up four runs over seven in Comerica.

While either pitcher is certainly capable of annihilating their opponent’s offense, I’m inclined to give Sabathia the slight edge in this match-up, due primarily to his overall excellence at Yankee Stadium. Seven innings of three-run ball or less should do the trick.