Back in January, we all thought the Yankees were going to have a very solid rotation one through five, including a surplus with Phil Hughes and Freddy Garcia fighting for the last spot. Obviously things haven't exactly gone according to plan with both Hughes and Garcia being ineffective and Michael Pineda being out for the season. With this, they will be heavily leaning on CC Sabathia, Hiroki Kuroda, and Ivan Nova.
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| (AP Photo) |
Nova had a very solid 2011 campaign and was supposed to be a stabilizer for the staff this year, but has gotten off to a bit of a rough start. Through six starts, he has four wins and a 36:11 K:BB ratio in 37.2 innings, but is giving up almost two homers per nine innings (good for an 18.2% HR/FB). This is insanely high, so what's the reason for this?
He may not have missed a lot of bats last year, but the one thing Nova did very well was keep the ball down. He had a 52.7% ground ball rate which helped him keep the ball in the park (0.71 HR/9). This year, his grounder rate has gone down by 8% while his fly ball rate has gone up by the same margin. This means when batters are putting the ball in play against him, they are hitting more fly balls and less ground balls than they were last year.
If we take a look at his individual pitches by how many grounders and fly balls they yield, here's what we get.
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| 2011. (Click to enlarge) |
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| 2012. (Click to enlarge) |
As we can see it comes down to getting more grounders on his fastball and change up, like he was last year. Something that should be noted is that he's throwing the change more frequently now than he was then, a pitch that he's trying to work into his arsenal and make a real weapon. However, the results from that pitch this year, lead me to believe he's been leaving it up since he probably doesn't have the same ability with that than he does his slider, or any other pitch for that matter. A good example was last night on the home run by Luke Scott, that was change that he left up.
Nova obviously needs to start keeping the ball down a little bit better to limit the homers, which is something much easier said than done, but is also only one slice of the problem. The other thing that has factored into this is luck. A larger percentage of the fly balls he's allowing are going over the fence than were last year (8.4% HR/FB in 2011). So even though allowing more balls in the air is making more homers happen, there is some luck coming into play here, and I expect his homer rate to start steadily declining, to an extent, at some point in the near future.
(Graphics via Brooks Baseball)
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