Zell's Pinstriped Blog, A New York Yankees Fan Blog

In a word…nothing. Much like everyone else, I was wondering if Phil Hughes‘ recent struggles are endemic to something we should panic over. So, I decided to do a little statistical research by comparing Hughes this year to the age 24 seasons of five of the best fastball/curveball right-handed starters from the past decade. The reason is semi-obvious, I hope: Hughes is predominantly fastball/ curveball, so it seems best to compare him to other pitchers with a similar repertoire at the same age. I didn’t want to dig too far into history, since comparing Hughes with Nolan Ryan, Walter Johnson or Tom Seaver wouldn’t be fair. Besides the fact that they are all Hall-of-Famers, they pitched in different eras. (Though it would be nice to think that in 15 years we’ll be talking about Hughes in the same vein!).

I chose 5 pretty good pitchers: Roy Oswalt, Ben Sheets, Roy Halladay, Jake Peavy and A.J. Burnett. Let’s face it, any team that had those five in their starting rotation would be the odds on favorite to win their division and go deep into October. For you math geeks, I extrapolated everything to a 162 game season to make comparisons fair. See the chart below for comparisons.

All of Hughes’ peripherals match up quite nicely with this quintet of established, All-Star caliber pitchers at similar points in their careers. In fact, they are almost identical. The only stat that is why out of line is the W-L record and frankly, I never counted on Hughes winning more than 15 games this year, anyway.

There’s another lesson to be gleaned from this chart. Four of the five pitchers – Oswalt, Sheets, Peavy and Burnett – threw at least 90 more innings in their age 24 season than in their age 23 season. Only Roy Halladay didn’t and he threw 72 more innings. Sometimes, it’s not the number of innings but the talent of the pitcher that determines success in future years. One other note on the emerging “Hughes Rules”: As shown, he is currently on pace to throw around 180 innings, or 75 more than last year. It’s not a total that concerns me (I guess, like Nolan Ryan, I’m old school when it comes to what I expect from a starting pitcher), but it obviously concerns the Yankees. If they want to limit his innings, I recommend keeping his innings per start shortened. He should have 14 – 15 starts remaining this year. If the Yanks want to hold him to around 160, that works out to 5 1/3 innings per start. But please, no more skipping starts. Players are creatures of habit and pitchers especially so. Skipping starts upsets not only their game day routine, but their between games routine, as well –and that time is when all of the preparation for the next start takes place.

The lesson to be learned here is we fans were probably too quick to send him to Canton in May. So relax and enjoy the ride. If Hughes’ next 5 years are anything like the pitchers I’ve compared him to, then the Yankees have a bona-fide ace in the making.