Zell's Pinstripe Blog

When the Yankees signed Mitre, I wasn’t too happy. I don’t know how most Yankee fans could be. I know of one person who generally likes Mitre and that is his manager, Joe Girardi. He had this to say when he came up last year:

“He’s a sinker, curveball, changeup guy,” Girardi said Friday. “His sinker’s probably 88-91 [mph]. He’s going to throw a lot of strikes; he’s going to get a lot of groundballs when he’s throwing the ball well. I’ve always thought he’s had kind of a bulldog attitude.”

Now, I know the old saying that you cannot have enough pitching is generally true, but my question is, when you do have enough pitching, when is the right time to cut ties with Sergio Mitre?

Personally, I would try to find a bidder once the 5th starter race is over — Oh, for Mitre, the race is over or should we say that it never started — but that is just me. If one looks over Mitre’s stats since he has gotten the call to the big league, it sure isn’t pretty.

During the 360 innings he has pitched as a starter, he has a 5.47 ERA with nearly a 1.6 WHIP. Going even further, his SO/BB rate is 1.84, not exactly great. Opposing batters also hit at a clip of .306/.361/.435 during that time.

Now, Mitre has relieved before he became a Yankee, but he hasn’t spent any substantive time there. However, in those 36.1 innings of relief, he accumulated a 6.44 ERA. The slight bright spot is that he allowed opposing hitters to hit slightly less for average than when he started. However, he allowed a slightly higher OBP (.364) and an obscenely higher Slugging percentage (.549). Realistically, 36.1 innings isn’t enough to project anyone to do anything, however, it does show a frightening trend that we, as Yankee fans, don’t want to see.

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