Have the Yankees struck gold here?
Is it possible that by reinventing Brandon McCarthy to some degree, they have turned him from a pitcher who couldn’t win in Arizona to a guy that Brian McCann says could be “top-of-the-rotation'” starter?
Or is it more likely we’re making way too much out of McCarthy’s dazzling six innings in the Yankees’ 7-1 victory over the Reds on Saturday?
Time will tell, obviously, but McCarthy sure sounds reborn as a Yankee. And the reasons he laid out after Saturday’s performance offer at least some reason to believe he wasn’t just caught up in the exhilaration of a successful home debut in the Bronx.
Specifically, since trading for McCarthy two weeks ago, the Yankees have encouraged, perhaps even insisted, that he become less predictable. That is, he should stop relying so heavily on his signature pitch, his sinker, which wasn’t fooling anybody while he was going 3-10 with a 5.01 ERA for the Diamondbacks.
On Saturday, GM Brian Cashman said that a study by the club’s analytics department before the trade convinced the Yankees that McCarthy could get back to the success he had enjoyed in previous years if he reincorporated his cutter, a pitch the Diamondbacks instructed him to stop throwing this season.
In addition, McCann went to McCarthy after catching him in Cleveland last week and convinced him to throw his four-seam fastball up in the zone at times as a counter of sorts to his sinker.
Utilizing a much more varied repertoire on Saturday, McCarthy dominated the Reds, racking up nine strikeouts against no walks, while allowing only a solo home run to Chris Heisey.
What made the performance seemingly significant, as well as impressive, was the fact that McCarthy took a beating from these same Reds when he faced them on May 31, giving up nine hits and five runs in 4.1 innings.
The difference, McCarthy said, was that the same hitters weren’t able to simply look for his sinker.
“It’s hard to keep major league hitters off of just one pitch,” he said. “The cutter neutralizes the inner half of the plate against lefthanders, and you can do things away to righthanders with it.
“It kind of helps set up everything else and gives you some room to work.”
McCarthy has the velocity to make the hard stuff work. He throws his cutter, which breaks in on lefties late, at 87-88 mph, his two-seam sinker at 92 mph, and his four-seam fastball up in the zone at 94, occasionally even 95 or 96 mph on Saturday.
He said the timing of the trade was perfect because he had grown frustrated in Arizona with the club’s preference that he not throw the cutter.
“I feel like myself again,” he said. “They didn’t want me throwing it any more. They wanted more sinkers away, but I feel like I need that pitch to be successful.
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“The Yankees came to me right away and said, ‘We need to bring the cutter back into play.’ They obviously looked back and saw, ‘when he’s good he was throwing cutters. When he’s not, he wasn’t.’
“I was glad to hear it because I was going to tell them that anyway. It’s been frustrating because I felt like I’ve been throwing better this season than any other year.”
At age 31, McCarthy should have plenty of pitching left. He may not have the potential for consistent dominance, but at his best with the A’s a couple of years ago, he was a very reliable starter.
He rebounded from being hit in the head with a line drive in 2012 to pitch well enough for the Diamondbacks to sign him to a two-year, $15.5 million contract. Last year he missed time because of a seizure related to his head injury, but it hasn’t been an issue in 2014.
So we’ll see where this leads. Clearly McCarthy needed a change, in more ways than one, and in that respect he sounded especially grateful for McCann’s guidance. The Yankee catcher, who has been a disappointment offensively, has lived up to his reputation for being someone who can make a difference behind the plate.
“I’ve got a lot of trust in McCann,” was the way McCarthy put it. “He’s known for his game-calling, his catching. When he says, ‘Let’s use the four-seamer, we can set up hitters a different way,’ there’s no reason to have any self-doubt. All I had to do was execute.”
McCann, in turn, said his experience catching sinkerballers such as Tim Hudson convinced him that McCarthy needed to use his fastball and cutter to “change hitters’ eye-level and keep them from hunting just one pitch.”
Can it really be that simple? It was on Saturday. Does it mean the Yankees made the trade of the year? That remains to be seen.
