Looking at the ALCS stats, the Yankees pretty much did what they did during the regular season, their BA and OPS coming in very close to their 2009 numbers. The Angels, however, showed a 50 point drop in batting average and a 140 point drop in OPS.
The biggest goats of the series were the players around Hunter and Guerrero. Figgins and Abreu hit poorly as table setters, both posting OBPs below .300. Hunter and Guerrero hit very well during the ALCS, but had few runners to drive in due to the failure of the top two hitters to get on base. Torii and Vlad ended up setting the table for Morales and Rivera, who failed just as badly as Figgins and Abreu.
In a way, the Angels offense was a negative image of the Yankees offense. New York received poor batting from Teixeira and Swisher, but everyone else contributed. Because Mark and Nick were separated in the order, they never gave an Angels pitcher an easy stretch. (Note that Teixeira batted third and Swisher eight, the spots the lineup analysis tool tends to put poor hitters. The fifth and sixth best lineups, based on the players’ 2009 LCS stats put Teixeira third and Swisher eighth.)
If either the table setters had reached base, or the lower part of the heart of the order had hit for power, the Angels might be playing tonight.
Posted by David Pinto at 11:54 am | League Championship Series | Permalink | 3 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
October 26th, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
Hm, there’s another way to look at it, though.
In the ALCS, you’d expect to see much better pitching on average than in an average regular season game. The Angels surely did face much stronger pitchers on average in this ALCS. So maybe the lower OPS is about what you’d expect. The real difference, in that case, would be either (i) the Yankees stepping up their hitting so that they were able to produce as much against very good pitchers as they ordinarily do against average pitchers, or (ii) the LAA pitchers’ inability to pitch up to their usual standards.
Of course, a really glaring failure by the Angels was in their defense. I don’t know how much difference that really made to the overall runs scored, though.
October 26th, 2009 @ 10:21 pm
Looking at the totality of Yankee hitting misses the fact that ARod carried the Yanks — hitting at an unreal level.
October 27th, 2009 @ 12:32 am
Good analysis. What stood out to me the moment I saw the boxscore was the Yanks drew 9 walks and the Angels drew just 2. I didn’t get to see the game itself. I also can’t help but notice that it seems the Angels blew 2 games due to a lot of defensive blundering…since they did win 2 games, it’s logical to think they could’ve won 4 games in this series is the defense hadn’t blown some key plays so often. Of course, a couple really bad ump calls added into the mix too.