If Healthy, Can CC Sabathia Reinvent Himself with Ace Stuff in Rearview?

At least where CC Sabathia is concerned, the good news for the New York Yankees is that the big left-hander is feeling healthy and ready to go for the 2015 season.

Trouble is, if Sabathia will actually pitch in 2015 is only one of the question marks next to his name. With two years of bad pitching behind him and his power stuff long gone, the other is how he'll pitch in 2015.

Sabathia didn't have much to say about that in a recent chat with ESPN. The main focus was his recovery from the right knee surgery that ended his 2014 season after only eight starts, which Sabathia said is going well.

"That was the shortest year, having my year cut short by injury last year," he said. "Hopefully this year I can go out and try to make 30 starts and just be healthy and try to help the team win."

Judging from the way their rotation is put together, the Yankees seem to be banking on Sabathia making 30 starts. But in reality, who knows? The previously sturdy southpaw has run into a couple health woes other than his bad knee since 2012 and is unlikely to find the fountain of youth in his age-34 season.

But what the heck. Let's imagine that Sabathia will stay healthy in 2015—would he produce quality starts?

Based on what Sabathia did in 2013 and 2014, and the answer would appear to be no. After pitching to a 4.78 ERA in 2013, he got lit up to the tune of a 5.28 ERA in 2014. Along the way, it's been no secret that his fastball has lost a ton of steam. A power pitcher, Sabathia is not.

According to the projections, however, Sabathia's immediate future is not without hope.

Here's what Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA projections, and the ZiPS projections and Steamer projections at FanGraphs see in store for Sabathia in 2015:

There's some disagreement here, but the agreement that matters is in the ERA column. Relative to what he was doing in 2013 and 2014, the projections think Sabathia can rebound in 2015.

Mind you, it won't be a big rebound. The American League's ERA last year was 3.81, so any of those ERAs would only make Sabathia a roughly average AL hurler, or safely, worse than an average AL hurler.

The bright side, however, is that this is at least an attainable goal. Maybe not easily attainable, but more attainable than you might think.

Former Yankees hurler David Cone told WFAN last week (via Ryan Hatch of NJ.com) that it's "tough to go from a four-seam power guy to a two-seam sinker kind of guy," but that he believes Sabathia can do it.

Cone believes Sabathia can do what his stuff is telling him to do and make the transition from a power pitcher to a finesse pitcher.

Sabathia's 2014 performance suggests he has a lot of work to do. He put up that 5.28 ERA while pitching with an average fastball that FanGraphs marked at 88.8 miles per hour. That's a bad correlation that hints Sabathia is struggling mightily with his transition into finesse-style pitching.

But in reality, it's not so bad.

Last spring, there was a lot of talk about Sabathia working with longtime Yankees southpaw Andy Pettitte on developing a cutter, with the general idea being to use the pitch to make his arsenal more diverse and, in turn, his pitch selection less predictable.

Well, the cutter itself didn't quite do the job, but Brooks Baseball can show that Sabathia's pitch selection did become less predictable:

Before 2014, Sabathia was pretty much all four-seamer and sliders. But in 2014, he featured his four-seamer, sinker, slider and changeup almost equally, with a few cutters on the side.

Mixing things up isn't the only thing Sabathia did well. He also did an outstanding job of keeping the ball low, as BaseballSavant.com can vouch that he kept a career-high 56.4 percent of his pitches at or below the knees. 

When you're keeping your pitches down and mixing up your sequencing, good things are going to happen. And they did for Sabathia. His swinging-strike rate jumped from 9.6 to 10.5, helping his strikeout rate jump back above league average. And thanks mainly to his extra sinker usage, his ground-ball rate also experienced a rebound.

Couple those performances with how Sabathia's walk rate remained strong, and you get a pitcher who did all the things you want pitchers to do. 

Sabathia's poor 2014 thus looks like a case of a pitcher being killed by bad luck. Most notably, that appears to be the case in the HR/FB (home runs per fly balls) and BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) departments, where Sabathia's 2014 figures were well above his career norms.

Anyone who watched Sabathia pitch, however, will know that there's a problem with chalking the homers and hits he surrendered up to bad luck. As much as bad luck can influence things like that, so can hard contact.

And yeah, Sabathia gave up a lot of that.

ESPN.com's Mark Simon has numbers that can drive that point home, but it was obvious to the naked eye. And it was weird, too. One minute, Sabathia could be missing bats and getting grounders like gangbusters. Then next, BANG.

It's easy to point to Sabathia's suddenly lackluster fastball, and the .352 average and .722 slugging percentage hitters had against his four-seamer suggest it's that simple. But the pain of his velocity loss extends even further than that.

The best way to overcome a velocity loss is to be more effective changing speeds. And despite his more unpredictable pitch selection, Sabathia was actually worse at that in 2014. Though his fastball velocity went down, his slider and changeup velocity stayed steady. 

That resulted in very little velocity differential between his heat and those two pitches:

Where there had once been a big velocity difference between Sabathia's heat and his primary off-speed pitches, there was very little in 2014. Knowing most hitters sit fastball and adjust to off-speed, that's not good. Even if a hitter guessed wrong against Sabathia, he wasn't necessarily going to be off-balance.

And this isn't the only issue Sabathia had with his 2014 approach. Though it looks good that he kept the ball down so much, you wonder if he kept it down a little too much. According to BaseballSavant.com, Sabathia gave up a .223 average (second worst of his career) and .408 slugging percentage (the worst of his career) on low pitches.

So on the one hand, you have the good: Sabathia's pitch selection became less predictable in 2014, and he showed he could still do what he wanted in terms of locating the ball.

And on the other, you have the bad: A more unpredictable pitch selection didn't come with increased deception, and his location might have been a little too predictable.

Frankly, the velocity differential issue will be tough to fix, and it's the biggest reason nobody can expect too much from Sabathia in 2015. And though he got hit harder than usual doing so, the last thing to tell a pitcher to do is stop keeping the ball down.

But again, there's hope. If Sabathia can achieve some progress by embracing more of a finesse-oriented approach, he should be able to achieve progress by taking it even further.

To this end, the key to Sabathia's next step could be Brian McCann, provided he can do for Sabathia what he did to Brandon McCarthy.

The popular narrative is that McCann got McCarthy to throw his cutter more, which McCarthy himself confirmed. But in addition, Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs uncovered how McCann got McCarthy to mix in some straight heaters up in the zone to keep hitters from focusing too much on the bottom of the zone. These adjustments worked like a charm, as McCarthy's ERA went from 5.01 in Arizona to 2.89 in New York.

In 2015, similar adjustments could be in store for Sabathia.

If not more cutters, perhaps McCann will look at how badly Sabathia's four-seamer got knocked around and encourage more sinkers. But knowing that Sabathia basically stopped throwing high fastballs last year, there's a lesson to be learned about what four-seamers Sabathia does feature needing to be high. 

Granted, these are just some educated guesses about where Sabathia's reinvention could go next. But the overarching point is that he made more progress with his reinvention than his limited 2014 production suggests, and taking it the next step may not be that difficult.

Don't take this to mean that Sabathia can be an ace again. He likely can't be. But in fairness, he never said he wanted to be an ace again. He only said he wanted to be healthy and help the Yankees win.

It will be up to his body to make the first thing happen, but he doesn't need to be an ace to make the second thing happen. He'll just need to be better, and the bridge from here to there is one that can indeed be crossed.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.

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