It's easy to forget how young Chien-Ming Wang is in baseball years. Most 28-year-olds who have enjoyed anything like the kind of success he has — he won 19 games in each of his first two full seasons with the Yankees, and goes into tonight's start against Cleveland tied for the league lead with six — are basically finished pitchers. Wang isn't.
He is, for one thing, from Taiwan, which may be a strong baseball nation, but couldn't offer the teenage Wang the kind of competition he would have faced in Texas or the Dominican Republic. Also, because of an arm injury that cost him the entire 2001 season and from which he was still recovering in 2002, he didn't pitch a full season in the American minors until he was 23, and even then, he pitched only 125 innings. This has its advantages — Wang didn't endure the kind of stress that peers such as Carlos Zambrano and C.C. Sabathia did while he was developing — but he also just has less experience working and reading hitters than you'd expect from a 28-year-old ace.
Given this, one might have expected some modest but real growth in his game coming into this year. He has, so far, showed it. Most important has been the improvement in his strikeout rate; at 6.4 per nine innings, he's more than doubling his 2006 mark. But there are other signs that Wang is only now truly coming into his own.
For most of his time in the majors, Wang's biggest weakness has been against left-handed hitters. Last year, for instance, he struck out 7.9% of those he faced, as against 17.8% of right-handers. There's no mystery as to why. His nasty sinking fastball, which he routinely throws at 94 mph and can throw much harder, breaks down but also tilts — out and away from right-handers but right into the sweet spot where most left-handers like the ball. The same is true of his slider, his second-best pitch. Wang has usually tried to neutralize left-handers with a changeup that he rarely throws to right-handers, but it isn't an especially effective pitch.
This year, he has slightly but noticeably changed his approach, throwing the fastball more often against left-handers and the changeup and slider less often, while mixing in the odd split-finger or cutter. So far, his strikeout rate against them is up to 12.2%, which isn't fantastic, but represents an improvement of half over what he did last year. If he can keep doing as well while continuing to suppress left-handed power (he's given up just one home run to left-handers in 82 plate appearances), he'll have gone a long way toward plugging the biggest hole in his game. Against right-handers, Wang has been throwing a cut fastball a bit more often. It isn't a great pitch, but it does give hitters something else to look for, and further shows his evolving style.
Tonight's game, though, will especially bear watching because it will give some insight into how Wang will deal with his second main weakness — his susceptibility to lineups that have his fastball well scouted.
My theory on Wang's playoff struggles (he's 0-3 with a 7.58 ERA in four starts) has always been that because he's so reliant on one pitch, he's just more vulnerable to teams that are better prepared for it than the average team playing a routine game in the middle of the season might be. Boston, for instance, managed just two hits and no walks against him in his complete game, a one-run masterpiece on April 11, but thrashed him five days later, racking up nine hits, three walks, and eight runs in four innings.
Cleveland, which has a strong lineup with some true star hitters like Grady Sizemore and Victor Martinez, makes another good test for this theory. They faced him April 27, when he struck out nine — one short of his career high — in seven innings, and picked up a win in a 1-0 contest. A hammering tonight might be put down to the mysterious fingernail problems that surfaced in his last start, against Seattle. (Then again, he cracked a fingernail last year around this time, and then carried a perfect game into the eighth in his next game.) It also, though, might be a sign that even his recent advances haven't quite given him the tools to handle a lineup that's ready for what he has to show them.
Either way, though, Wang is an excellent pitcher, and a joy to watch closely. If he's maturing a bit, that's wonderful news for the Yankees; if he's just enjoyed an especially good first six starts this year, that's fine, too. For years, he's been pitching with a style that simply shouldn't work, and yet it has. Whether or not he can put some final touches on it and take a step forward that he can sustain through the year, he'll remain a pitcher no one should ever take for granted.
tmarchman@nysun.com
