New York Yankees: J.A. Happ’s road to redemption

J.A. Happ has some big shoes to fill in this season. The 37-year-old veteran southpaw is the oldest active player on the Yankees and the team will be looking for him to bounce back in a big way after a down season in 2019.

Ever since coming to New York before the trade deadline in 2018, Happ has had his ups and downs. He pitched strongly for the Yankees after the trade going 7-0 with a 2.69 ERA, but he did not pitch well in the postseason against the Red Sox in the ALDS and then last season was one he’d like to forget, as he finished the year with a 4.91 ERA in 31 games.

Happ is in the last guaranteed year of his two-year contract that he had signed with the Yankees after the 2018 season. With Luis Severino gone for the season, and James Paxton out until May at the earliest following back surgery Happ will occupy the third spot in the rotation and rightfully so. The Yankees are a young squad loaded with talent and they need guys such as Happ and Brett Gardner to stabilize the group and keep things loose.

So far this spring training, Happ has pitched well in three starts by pitching nine innings, giving up just four hits, an earned run with 11 strikeouts, while holding the opposition to a .133 batting average. His ERA is also at 1.00.

In order for Happ to rebound this season, he’ll have to make some mechanical adjustments. The biggest problem that plagued him last season was the long ball, as he served up 34 dingers.

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James Wagner of the New York Times detailed in an article last year that Happ has always been a fly-ball pitcher, which he noted accounts for 40 percent of the pitches he throws that get put in play. He also described how his four-seam fastball was being hit much harder by the opposition which is a similar problem to what Masahiro Tanaka experienced last year when his splitter was getting hit.

Happ needs to keep the ball down in the strike zone and find a way to induce more ground ball outs. Yankee Stadium as every baseball fan knows is not a very pitcher-friendly ballpark. One long fly ball to right field is all it takes to cause a disaster.

In the final years of C.C. Sabathia’s HOF worthy career, he reinvented himself by making an adjustment to throw more cutters and rely on location instead of overpowering hitters. Especially in 2017 when he played a pivotal role for the team in the postseason. Sabathia set the foundation for other veteran lefties like Happ to follow.

Happ isn’t Sabathia and never had elite stuff like Sabathia once had. There’s no comparing the two pitching arsenals, but Happ should learn about how Sabathia was able to force a ton of weak contact and try and implement that into his repertoire this season.