NYT: Rosenheck: Scioscia Will Need a Quick Hook in Game 6

Whoa! By the looks of this...Sgt. Saunders had a better chance of surviving a tour of the Sikorsky Museum.

The Angels will counter with Joe Saunders, who made the 2008 All-Star Game and is second in the American League in wins to Roy Halladay over the past two seasons.

Sounds like a good matchup, right? Not so much.

Quantitatively savvy baseball fans are well aware that the win is a flawed statistic, but few hurlers demonstrate its weaknesses better than Saunders. In 2008, his ritzy 3.41 earned run average was built upon the shakiest of foundations: a .267 batting average allowed on balls in play, known as Babip, which is next to impossible for a nonknuckleball pitcher to maintain over a lengthy period of time.

Sure enough, in 2009, his Babip reverted to the league average at .290, and his earned run average spiked to 4.60. But the Angels’ surprisingly powerful offense gave him a whopping 141 runs of support in 186 innings this season, enabling him to rack up a 16-7 record.

Beneath the surface, Saunders is nothing more than a back-of-the-rotation stopgap, thanks to a career strikeout rate barely over five per nine innings. The Yankees hit lefties and righties equally well, meaning his portsidedness is of little advantage, and as Vicente Padilla showed in the National League Championship Series, it’s extremely difficult (although of course not impossible) for a mediocre pitcher to shut down a premier lineup in two consecutive starts.